21st Century Nightmare
From William Lucy — Secretary-Treasurer
There's a threat out there to all of us, and it's called the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas. FTAA, as it is known, threatens our health, our environment, our safety and our jobs. It's the next generation of NAFTA, another bad globalization scheme that Big Business forced down our collective throats.
FTAA is the result of many years when public employees ignored trade agreements thinking they're just about cars and steel. Well, it's time to wake up. Globalization is also about services, and social and domestic policy — who drives our kids to school, who prepares their school lunches, who takes our blood at hospitals, who filters our water.
Sisters and Brothers, we're talking about privatization on a global scale, where a multinational corporation makes money by slashing salaries or suing a school district for wanting local people to drive school buses.
FAST TRACK TO TROUBLE. If the President of the United States gets his fast track authority, we are going to see FTAA become a reality. What fast track means is that the President — and he alone — can negotiate trade agreements and send them to Congress where they say "yea" or "nay" to this far-reaching, dangerous agreement, without a chance to change one word. That may be fast but it's not fair, certainly not for working families.
We can say goodbye to quality public services if this all comes to pass and hello to worldwide privatization. Look at the jobs we do. Think about who we are as union members and see if this type of global conspiracy isn't about shutting us down and shutting us out.
One of the major threats of globalization is the rapid push for corporate takeover of public services, like education, health care, social assistance, correctional services, environmental and municipal services — not just in the United States, but all over the world. FTAA will cover the entire Western Hemisphere!
This is supported by the same corporations AFSCME battles every day in its anti-privatization campaigns and private-sector organizing drives. U.S.-based multinationals like Lockheed Martin, HCA Healthcare and Wackenhut welcome opening our markets even more. Why not? They have already established global dominance. They have everything to gain and nothing to lose. While our country has a lot to lose — mainly our service sector jobs.
'OUTSIDE' PRIVATEERS. In this age of privatization and the pro-Big Business/corporate environment created by the current administration, a corporation could use the FTAA to force countries to privatize services. It's bad enough when a city, state or federal entity privatizes — but what happens when even a foreign corporation outside our country has the power to privatize inside our country?
For many of these money-hungry companies, their bottom line is the bottom line, built on the backs of cheap labor without adequate protections — protections our union has fought for, and continues to fight for, every day.
Do we want health care to be a trade rather than a profession? Do we want prisoners watched over by under-trained guards after our professional corrections officers have been forced out?
One big way to oppose FTAA is to oppose fast track, which would ram through Congress and force down our throats global controls that challenge the legitimacy of our very government at the federal, state and local level.
NO FOOLIN'. We cannot afford to be fooled. And we have to make sure our representatives in Washington, D.C., aren't fooled. We have to alert them, go out and lobby them, and let them know if we give the President fast track power today, we may all wake up without jobs tomorrow!
The environmental laws won't have teeth. The wages won't be living wages. Businesses will go to poor countries and pollute them. Look at Mexico: It has good environmental laws on the books, but they aren't enforced.
If, God forbid, we end up with another even-more-powerful international scheme such as FTAA, it will be a weight around our necks that we will have to pass on to our children and our children's children. We must stop irresponsible globalization and develop thoughtful, people-driven — not power-driven — ways to cooperate on a global level.
