Trade Deals and Postal Workers

International trade agreements have contributed to the loss of more than 3,000,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs in the past two decades. Nearly 1,000,000 jobs were lost under NAFTA alone.

Most of those jobs ended up as sub-poverty sweatshop jobs in poor countries where workers are regularly denied the right to form unions.

Now a new generation of trade deals spells trouble for postal workers.

• Negotiations for a new generation of trade deals are currently under way.

• These deals could mandate privatization of postal, undermining union wages and jobs.

American Federation Of State, County And Municipal Employees, AFL-CIO (AFSCME) statement:

“Multinational agreements, like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) are slowly taking the decision whether or not to privatize out of the hands of state and local government officials and giving wide-ranging powers to private corporations.”
Continuing The Fight Against Privatization Resolution passed at AFSCME’s 35th International convention, June 2002
 

Free Trade In Services

• International trade no longer means just manufactured goods.

• The focus of new free trade deals is on services, including postal services.

There are two major trade deals currently being negotiated that could spell big trouble for postal workers.

General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS)

How would GATS and FTAA affect postal workers? GATS and FTAA will require many government-provided services – at the federal, state, county and municipal levels – to be opened to bidding by foreign private companies.

GATS provisions apply to "non-governmental bodies in the exercise of powers delegated by central, regional or local governments or authorities" – this includes the US Postal Service. To see which services are likely to be covered under GATS, we can look at what the most powerful players in the negotiations – Europe and the United States – are seeking to include.

Both the Europe Union (15 European nations) and the United States are specifically targeting "postal services."

Europe intends to include the "handling" [defined as: clearance, sorting, transport and delivery] of addressed written communications on any kind of physical medium, including [but not limited to]:

Hybrid mail services;

Direct mail;

Addressed parcels and packages;

Addressed press products;

Registered or insured mail; and

Express delivery.

The U.S. position – at least what has been revealed so far – is to include "express delivery services" that are "cross-subsidized" by "government-granted monopoly services, such as first-class letter carriage."

This seems clearly to include USPS express delivery services.

We won't know exactly which postal services will be included in the new GATS until negotiations are completed in 2004. However, with the United States and the Europeans being the biggest players, it seems clear that at least a significant part of USPS services will be covered under GATS rules.

Any services covered by GATS will be open to bidding by foreign private companies that compete with USPS to provide that same service.

Additionally, GATS and FTAA may prohibit governments from setting any conditions for awarding government contracts, except to ensure product quality or supply.

The Service Contract Act  would probably not meet this test. It would almost certainly be disallowed as an illegal trade barrier, since it sets conditions – paying prevailing wage rates – that go beyond ensuring product quality or supplier capability.

Let's look at a hypothetical situation a few years in the future, to see what could happen to USPS employees if these types of trade deal provisions were in place:

• In the months before the new GATS takes effect, German-based Deutsche Post, and Holland-based TPG, both national postal services that have been partially privatized and now compete in other countries:

• Gain the agreement of the European Union to challenge the U.S. Private Express Statutes – which give USPS the exclusive right to carry letters for compensation – as an illegal trade barrier under GATS.

• At about the same time, TransForce, Canada's second-largest trucking company gets the agreement of the Canadian government to challenge the Service Contract Act as an illegal trade barrier under GATS.

• As soon as the new GATS takes effect, Canada files such a challenge before the World Trade Organization.

• The EU claims that the Private Express Statutes violate GATS obligations to allow companies from other GATS nations to compete for the right to provide postal services in the United States and Canada claims that the Service Contract Act is a GATS-illegal condition for awarding government-authority contracts.

• The United States chooses to contest the charges. The World Trade Organization assigns the case to a panel of three "trade experts" to decide the case. They meet in secret, at WTO headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. Their ruling will be essentially final – subject only to a very technical internal WTO appeal process.

• After months of testimony and deliberation, the WTO announces the panel's findings. It rules that the Private Express Statutes and the Service Contract are, in fact, both violations of GATS rules.

• It orders that the United States must bring these laws into conformity with GATS rules so that carriers from other WTO-member countries are allowed to bid for the right to provide postal services in the United States—and so that companies from other WTO-member countries are allowed to bid for USPS work without being required to pay prevailing wages to their workers.

• The United States would have the option to refuse to honor the panel's findings, but in that case the WTO would assess hundreds of millions of dollars of trade sanctions against US exports – a politically near-impossible position to maintain, even if we had a President committed to fair trade rather than "free" trade.

• Thus Congress agrees to change the Private Express Statutes and the Service Contract, but US-based carriers, including UPS and FedEx, put up a howl, insisting that foreign companies not get greater opportunities than US companies.

• In the end, Congress changes the laws so that all competing carriers – foreign and domestic – are allowed to bid for USPS services, with no requirement that a prevailing wage be paid.

• Deutsche Post and TPG, along with UPS and FedEx begin "cream-skimming" – bidding to pick off USPS's largest customers, such as Capital One with 1.4 billion pieces per year of presorted permit mail and Quebecor, the world's largest commercial printer, which drop ships two billion pieces per year.

• At the same time, USPS is required to accept TransForce's bid to provide long-haul mail transportation on 30 key routes, even though the TransForce drivers will be paid less than $10 per hour and receive minimal benefits. And US trucking firms begin to bid on other routes without having to abide by prevailing wage requirements.

We leave this hypothetical scenario now, but if new GATS rules are adopted as currently envisioned, this fictional case could become all too real.

In the 1990s corporate free-traders came after industrial workers with NAFTA and the WTO. Now they are coming after postal, public sector, and construction workers.

So what can be done? The answer is in the political arena.

• Learn more about the coming trade deals and how they will impact public employees.

• Stay in touch with your union's research department and the Citizen Trades Campaign

• Educate your members about how these new trade deals would impact them.

• Mobilize your members to stay in touch with their Senators and Representatives about these deals.

• Bring trade issues into your candidate screenings! The candidates you screen may end up voting on the trade deals that will affect public employees.

• Elect lawmakers who oppose trade deals that contain anti-worker provisions, reject candidates who support them

• Join the Citizens Trade Campaign – a national coalition of labor, environmental, consumer, family farm, and religious organizations fighting to bring fairness into the global economy. CTC has affiliated state coalitions in CA, TX, FL, IN, MN, WI, PA, WA, and NYC. www.citizens.org/trade

Source:  Frank Wilson Chicago Local  Steward  via 21cpw.com and from an APWU  Local via e-mail

Related articles:

GATS Attack -- Little-Known Trade Agreement Threatens Democracy -

The Black World Today (Dec 12, 2002)

America defines its democracy as government of the people, by the people and for the people-This is the elite that is pushing the World Trade Organization, NAFTA and the foreign sourcing of production. The corporations of other countries now have the right to sue our state governments in their private courts without recourse to the U.S. Constitution or our Supreme Court. They are suing to open the U.S. Postal Service to foreign competition and to do away with any environmental law that they decide is a barrier to trade. The people, the workers, the taxpayers are not allowed to be a party to these legal actions. Commentary by Paul Heise

The new generation of free trade deals -GATS, WTO-Workday Minnesota

US Seen Offering Little New Services Access at WTO-Reuters

EU Demands Corporate Access to U.S. Postal and Municipal Water Systems and Elimination of State Insurance, Land-Use and Alcohol Distribution Regulations -

Public Citizen

EU’s Demands Under WTO/GATS-Public Citizen