Following passage of the Central American Free Trade Agreement in July 2005, the Bush administration began steamrolling several smaller free trade agreements through Congress, many of which are more detrimental to workers than CAFTA.
The most recent bad trade deal was the Oman Free Trade Agreement, signed Jan. 19, 2006. Congress will vote on whether to approve the agreement this summer. A Bush administration fact sheet claims the treaty commits Oman to follow internationally recognized worker rights. The White House also says the Omani government approved labor laws three years ago that create worker representative committees for the first time.
But global union leaders point out that the worker committees are not independent at all because Oman’s government reserves the right to attend the committee meetings, approve the agenda beforehand and prevent the committees from affiliating with international labor organizations, all practices that violate workers' standards approved by the United Nations’ International Labor Organization.
In June 2005, the AFL-CIO filed a petition with the Bush administration to remove Oman as one of the countries receiving special trade deals under the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) because Oman did not enforce internationally recognized workers’ rights.
“There is no right to freely organize and bargain collectively; workers do not have the right to association; and conditions of work do not meet the standard of acceptable as required for GSP designation,” the petition said.
In June 2006, a coalition that includes the AFL-CIO and more than 350 labor, religious, consumer, farm and environmental groups sent a letter to Congress urging rejection of the trade deal. The coalition wrote:
“OFTA would expand the failed model of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). This model has accelerated job loss and lowered living standards in the United States while exacerbating poverty and social disparities in the developing nations with which we trade.”
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