75 Colombia unions want the free-trade agreement

posted at 11:55 am on April 8, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
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Few reporters have covered the Colombian trade pact story as well as Monica Showalter at Investors Business Daily. Today, she updates readers on a particularly nasty deception made by the opponents of the pact in the US, which exploits the murder of a trade unionist to argue against the pact’s ratification. What they don’t mention is that Jairo Giraldo Rey supported the free-trade pact before his murder, and was joined by 75 unions in Colombia in that position:

Jairo Giraldo Rey’s murder near Cali last November gave big labor a seemingly textbook case for why Congress should reject the Colombia free-trade pact, which President Bush sent to Congress Monday, forcing a vote on the contentious deal within 90 days.

The 35-year-old union leader’s death showed why “the AFL-CIO remains unalterably opposed to passage of the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement,” wrote AFL-CIO President John Sweeney in a Nov. 8 letter to House and Senate members.

The only problem is, Giraldo supported free trade.

Indeed, his fellow members of Sinaltraifrut, a 10,000-member banana harvester’s union, say trade creates jobs and breaks up vested oligarchies. Whoever killed Giraldo likely didn’t want him flying to Washington that week to lobby Congress to pass the pact.

Democrats who oppose the bill do so on behalf of their friends in Big Labor, not out of friendship for the Colombians. They claim that Alvaro Uribe has not done enough to end the violence against unionists in Colombia. Yet during the last six years, murders have decreased by over 40% in all categories, and by 86% against unionists.

The government conducted serious reforms during that period. Uribe helped rewrite the entire justice system, transforming it to a more modern system. As a result, they have won 156 convictions in crimes against trade unionists, when they only had one in the entire ten years that preceded 2002. The backlog of prosecutions in these crimes has dropped from six years to less than 18 months, and is still improving.

Not all of the unions in Colombia support free trade, but it’s worth noting which unions do support it. Showalter reports that the majority of the private-sector unions want the pact approved, while the overwhelming number of public-sector unions oppose it. Because 70% of public-sector jobs are unionized as opposed to only 4.5% in the private sector, the public-sector unions in Colombia have a greater voice. However, the private sector unions understand that untariffed trade creates private-sector jobs and reduces the need for nanny-state positions on which the unions rely.

Instead of penalizing Colombia for their progress, the US should welcome Colombia into a free-trade agreement.

Monica Showalter will be my guest on this afternoon’s Ed Morrissey Show at 3 pm ET.

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