Urge Cantwell to sign Franken’s TPP letter

(Nov. 19) — Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) is urging his colleagues in the U.S. Senate to sign a letter to President Obama that urges provisions be included in the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement to discourage the continued outsourcing of American jobs. The letter says, (The TPP) “should be crafted to maximize good job creation and market expansion while minimizing the incentives for further off-shoring of middle class jobs.”

This letter will not only be delivered to President Obama and U.S. trade negotiators, but also to trade negotiators from other countries at the start of the Auckland Round of TPP negotiations in early December.

TAKE ACTION — Please contact Sen. Maria Cantwell’s office at (206) 220-6400 or (202) 224-3441 or via email and urge her to sign Sen. Franken’s letter to the president on discouraging job outsourcing in the TPP. If the staffer you speak to is unclear about which letter you are referring to, offer to send it (via this link) or ask them to contact Sen. Franken’s office.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) would link Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam, Mexico and Canada into a “free trade” zone similar to that of the North American Free Trade Agreement. The TPP is the first international trade agreement to be negotiated from scratch by the Obama administration, and those negotiations are being held entirely in secret.

Although the details of the agreement are not yet known, the suggestion that destructive NAFTA policies would be expanded has alarmed advocates for labor, environment and human rights groups around the world. When Mexico and Canada were first invited to participate in the TPP, the AFL-CIO, the Canadian Labour Congress and Mexico’s National Union of Workers (UNT) have urged that the TPP include “provisions to ensure strong worker protections, a healthy environment, safe food and products, and the ability to regulate financial and other markets to avoid future global economic crises.”

To have a positive impact on working families in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, the TPP must break from NAFTA, which imposed a destructive economic model that expands the rights and privileges of multinational corporations at the expense of working families, communities, and the environment.  The model of globalization enshrined in NAFTA promotes a race to the bottom in terms of wages, labor rights, environmental protection, and public interest regulation.

The time to influence the rules TPP will create for the new global economy is NOW. If we wait until trade negotiators have an agreement that gets fast-tracked in Congress, it will be too late. So please call Sen. Cantwell TODAY about signing Sen. Franken’s letter. Thank you.