Focus: A threat to democracy

FOCUS ❐ TRADE AGREEMENTS AND THE LABOUR MOVEMENT and undermine public services, social and environmental protection and trade union rights’. The agreements will contain clauses protecting investor ‘rights’. The idea is that businesses are to be compensated if governments legislate or regulate in a way that interferes with businesses’ profits (actual or anticipated). The investor-state dispute settlement (‘ISDS’) mechanism governing breaches of these clauses is – justifiably – one of the report’s major focuses. Disputes are to be adjudicated ‘in closed tribunals for which there is no appeal and arbitrators are free to determine compensation and allocation of costs’. The report goes on: ‘[t]he tribunal consists of 3 private-sector lawyers who also serve as corporate advocates – there are no conflict of interest rules and the jurisprudence is essentially arbitrary’. Taking these things together – the secret content of the agreements, the conferring of rights on businesses, the secret hearings, and the idea that business interests fetter government policy – the report argues that these agreements ‘lock in’ neoliberal policies politically and legally. It says: ‘[t]he regime is expressly designed to prevent a reversal of neoliberal policies and the corporate power it consolidates by threatening sanctions against countries whose governments attempt to re-erect these barriers or create new forms of social and/or ecological protection in response to the pressure of labour and social movements’. The authors illustrate this argument by looking at specific policy areas that have been damaged as a result of trade agreements, for example water and fishing rights in Canada and (troublingly ) the Slovakian government’s failure to regulate healthcare insurers. The report notes: ‘When the newly elected government of Slovakia in 2006 restricted the power of private health insurers to distribute or repatriate profits, several foreign health care providers sued for damage suing the NetherlandsSlovakia BIT. The Dutch company Achmea was eventually awarded USD 25 million in damages and costs, and succeeded in enforcing the order through the Luxembourg courts, which have blocked EUR 29 million of the government’s assets in its banks. The story doesn’t stop there. In February 2013, Achmea initiated proceedings against the government of Slovakia to block draft legislation which would establish a single public health insurance scheme. The law is still in draft form and envisages various options to accomplish this goal. Achmea’s claim for compensation for expropriation under a law which has not been adopted and under which it has therefore suffered no damages constitutes a preemptive strike to block future legislation’. Under the terms of free trade agreements governments lose their power to legislate in the interests of workers INTERNATIONAL union rights Page 12 Volume 21 Issue 3 2014 ‘T rade Deals that Threaten Democracy’ is a mildly-named new report from the International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers Associations (‘IUF’). The report examines regional and bilateral agreements and explains their harmful effects not just on democracy but also on government policy, the rule of law, trade union rights and social and environmental protection. The brochure: ‘seeks to provide trade unionists with an overview of what is behind the negotiations on the EU-US and TransPacific trade and investment agreements and their likely impact. It explains why we need to organize to defeat these treaties, to roll back the layers of protection shielding transnational capital from democratic regulation and to begin putting in place a system of global rules which effectively enforces respect for human rights over the private claims of investors’. The report gives a troubling account of trade agreements, exposing the particular threats of two proposed mega-treaties – the US-EU Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the twelve-nation TransPacific Partnership Agreement (TTP) – and suggests why (and how) the trade union movement must defeat them. Only policymakers and transnational businesses have been let in on the contents of the TTIP and TTP negotiations. Indeed, the report notes that the tests are: ‘officially secret; [and] documents relating to the negotiations will be kept under government protection for decades’. But while the report therefore lacks specific source material its contents aren’t just speculative : the authors draw on the 3,200 currentlyexisting bilateral and regional trade and...

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