Unions Kill Trade Agreement - Real Improvement Unrewarded

May 6, 2008 | Filed Under 00Publius Contributor, Business, Congress, Democrats/Leftists, Economy/Finances, Foreign Policy, Media Bias, News, Unions, Warner Todd Huston |

-By Warner Todd Huston

The powerful union lobbies in the US have cornered their lapdogs in the Democrat Party and succeeded in killing the free trade agreement that we had brokered with Colombia. The main reason that unions twisted the arms of their Dem representatives is supposed to be because of Colombia’s admittedly horrid history of violence against unions and workers.

John Sweeney, president of the largest US federation of unions, the AFL-CIO, detailed the allegations in a Washington Post op-ed April 14: “In Colombia, joining a union or advocating for workers’ rights can be a de facto death sentence,” he said. “The human-rights atrocities against union activists and supporters are not isolated, rogue events; they are committed largely by the armed forces and paramilitary organizations with ties to elected officials close to President [Alvaro] Uribe.”

Now, who can deny that such a history is lamentable? I, for one, am one of those folks who complains that the US government works so closely with the murderous, inhuman Chinese, for example, so I can very much sympathize with the sentiment that we should not reward criminal nations that perpetrate such murderous and violent actions against their own people.

Michael Fumento, though, effectively demolishes the unions stance by noting the startling improvement in Colombia under Colombia’s president Uribe.

Yes, Colombia has a high murder rate. With much of the country still in the control of vicious leftist narco-terrorists (supported by Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez), you’d expect a high murder rate among any one group - from union members to midgets. That said, last year’s 17,198 homicides (among 45 million people) was a drop of 40 percent from the 28,837 in 2002.

Deaths among Colombia’s union members plummeted even farther - from a high of 275 in 1996 to only 39 last year. That’s a drop of 86 percent in a decade.

And that’s 39 killings (a figure the AFL-CIO itself cited last month) out of about 800,000 union workers - or about five murders per 100,000 union members. How does that constitute “a de facto death sentence” - when the murder rate for the population as a whole is about eight times higher?

Now, wait a minute. Isn’t it “improvement” and “success” and “effort” that leftists always claim to want to see to afford any rewards? How much better does Colombia have to do to show vast improvement than an 86% drop in the sort of murders that the unions here are complaining about?

In the end, it is all a lie by both the unions and their lapdogs in the Dem Party when they say that Colombia doesn’t deserve the free trade agreement because of how unionists are treated there. What American unions and the Democrats want to avoid is any success for the waning Bush Administration.

That is it.

They couldn’t care less about the lives of union members in Colombia. And by killing the trade agreement, the unions here are proving that they don’t care if Colombia’s union members get to keep their jobs, either!

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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer, has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and is featured on many websites such as newsbusters.org, townhall.com, New Media Journal, Men’s News Daily and the New Media Alliance among many, many others. Additionally, he has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs to discuss his opinion editorials and current events. He has also written for several history magazines and appears in the new book “Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture” which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of publiusforum.com. Feel free to contact him with any comments or questions : EMAIL Warner Todd Huston