Issue Position: Trade - Worker Rights and Trade

Issue Position

Congressman Kucinich was an active opponent of making permanent most-favored-nation trading status with China, continuing his effort to build support for a new trade policy that conditions trade relations with the U.S. on worker rights. Kucinich was most concerned that granting China permanent MFN would encourage U.S. businesses to close facilities in the U.S. or forgo investment in the U.S. in favor of opening new factories in China. Products made in those factories would be sold in the U.S. as well as other places in the world.

As Congressman Kucinich said in a letter released to every member of Congress:

"It is a myth that the U.S. exports high technology to China, while the U.S. only imports labor-intensive, low technology goods. In fact, we import both, and we have a trade deficit with China in both.

"Indeed, trade in the highest technology is unbalanced in China's favor. According to the latest figures from the Department of Commerce, the U.S. now imports from China 64 percent more than it exports to China in Advanced Technology Products. These products include: microprocessors, printed circuits, integrated circuits, telephone switching equipment, and turbojet engine parts.

"Corporate leaders are fond of calling high-technology the "industry of tomorrow." Some tomorrow is in store for American workers! Permanent MFN will give China a permanent advantage in attracting high technology manufacturers, and U.S. firms a permanent incentive to build new plants in China, not the U.S."

Congressman Kucinich organized several briefings on the effects permanent MFN would have on manufacturing, agriculture and high technology. He did this in coordination with Rep. Charlie Norwood, a Republican from Georgia.

In the previous year, Kucinich organized 113 Democrats to sign a letter calling upon the Administration to renegotiate existing WTO agreements to remove prohibitions on linking trade and worker rights, before any new WTO agreement is negotiated. The letter states that the U.S. should be free:

to prohibit import of products made with child and forced labor, and

to use the leverage of access to the U.S. market to guarantee the rights to workers all around the world to organize into unions and bargain collectively; to be protected by workplace safety and right-to-know standards that are minimally equivalent to current U.S. standards, and to benefit from legal minimum wage levels.

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