Trade bills advance in Congress after five-year dry spell

By Staff -- Purchasing, 10/5/2000

While labor unions increasingly argue that free trade adds up to lost jobs and sweatshops, the U.S. Congress has been signaling a readiness to back global commerce for the first time in years. Recent measures-ranging from a limited trade opening to Africa to progress on easing a 40-year-old embargo on Cuba-are mostly small steps. Yet they're hard to ignore because they come in the face of union pressure on Democrats and Republicans alike in this presidential election year.

In recent months, Congress has moved to back the Clinton Administration's top trade priority by granting China permanent access to the U.S. market. It has overwhelmingly endorsed continued U.S. membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO), and it is likely to support a pact to open commerce with Vietnam. Those bills, plus the Africa and Cuba legislation, are the first free-trade measures to advance in Congress since the legislators ratified U.S. membership in the WTO in late 1994. Congressional members are finally "lifting the blinkers" from their eyes and realizing that "advancing free trade is a win-win situation," says Republican Rep. Philip Crane of Illinois, who chairs the House Ways and Means trade subcommittee.

Not everyone is as convinced that U.S. sentiment is changing, especially amid the sustained attack on international commerce by labor, human rights groups and others, who blame trade for everything from the loss of manufacturing jobs at home to environmental degradation overseas. After all, less than a year ago, efforts by World Trade Organization members to start a new round of global trade talks collapsed after four days of meetings in Seattle that were marred by street protests and a revolt by developing countries. Also, American steelmakers have won a spate of anti-dumping complaints against foreign rivals, driving many away from key U.S. markets in the face of prohibitive tariffs.

What's more, no real U.S. progress toward free trade is possible without "fast-track authority," which would give the president power to freely negotiate accords and has been denied to Bill Clinton since 1994, a year after the bitterly contested North American Free Trade Agreement (nafta). Still, analysts and companies say the recent string of free-trade victories stems from a renewed confidence among companies and workers as the U.S. economy powers ahead in its longest expansion ever.

That confidence has prompted Americans to largely overlook a ballooning trade deficit, long a politically explosive issue. With unemployment close to a 30-year low at 4%, even the record U.S. trade deficit of $30.6 billion in June isn't seen as a major problem. That's because "attitudes toward open-trade regimes go up and down with the economy," says Barry Bosworth, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

Even with the success of the domestic steelmakers' anti-dumping campaign in shutting down imports from some countries, Bosworth says the economy's strength and low jobless rate make it tough for industries vulnerable to trade-like steel-to make the case that world commerce costs local jobs. The presidential election offers more cause for optimism for advocates of open commerce, since Vice President Al Gore and Texas Governor George W. Bush are both avowed free traders. The battle over who controls Congress will loom larger, with Republicans generally supporting free trade and many Democrats opposing it along with their traditional constituents, organized labor and environmentalists.

Some critics say the free-trade momentum has less to do with a shift in sentiment than the increasingly sophisticated efforts to lobby Congress by companies and trade groups for agreements that will benefit them. Still, Don Johnson, a former Georgia congressman and assistant U.S. trade representative, says "there has been some improvement in the past six to 12 months in attitudes toward free trade when compared with 1993, when nafta was approved." Yet, he says that "while nafta has boosted the U.S. economy, many people still believe that the trade pact has cost jobs." Reason: "The media doesn't write as much about successes as it does about plant closings," he comments.