Human rights and free-trade politics

0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 21, 1997 | by Susan Crabtree

The shattering of historically entrenched political divisions almost certainly will be the most enduring legacy of the MFN fight. Beijing now will face opposition from a broader human-rights coalition.

In 1975, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union told consumers to look for the union label -- they even ran television ads of their members singing that slogan. By the mid-eighties, the refrain had changed to Buy American. This year, as concern continues to mount about China's abuse of workers and the Asian giant's $40 billion trade surplus with the United States, the AFL-CIO is leading a new campaign, telling Americans to look for the Made in China label, and then to boycott it.

The failed House resolution to revoke "most favored nation," or MFN, trade status for China has not deterred labor unions or their allies in Congress. Just minutes after the House vote, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, a union-allied Democrat from California who served at the vanguard of the anti-MFN campaign on Capitol Hill, declared victory despite the 259-173 loss. "The Clinton administration and the Chinese regime should take no comfort from the outcome of this vote," she announced. "We've increased the awareness in Congress and among the American people of the key issues like trade, [weapons] proliferation and religious and human rights."

The day before the vote, the organized-labor political machine already was spinning its line in a new direction. Instead of devoting its resources solely to educating lawmakers about China's human-rights abuses and mushrooming trade surplus with the United States, the unions took the issue to consumers, the driving force behind the American marketplace. "We want to get out of the MFN box," says Jeff Fiedler, president of the Food and Allied Services Trade department of the AFL-CIO.

Fiedler conceded defeat on the MFN vote, but released an incendiary report as a guide for consumers. He said the very stores Americans frequent most -- Wal-Mart, Kmart, Macy's and Nordstrom's, among others -- are selling products manufactured in companies owned and operated by Red China's People's Liberation Army, or PLA. Douglas Dority, president of the 1.4 million-member United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, or UCFW, announced a campaign to "Kick the PLA out of the USA."

Standing in front of enlarged photographs of PLA troops bludgeoning students in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and of the People's Armed Police, or PAP, executing a man in South China, Dority declared, "The bloodstained products of the PLA and the PAP should not soil the shelves of U.S. stores." In a letter to President Clinton, he urged the administration immediately to revoke visas of all foreign representatives of companies operating in the United States owned by the PLA or the PAP. He implored retailers nationwide to boycott such products. In a separate letter to members of Congress, Dority called for legislation to ban the PLA and the PAP from doing business in the United States or with U.S. companies.

Fiedler, who has made a second career of tracking PLA and PAP activity, revealed that in 1996 companies including Macy's, Kmart, Schwinn and a subsidiary of Nike purchased products directly from PLA-owned companies. Holding up a PLA-manufactured yellow slicker he had purchased at Wal-Mart, Fielder listed PLA and PAP products exported to the United States -- goods such as toys, pants, cycling and ski gloves, fish for fast-food restaurants, exercise weights, glassware and lighting products, among many others.

Indeed, maintaining "normal" trade status for Beijing may have been a Pyrrhic victory for MFN proponents. The AFL-CIO campaign and the series of punitive legislative proposals the issue has prompted (see Cover Story) may fuel further skepticism about trade with China. On May 1, the Wall Street Journal, NBC and Hart Teeter released a poll that found 67 percent to 27 percent of the American public believe China should improve its human-rights record or lose its current trading status. A week before the vote, a Louis Harris poll published in Business Week found the same number of people believe MFN should be revoked, while those supporting MFN for China had dwindled to 18 percent.

Opponents of MFN cited the polling data and grumbled about the timing of the House vote. Pelosi and union leaders argued that their colleagues on the other side of the debate and the proChina business lobby were well aware that Americans were deeply distrustful of Chinese trade and had worked to schedule the vote before members of Congress had a chance to discuss the issue with their constituents during the July 4th break, after the potentially explosive changing of the guard in Hong Kong. "Washington lobbyists succeeded in keeping this vote a Beltway business deal," Pelosi lamented after the vote.

When the date for a vote was scheduled before the recess, the resolution's proponents realized it was doomed. A week before the debate Pelosi's press secretary, George Papagiannis, spoke of the somber mood among humanrights activists and protectionists. "It reminds me of coaches going into the final quarter of the Superbowl and shrugging their shoulders," he says.