An Apology to Jeff Faux, and a Restatement of the Question
I appreciate Jeff's response to my first question, on the actual relevance of trade deals.
On the second, I suppose I should just apologize, because I did not intend to challenge his integrity or the integrity of his argument, and I don't think I did, but perhaps my way of phrasing the question -- in the middle of a debate that has had mostly rhetorical questions -- sounded like I did.
Within the political reality of the early 90s, the argument that NAFTA would only be acceptable if you had labor and enviro conditions that were not at all politically feasible was part and parcel of the argument against NAFTA. Jeff says as much: "It was a crappy deal for workers in all three countries. Why such contempt for people who turned out to be right?"
But I have no contempt for people who opposed NAFTA! I didn't show any. As I think Jeff knows, I worked at the time for a Senator (Bill Bradley) who was a huge NAFTA supporter, but it wasn't my main issue -- I'm at worst guilty of writing some pro-NAFTA speeches -- and I don't need to defend it or not defend it now. I've been very interested in all the analysis of why NAFTA's opponents "turned out to be right," including Brad DeLong's own "Afta Thoughts on NAFTA," which doesn't go that far but concludes,
Having witnessed
Mexico’s slow growth over the past 15 years,
we can no longer repeat the old mantra that
the neoliberal road of NAFTA and associated
reforms is clearly and obviously the right one.
Would some other, alternative, non-neoliberal
development strategy have been better for
Mexico in the late 1990s and early 2000s? Would
it have been better to have urged President
Carlos Salinas de Gortari to focus his efforts on
investments in education and infrastructure and
on trying to clean up corruption rather than on
free trade? Perhaps.
It wasn't dishonest for people who wanted to stop NAFTA to demand unattainable labor and enviro standards. It's perfectly reasonable to say, "only under the following conditions would this be a good deal." That the conditions would be deal-breakers is fine -- as long as you're better off with no deal. That's a fine and honorable kind of political advocacy -- all the more so if history vindicates the view that both countries might have been better off without NAFTA. What it was not was an actual effort to implement North America-wide labor and enviro standards.
And thus my question: Are you holding out global standards mainly as a way of stopping trade deals? Is stopping bad deals an end in itself? (Which is in a sense my first question.) Or, are you looking for a way to use trade deals as leverage for some rules of the game that actually address the issues of a global labor market? It matters -- one would pursue different strategies depending on what the answer is.
Much of what you're written here and in your book suggests the answer is the latter, and I think we're at the very beginning of an opportunity to think about a global social contract as a necessary end regardless of trade deals. But in the response to Brad's question re China, it seems to me that you passed up the opportunity to say, "we could live in a world where the rules of the game are structured so that trade deals actually do benefit the poor in China."
So, just to restate the question, with hopefully no baggage loaded onto it: If all we could achieve from your political strategy was to stop all future trade deals, bilateral as well as sectoral, is that a good end in itself and would it significantly benefit U.S. workers?
Comments (15)
Mark asked Jeff:
Why must these two reasons be considered mutually exclusive? It is my position (and I'm guessing that Jeff concurs) that we must hold out for beneficial global labor, safety and environmental standards in the hope of addressing the serious issues of a global labor market, and also as a means of preventing another of the sort of bad deal that NAFTA has proven to be if the international corporatist cabal refuses to permit such globally-beneficial standards to be enshrined in global trade agreements.
In other words, if you truly comprehend that holding out for globally-beneficial global labor, safety and environmental standards can serve as the means to both good ends that you included in the questions, what could you possibly have as an honest motivation to ask such questions at all?
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March 2, 2007 10:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
huh?
"It wasn't dishonest for people who wanted to stop NAFTA to demand unattainable labor and enviro standards. It's perfectly reasonable to say, "only under the following conditions would this be a good deal." That the conditions would be deal-breakers is fine -- as long as you're better off with no deal."
If writing fair standards into NAFTA would improve the outcome for the majorities in the countries involved, who are the "deal-breakers"? Who gets to draw the line in the sand? Your entire argument is based on the implicit assumption that the neo-liberal coalition inevitably gets to say: here's the deal, take it or leave it. This is neither honest nor convincing.
If enough Democratic NAFTA supporters had supported global standards, insisted on them, maybe they would have gotten a better deal, after all, NAFTA's supporters wanted NAFTA, they aren't disinterested altruists. They aren't going to take away their marbles in a huff if they don't get their way. Maybe it wouldn't have passed when it did, but why do I have to accept the premise that it would never have passed?
And if your argument boils down to: Silly boy, the people financing people like Bill Bradley's campaigns inevitably frame the debate, and win, why bother talking about the welfare of American or Chinese laborers at all?
March 3, 2007 1:11 AM | Reply | Permalink
Someone needs to challenge his integrity. I wouldn't apologize, Mark.
March 3, 2007 1:37 AM | Reply | Permalink
I don't see what's so unusual about this. If I'm selling you my dog, and I say you can only have the dog if you can provide a good home for it, am I trying to find a good home for the dog or just to keep from selling it to you if I know you cannot or will not provide one? They are the two sides of the coin.
I doubt any complete cessation of trade deals will be permanent because there will always be money on the table in trade, even if not as much as the merchants would prefer. Profit is profit, the original context of "it's all good". For that reason, a complete cessation, while not optimal, is a perfectly reasonable goal. Close the table, and the money boys will still come back, but chastened.
March 3, 2007 2:44 AM | Reply | Permalink
It strikes me that this general debate would move forward if persons acknowledged responsibility in a holistic sense: If, through some action of mine, I claim responsibility for the good which ensues, I must also acknowledge responsibility for the bad which accompanies it. This ethical principle is thousands of years old.
If the good includes raising millions out of poverty, I may have some right to boast. If, as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and China Labor Watch document, there are also serious negative consequences, I have some obligation to accept responsibility for those, regardless of whether or not I intended them to happen, to remedy those to the extent I have power and influence to do so, and to use my best efforts to ensure they don't happen again when an opportunity for similar action occurs.
aMike
March 3, 2007 5:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
Does the word "standards" always have to be modified with the word "unattainable"?
Don't certain conditions have to be met before a nation is eligible to join the EU? And don't countries have to maintain those standard in order to stay in the EU? I remember Greece and Italy being put under pressure make an bonafide effort to get rid of, say, corruption, in order to maintain their trading priviledges.
Is it "unattainable" to expect countries to make an effort start to institute graduated income taxes to pay for their own social and built infrastructures, for example, as we do? I understand that many Latin American countries don't have this feature of our government.
March 3, 2007 9:30 AM | Reply | Permalink
While I too would like to hear more on this topic from Mark Schmitt, I don't see the grounds for such deep puzzlement -- or for the implicit charge about his motiviations. He gives the reason for asking the question in the very next (and final) sentence of the paragraph you quoted -- the sentence you left out:
Now I'm not sure what Schmitt means here -- as I say, I'd like to hear more from him on the topic. But it's not difficult to imagine the sort of thing he might have in mind.
If the goal is stopping future NAFTAs (if this still matters), that suggests staking out a maximalist position on those "globally-beneficial global labor, safety and environmental standards," and sticking to it, even (indeed, especially) if such maximalist goals are practically unattainable.
If, on the other hand, the point is to use trade agreements as leverage to get some "globally-beneficial global labor, safety and environmental standards" actually enacted, that suggests a strategy that aims for standards that have a real hope of being adopted.
Both of these (I think Schmitt is saying) are reasonable positions for progressives to take, in light of recent history. But they are quite different positions, and which one to take goes to the heart of the question of what it is progressives (should) want, with respect to trade policy, now.
Although not confining himself to the narrower question of trade agreements, this is the level at which James Galbraith addressed the issue of trade in the Nation article that Schmitt quoted in his previous post. There Galbraith says, among other things: "Standards to guard against flagrant abuses such as child and prison labor are fine, but it's an illusion to think they will, or should, dent the flow of goods from China" (emphasis mine).
I take it there is a serious, open question here: Should progressives be aiming for such standards, or should they be aiming as it were past them, at the goal Galbraith is here warning us away from?
March 3, 2007 12:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
bento answered this, in plainer language than I could.
I don't believe that the two stated ends are really separate ends, but rather points along a continuum of acceptable outcomes.
--
March 3, 2007 12:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
So then, for you, the goal that Galbraith warns us away from, of "dent[ing] the flow of goods from China" is a valid progressive goal (albeit not the only one)?
I think that one of the things Mark Schmitt was trying (in good faith) to find out is precisely whether this is also Jeff Faux's position.
Whether one agrees with it or not, it is clearly not the only possible progressive position on trade. It is not, for instance, the position Galbraith recommends.
March 3, 2007 2:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
Mark- As someone who was involved in the NAFTA fight back then, I have to say that many of us had expected Clinton to come back with a better deal on labor and environmental standards. It was not a foregone conclusion that he was going to declare war on the Democratic labor and environmental base and shove it down our throats-- and it was politically the stupidist thing he ever did from a pure political standpoint.
If he had instead concentrated on health care reform in 1993 -- instead of NAFTA -- he would have done far better. That's what folks expected him to do in many cases.
March 3, 2007 2:12 PM | Reply | Permalink
if
Only if those negative consequences are directly a result of the action and would not have occurred had the action not been taken, which you haven't shown. For instance, the Human Rights Watch article you link to talks about the police state controls that China uses against its people. These types of controls existed prior to free trade agreements. So how can you lay this at the feet of free trade. If anything, China has become a more open society since free trade began. Or have you forgotten Tienamen Square?
What's more, the China Labor Watch article you link to is talking about letting workers know their rights as outlined in international law, which only applies to China because it joined the World Trade Organization. In other words, trade provided China an incentive to sign a treaty respecting worker's rights.
The Left always does this -- comparing trade, or Capitalism, or America's actions in the world against some perfect good that has never existed in the history of humankind. Then, the arguement goes, because we took an action that didn't acheive the perfect good -- even if on net it improved things -- we're now responsible for all the misery in the world.
March 3, 2007 3:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
A good deal is better than no deal, and no deal is better than a bad deal.
And nowhere in that statement is any endorsement of "dent[ing] the flow of goods from China" as an end in itself, though I can see it as one component of the means.
--
March 3, 2007 5:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm not sure this answers Mark Schmitt's question -- though that's obviously for him to decide. For my part, it leaves me wondering substantially the same thing as before -- what should progressives be willing to count/accept as a "good deal?"
I'm pretty sure that there is plenty in most of these deals to reject -- unjustifiable extensions of overly-generous U.S. style intellectual property protections, for instance, or blind eyes turned toward first-world agribusiness subsidies while prying open vulnerable third-world agricultural markets. I don't imagine opposing that sort of thing is something progressives need to debate amongst themselves. Opposition on such grounds aligns us with the interests of poorer countries in these agreements, and against those of our own economic elites. Using trade agreements as cover for winning monopoly power in, or dumping subsidized exports on, weaker economies is something that all progressives (and all true friends of free trade) should be able to reject with a clean, indeed a righteous conscience.
But what I do think is debatable is how far to go in demanding that trade agreements equalize wages and working conditions in poorer countries.
If the goal is to prevent, so far as possible, all labor competition with lower-wage, less-productive countries, then the standard of what we should accept as a "good deal" needs to be as high as we can make it. Essentially, it needs to aim at forestalling such competition until and unless wages and productivity are roughly equal. If this is the goal, in other words, then there would seem to be no point in taking anything less than a maximalist position on trade conditions, otherwise you are indeed just negotiating with yourself. The increased trade with low-wage country x (that would be the presumptive result of the agreement) is all on the cost side of the ledger, so there is no reason not to demand the highest price for assenting to it, and to walk away from the table if you don't get that price.
If, on the other hand, the goal is to use business's desire for trade aggreements actually to introduce some basic pro-worker regulations in countries with which we make such agreements, while at the same time encouraging trade with lower-wage, less-productive countries as a desirable feature of the global economy (for the sake of the wealth creation and poverty amelioration that export-led growth can bring in such countries), then the standard of what we should accept as a "good deal" will necessarily be more modest. A good deal is then one that, in Galbraith's terms, eliminates the worst abuses of labor rights in the lower-wage, less-productive country, while still allowing increased trade with that country.
It seems to me that the latter goal would also imply that attaching conditions to trade agreements cannot be, for progressives, anything like the "last hope" for better economic outcomes at home. Our main efforts toward that end would, instead, have to be directed towards things like full-employment monetary and fiscal policies, fostering unionization in retail services, increased public investment in health, education and infrastructure, and so on. It implies, so to speak, a strategy of social democracy in one country.
March 3, 2007 8:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
And this is the fundamental issue. Free-trade advocates like Brad repeatedly say that the answer isn't to restrict trade, but to handle insecurity and inequality with social democratic programs on the home front. The problem is that our political system makes it nearly impossible to obtain such programs. Presidents as far back as Truman have unsuccessfully tried to obtain a national health care system. Bill Clinton didn't try very hard; he delegated the matter to his wife, and when she screwed things up by devising a ridiculous Rube Goldberg plan, he then let the matter drop, preferring to placate Republicans on balancing the budget and cutting welfare benefits.
The bottom line is that Clinton was an Eisenhower Republican. Now, there are certainly worse things to be, as we have found out to our cost during the past six years. But Eisenhower Republicans just aren't enough, now, for a working class that has been decimated by two decades of right-wing evil. We need a real progressive President, something we have not had since LBJ.
Brad, too, is an Eisenhower Republican at heart. Look at his priorities: free trade, balancing the budget, marginal tinkering with existing programs. It's fundamentally an upper-middle-class, "don't rock the boat", Burkean-conservative ideology for people who are already doing quite well with the current system. But the foundations of the system are breaking down, and it will not last without fundamental changes.
You may hold trendy post-nationalist views that do not consider American wealth to be any more important than Chinese wealth. But the majority of the American people do not share such views, and you know full well that if free-trade pacts had been openly proposed on such grounds, they would have been rejected by supermajorities of 90% or greater. As the surfeit of protectionists who won the 2006 election demonstrates, Americans are growing tired of the lying promises of "free trade."
March 3, 2007 8:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
Perhaps I should have made it clearer. . .
I linked not to articles, but to pages with links. In the first two instances, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, I linked to the home page of the China section, where you'll find numerous headline articles, with documenting links from many sources...among those stories of the mistreatment of migrant workers coming to cities from the countryside as a direct result of industrialization stimulated by American companies outsourcing manufacturing to China. The same is true of the third source. I could have linked to individual stories, but I assumed that anyone really interested in what was going on would take the time to prowl around a little.
aMike
March 4, 2007 11:16 AM | Reply | Permalink