Excerpts from an opinion piece by AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka in USA Today:
The last six months mark a fundamental shift in how our nation approaches and evaluates international trade proposals.
In just four months, among many other tactics, workers and their allies made more than 2.6 million phone calls and wrote more than 32,500 handwritten letters to the House and Senate. Congress may have reluctantly given the president the authority to negotiate the TPP, but workers have made clear he has the responsibility to do it the right way. Here’s how:
The final TPP must include rules against currency manipulation, as a bipartisan majority in Congress has demanded. … The TPP must also ditch the rigged legal system called investor-state-dispute settlement, which lets foreign corporations opt out of the U.S. court system and sue U.S. taxpayers to recover lost profits by arguing that local, state, or federal laws or regulations violate their right to “fair and equitable treatment.” … The labor and environmental rules of the TPP must not be merely enforceable, but also enforced.