How to Make the TPP Work for Workers

David Dayen talked to me about Out of Sight and how to create a global system of workers rights. An excerpt:

Loomis, who also writes for the liberal blog Lawyers, Guns and Money, masses an impressive amount of examples of the current appetite among multinational corporations for a race to the bottom, from Haitian wage theft to factory disasters in Thailand to the destruction of subsistence agriculture in Mexico to forced labor on shrimp boats to “sacrifice zones” where corporations deposit their toxic waste around the world. In each case, Loomis challenges the conventional wisdom that workers abroad benefit from making clothes or electronics for multinational corporations by raising their living standards, however meekly. In reality, this is outweighed by the massive environmental and health burdens ravaging their communities, and the awful conditions under which they toil.

His solution has resonance amid the TPP debate. “Workers should have the right to sue their employers or the companies contracting with their employers,” Loomis writes, “regardless of where the site is located.” Without this key feature, corporations will simply gravitate to the lowest-cost site for their factories and continue to abuse workers for profit.

This is a clever spin on what we see now with modern trade deals. They almost universally feature investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), where companies can appeal to extra-judicial tribunals, presided over by corporate lawyers who may have worked for that corporation at one point, and sue for “expected future profits,” lost when countries change regulations and violate the terms of international trade agreements. Trade negotiators claim this is critical to protect foreign investments from discrimination by host governments.

Workers don’t have the same privilege. They can’t appeal to some international body when they experience abuse, even if it violates trade deals. Unions and non-governmental organizations must appeal to a government to make claims against other countries, and that process simply hasn’t worked. Loomis’s idea would initiate a worker-state dispute settlement, or WSDS, giving workers direct access to sanctioning unlawful activities, rather than routing them through a third party. “This is not about turning our back on international agreements,” Loomis said. “It’s about making them serve us instead of serving corporate interests.”