CAFTA workers rights report from DOL

[Robert Oak]

Michigan Congressperson Releases Report on Workers Rights in CAFTA Countries
May 09, 2005

Last week, Michigan Congressperson Sander Levin was finally given a copy of a suppressed Department of Labor (DOL) report on workers rights in the Central American countries involved in the Central American Free Trade Agreement. The report, which demonstrates that many CAFTA countries do not have basic laws protecting workers rights, was not released for over a year by the DOL, despite a Freedom of Information Act request filed in May of 2004 asking that the report be released in light of the pending trade agreement.

http://www.mediamouse.org/news/michigan_congressperson_releases.php
(links to the actual report)

http://www.house.gov/levin/CAFTA%20Analysis.pdf
Levin, who pressured to get the report released, his analysis in this PDF.

[Robert Oak]

1. if you care about defeating CAFTA, this post is important

Firstly this shows yet another repression of facts by the white house
when they do not like the news

Secondly this report shows CAFTA is a complete turkey for all workers
in all countries.

[Robert Oak]

2. up for vote, please read, kick n/t

[sadiesworld]

3. Hey.

I'm pretty down right now about the lack of interest in this topic. What's the deal? I've been trying to post a CAFTA heads-up on unrelated threads but I just seem to be killing them. :cry:

Oh well.

P.S. Thanks for your unbelievable work on labor and trade issues. :yourock:

[Robert Oak]

4. ty!

Yeah, it's kind of lonely...because we pay attention to immigration issues (due to labor arbitrage) we get caught right in the middle...
on many lists there clearly are some "wackos" out there who are racists
and then of course disagree with some of the conservative Republican positions. Yet on the Democrat side, we just see multinational corporate agenda....

so it's tough for neither party is addressing that issue sanely as well as many Democrats are truly corpocrats and giving multinationals what they want.

Anyway, I believe the reason you see apathy is because anything to do with trade, economics, budget deficits, labor economics and so forth requires a lot of reading, really some econ 101/102 concepts down pat and I think Americans believe all of this is boring as hell.

I blame the school system...my eyes glazed over too in high school...but fortunately I got the good stuff in college and realized all of this was fascinating...but so many are turned off to anything that has "numbers" or math in it...they just zone out!

So, with that I tried:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=106x19330

and I think maybe an approach is to explain why CAFTA is bad news as succinctly and clearly as possible and assume nothing in terms of awareness.

I think I get too complex sometimes and think everyone just sees what I see, when they do not have the background to 'get it' fast.