Wyden Statement at Finance Committee Hearing on Trade Agreement Implementation
As Prepared for Delivery
I believe deeply in the benefits of trade. In America, trade-related jobs often pay better than non-trade jobs. And there are going to be a billion middle class consumers in the developing world in 2025 with money to spend on American-made goods. So it’s my view that we have to make things here, add value to them here, and ship them around the world.
Now, my heart breaks when I hear news like what’s going on in Indiana, where Carrier Corporation and a United Technologies Electronic Controls have announced they’re shuttering plants and heading to Mexico. I talked with my friend Senator Donnelly about this just yesterday. These are factories that have been around for decades, supporting the livelihoods of a lot of working families. When you’re a worker caught up in an awful situation like this, it’s got to curdle your blood when you hear some callous line from an executive about how it’s only business, and the company’s going to “synergize its inputs and maximize efficiencies.” It must feel like you and your family were just a little cog in a big machine.
My number one goal, when it comes to the cutthroat global economy, is to fight for American workers. I believe our trade policies must spur the creation of red-white-and-blue jobs that can support a middle-class family in Oregon and around the country. I want to make sure American workers and American businesses are in the economic winner’s circle when they compete with foreign firms.
You do that by enforcing the rules here at home, stopping unfair trade before it hurts American workers and families. And you do it by writing new rules overseas. That means engaging with other countries, hammering out commitments in trade agreements that countries will drop unfair barriers to products made in the United States. You get commitments to raise the bar on issues such as labor rights, so that companies aren’t lured away from the U.S. by opportunities to kick around cheap foreign workers. You get commitments on environmental protections, so that countries don’t turn a blind eye to practices like illegal fishing or the sale of stolen timber that often undercut American producers and do harm to the environment. You prevent a race to the bottom, you close loopholes and end outdated policies, and you bring the world up to our standards.
Then you have to enforce those agreements. The landmark package of enforcement measures put together by this committee – and very recently signed into law – is a major step forward. In the past, trade policies were often too old, too slow, or too weak to fight back when bad actors overseas found ways to rip off American jobs. Our tough, new game plan on enforcement will help change that.
You’re already seeing this new approach to trade policy pay off. Last year, Senator Brown and I worked together to close an egregious, old loophole in our trade laws that allowed for certain products made by slave or child labor to be imported to this country if there was no producer here at home. Under the loophole, economics trumped human rights, and Senator Brown and I said that was absolutely, 100 percent wrong. So we wrote a provision that closed it. And yesterday, the Portland Business Journal ran a story about how our crackdown on imports made with slave labor has the potential to make big improvements in the chocolate industry.
One company featured in the story, Tony’s Chocolonely, just set up its U.S. headquarters in Portland, and it’s leading the way when it comes to sourcing cocoa without exploiting slave labor or child workers. One of the company’s leaders said in the story, “The impact of this law will depend greatly on how it will be executed and enforced.”
Not only is that true when it comes to ending slave labor – it’s true in all our trade laws and agreements. Enforcement is absolutely vital. And the first step in the enforcement of a trade agreement is getting implementation done right. The U.S. cannot allow countries to backslide on their promises before a trade agreement even goes into effect. Our trading partners have to take the commitments they've made at the negotiating table and turn them into action before they see benefits. That means writing or updating laws and regulations, and dropping unfair barriers so that American workers get the fair shake they've been promised.
Now that the President has signed the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, I expect consultations on its implementation to pick up steam. Confidence that TPP is going to be implemented the right way is a prerequisite for the agreement to win the support it would need to pass the Congress.
I see this hearing as an opportunity to identify many of the pitfalls and opportunities in the implementation process. And it will be extremely helpful down the road when it comes time to implement the TPP or any other trade deal. So I want to thank our witnesses for being here today. And I look forward to working on a bipartisan basis with this committee, the current administration and the next one to see that implementation is done right.
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