Many countries that border the Pacific Ocean have finally agreed upon the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free trade agreement between them. This agreement has attracted important opposition not only from presidential candidates like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump but also from international organizations like Doctors Without Borders.
Some people might think this is a new chapter for the United States economy or maybe even the world economy. Is it really?
In 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect. NAFTA immediately lifted tariffs and made it much easier for countries that signed it to sell across their
borders. In principle, this should have improved the American economy.
Instead, NAFTA resulted in the loss of manufacturing jobs for nearly 700,000 workers in the U.S. as large corporations took advantage of Mexico’s low wage requirements.
The GDP growth directly resulting from this agreement was also very slight. The agreement also downplayed the bargaining power of workers’ unions, which had no choice but to succumb to large corporations’ cost-minimizing motives.
Many argue that the TPP is not at all similar to NAFTA. But like NAFTA, the TPP aims to cut tariffs and increase exports for all countries involved, especially the United States, according to the White House. If we haven’t learned the lesson about how creating jobs through free trade agreements fails, we should learn it now.
Anything else learned about the TPP has come by reading leaked drafts of the agreement. This is because anyone who actually discloses the text of the agreement could go to jail. That makes any debate regarding the agreement’s problems impossible. How can we trust the government’s position that it will protect the rights of workers without even seeing on what basis it has come to that conclusion?
If anything, the leaks have suggested that the agreement puts more restrictions on the freedom of speech, imposes copyrights by removing any sort of fair-use language and diminishes the ability of people to debate what these laws mean.
It also forces U.S. policymakers to adhere to an agreement few understand. Furthermore, leaks have suggested that the intellectual property clauses actually increase the cost of medicine and deregulate public health safeguards. This is directly harmful to public health, and it prevents access to inexpensive medicine internationally.
From what we know of history, the TPP will not help the American economy. No one really knows what’s being negotiated in the agreement except the people who are negotiating it and the corporate lobbyists who influence those decisions. What we do know is that the TPP’s leaked clauses are harmful — we shouldn’t agree to them.
Every agreement has winners and losers. The people of this country have been the losers in past agreements. This time, let’s make sure that doesn’t happen.
