Congressional Leaders Reject Wall Street’s Push for Deregulatory “Trade” Pacts

The Obama administration needs to stop negotiating so-called “trade” deals with deregulatory rules pushed by the likes of Citigroup that would undermine the re-regulation of Wall Street. 

That’s the message that Senator Elizabeth Warren – champion of financial reform and member of the Senate Banking Committee, Congresswoman Maxine Waters – Ranking Member of the House Financial Services Committee, and other congressional leaders have delivered to the administration in recent letters.  

The members of Congress warn against expanding the deregulatory strictures of pre-financial-crisis trade pacts, crafted in the 1990s under the advisement of Wall Street firms, via two pacts currently under negotiation: the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA, also known as TTIP). 

As proposed, both pacts would include controversial foreign investor privileges that would empower some of the world’s largest banks to demand U.S. taxpayer money for having to comply with U.S. financial stability policies.  

Yesterday, Sen. Warren and Sens. Tammy Baldwin and Edward Markey sent U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman a letter calling for such “investor-state dispute settlement” (ISDS) provisions, which have sparked global controversy, to be excluded from the TPP.  The letter states:

Including such provisions in the TPP could expose American taxpayers to billions of dollars in losses and dissuade the government from establishing or enforcing financial rules that impact foreign banks. The consequence would be to strip our regulators of the tools they need to prevent the next crisis.

Earlier this month, Rep. Waters and Reps. Lacy Clay, Keith Ellison, and Raúl Grijalva sent a similar letter to Froman that called for ISDS to be excluded from TAFTA to safeguard financial stability, stating:

Private foreign investors should not be empowered to circumvent U.S. courts, go before extrajudicial tribunals and demand compensation from U.S. taxpayers because they do not like U.S. domestic financial regulatory policies with which all firms operating here must comply. 

TPP and TAFTA negotiators are also contemplating pre-crisis rules that would threaten commonsense prudential regulations such as restrictions on derivatives and other risky financial products, measures to keep banks from becoming “too big to fail,” firewalls to protect our savings accounts from hedge-fund-style bets, capital controls to prevent financial crises, and a Wall Street tax to counter speculative and destabilizing bubbles.  

Senators Warren, Baldwin, and Markey made clear in their letter that such anachronistic rules must not be inserted into a binding pact:

To protect consumers and to address sources of systemic financial risk, Congress must maintain the flexibility to impose restrictions on harmful financial products and on the conduct or structure of financial firms. We would oppose including provisions in the TPP that would limit that flexibility.

So did Representatives Waters, Clay, Ellison, and Grijalva:

TTIP should also not replicate rules from past trade agreements that restrict the use of capital controls, which the International Monetary Fund and leading economists have endorsed as legitimate policy tools for preventing and mitigating financial crises. Nor should TTIP include provisions that could limit Congress’ prerogative to enact a financial transaction tax to curb speculation while generating revenue.

Similar warnings were recently issued by more than 50 of the largest civil society organizations concerned with financial stability on both sides of the Atlantic – including Americans for Financial Reform, which itself represents 250 organizations.  In a letter to Froman and other TAFTA negotiators in October, the groups wrote:

We believe it is highly inappropriate to include terms implicating financial regulation in an industry-dominated, non-transparent “trade” negotiation. Financial regulations do not belong in a framework that targets regulations as potential “barriers to trade.” Such a framework could chill or roll back post-crisis efforts to re-regulate finance on both sides of the Atlantic whereas further regulation of the sector is much needed.

While governments across the world strive to rein in risk-taking by the financial firms that brought us the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, U.S. trade negotiators (advised by many of those same firms) appear to be moving in the opposite direction.  We cannot afford to insert into binding “trade” pacts more deregulatory constraints pushed by Wall Street.  We cannot afford the TPP or TAFTA. 

The recent letter from civil society organizations made this clear:

We are only now implementing the lessons of the last financial crisis. Let us not lay the groundwork for the next one.

Should the World’s Largest Chemical Corporations Be Allowed to Attack States’ Chemical Safety Protections?

Patrick Gleeson, Trade and Policy Researcher of Global Trade Watch  

How would you feel about the U.S. government paying foreign corporations to keep cancer-causing chemicals out of your water bottles?

That is a risk we’d face under a sweeping U.S.-EU “trade” deal under negotiation – the Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA), also known as TTIP.  As proposed, TAFTA would empower thousands of European firms – including chemical giants like BASF, Bayer, and Royal Dutch Shell – to bypass U.S. courts, go before extrajudicial tribunals and demand taxpayer compensation for U.S. policies – including chemical regulations.  

We depend on such regulations every day to keep toxic chemicals out of our food, toys, rivers, and clothes.  This past July, more than 100 organizations on both sides of the Atlantic sent a letter to TAFTA negotiators to warn against TAFTA’s threats to such commonsense protections:

Stricter controls (including restrictions on some or all uses) of hazardous chemicals – including carcinogens and hormone disrupting chemicals – are vital to protecting public health…EU and U.S. trade policy should not be geared toward advancing the chemical industry’s agenda at the expense of public health and the environment – but that appears to be exactly what is currently underway with TTIP.

While U.S. federal chemical regulations are sorely outdated – with no major overhaul since the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) – U.S. states have been filling in the gap, enacting forward-looking policies to protect us from chemicals that pose a threat to human health and the environment.  State chemical safety policies cover everything from mandatory disclosure of chemical compounds on the packaging of consumer goods to outright bans on specific chemical compounds and additives.  According to Safer States, 35 U.S. states have enacted 169 chemical safety policies, while 114 more such policies are pending in 29 states.  

But this web of state-level protections on which most U.S. consumers depend could come under attack if TAFTA were to expand the controversial system known as investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS).  Six of the world’s 15 largest chemical firms are based in EU countries. The largest among them have facilities in many of the U.S. states that are currently contemplating new chemical restrictions.

Using TAFTA’s ISDS provisions, these foreign firms would be empowered to challenge U.S. state-level chemical protections with which U.S. firms must comply.  They could do so on the basis of sweeping rights available only to foreign investors, alleging, for example, that new chemical restrictions violated their rights by frustrating their expectations.  Such cases would be decided by tribunals unaccountable to any electorate, composed of three private lawyers authorized to order U.S. taxpayer compensation for “expected future profits” that the corporations claim they would have earned if not for the challenged chemical safety policies.

Recognizing the threat that ISDS poses to the autonomy of U.S. states to regulate in the public interest, the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), a bipartisan association representing state legislatures, has repeatedly stated it will oppose any deal that includes ISDS.

“The unpopular proposal to include ISDS in TTIP would force the public and their representatives to decide between compensating corporate polluters for lost profits due to stronger laws, or continuing to bear the health, economic and social burdens of pollution,” stated the July 2014 letter from more than 100 organizations.

To launch ISDS attacks against U.S. states’ chemical safety measures under TAFTA, European chemical firms would just need to have an investment in the United States – a broad criterion that many of the largest firms easily fulfil.  

BASF, the world’s largest chemical company, is based in Germany but has 66 subsidiaries in the United States.  BASF has particularly large facilities in 20 states, including Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and South Carolina.  Each of these states has considered new chemical safety legislation this year, the likes of which BASF would be empowered to challenge before extrajudicial tribunals under TAFTA. 

As a major supplier of chemicals to the U.S. market, BASF has already actively lobbied the U.S. Congress specifically to halt proposed restrictions on chemicals that it manufactures.  In 2014 alone, BASF has spent $2.3 million to lobby Congress on chemicals-related policies. TAFTA would give BASF a new tool to chill the development of U.S. chemical safety measures.

Other European chemical corporations have facilities scattered throughout the United States, manufacturing products ranging from synthetic fibers to rubber chemicals to pesticides.  Bayer, based in Germany, has subsidiaries in nine U.S. states, seven of which have been considering pending chemical safety legislation this year.  Royal Dutch Shell, headquartered in the Netherlands, has a U.S.-based chemical division that claims to make “approximately 20 billion pounds of chemicals annually, which are sold primarily to industrial markets in the United States.”  Shell’s U.S. chemicals division has facilities in Louisiana, which has been enacting new chemical safety measures. Were such new state-level regulations to be imposed on these corporations’ products out of concern for chemical safety, they would be empowered under TAFTA to demand taxpayer compensation.

Fifteen states, for example, are currently considering legislation related to a notorious chemical called bisphenol A, or BPA.  BPA has been identified as an endocrine disruptor, a class of chemicals that, according to the National Institutes of Health, “may interfere with the body’s endocrine system and produce adverse developmental, reproductive, neurological, and immune effects in both humans and wildlife.” BPA is used extensively as a plastics coating and hardener in food and beverage containers, including water bottles and the lining of metal cans. BPA can seep into the foods and beverages it contains, leading to human consumption.  

Though usage of BPA in baby bottles, pacifiers, and other baby products was phased out in recent years due to broad consumer concerns and government reports of potentially harmful impacts on infants’ development, BPA is still widely used in other consumer products.  Recent studies have continued to indicate health concerns for adults, including a 2014 Duke Medicine study finding that BPA stimulates the growth of breast cancer cells and lowers the efficacy of cancer treatments.  Another study this year, from the University of Cincinnati, finds a link between BPA levels in men and prostate cancer.

According to the NCSL, 12 states and the District of Columbia have enacted BPA restrictions thus far, including, for example, bans on BPA in reusable food containers and thermoses. With 15 states considering additional BPA-related protections just this year, we are likely to see more states enact policies to limit consumers’ exposure to this toxin.  

The risk is real that such policies could become the target of ISDS attacks by European chemical firms under TAFTA.  Some of these firms, including ones with investments in the United States, have already been lobbying against BPA restrictions in Europe for years.  Bayer is even a member of an industry alliance known as the BPA Coalition, dedicated to convincing the public and policymakers “that the safe use of BPA poses no known health risk to people.”

Might such firms be interested in using TAFTA to demand U.S. taxpayer compensation for new efforts to keep our water bottles free of carcinogens?  Let’s not find out.  

At Export Council, Obama Expected to Urge Corporate Interests to Help Him Obtain New Fast Track Powers to Expand the Status Quo U.S. Free Trade Pact Model That Congressional Democrats, Obama’s Base Oppose

At today’s meeting of the President’s Export Council, President Barack Obama is expected to urge yet another audience dominated by the corporate interests that opposed his election to help him obtain broad new Fast Track trade powers. Obama’s Fast Track request faces opposition by most Democratic members of Congress and base organizations as well as a bloc of conservative Republicans.

Obama also is likely to tout the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a pact that would expand the status quo U.S. trade agreement model that has led to staggering U.S. trade deficits, job loss and downward pressure on wages. When Obama picked up TPP negotiations from former President George W. Bush in 2009, consumer and environmental organizations, unions and congressional Democrats urged him to use the process to implement his 2008 election campaign promises to replace the old U.S. trade model based on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Instead, the administration has sided with the corporate interests that represent the majority of the approximately 600 official U.S. trade advisors and has replicated many of NAFTA’s most damaging provisions in the TPP.

“With the TPP, Obama is doubling down on the old, failed NAFTA trade pact status quo and even expanding on some of the NAFTA provisions that promoted American job offshoring, flooded us with unsafe imported food and increased medicine prices,” said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. “Given the TPP terms that would newly empower thousands of foreign firms to attack American health and environmental laws in foreign tribunals, incentivize even more U.S. job offshoring and ban the use of Buy American and Buy Local preferences, most Americans would be better off with no deal than what is in store with the TPP.”

Obama’s efforts to obtain Fast Track in the 113^th Congress were rebuffed, as almost all House Democrats and a bloc of House GOP members indicated opposition.

Obama’s efforts to push more-of-the-same trade policies have been sidelined by the dismal outcomes of his 2011 U.S.-Korea FTA: The trade deficit with Korea in the first two years of the pact. In fact, the record shows that U.S. export growth with U.S. Free Trade Agreement (FTA) partners lags behind the rate of export growth with non-FTA nations. In addition, the aggregate U.S. trade deficit with the group of 20 countries with which the U.S. has FTAs has increased more than fivefold since the FTAs took effect, due in part to a massive NAFTA trade deficit.

Outside of TPP Negotiations, Protestors Declare "No Fast Track Ever!"

As negotiators gather in Washington, D.C. this week for closed-door meetings on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), hundreds of activists from labor, environmental, consumer, human rights, public health, Internet freedom, faith and family farm activists joined concerned citizens to loudly make their voices heard outside of the secretive negotiations on Monday.  (Meanwhile, a select group of official trade “advisors,” largely representing corporations, enjoys unprecedented access to the TPP negotiators meeting behind closed doors).

The rallying cry from the activists, who gathered in front of the United States Trade Representative’s office, was loud and clear: "No Fast Track now, No Fast Track ever!  The TPP is a lost endeavor!"  

Fast Track was a controversial maneuver that allowed past presidents to railroad through Congress unpopular deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).  Corporations have called for Fast Track to be revived to empower the Obama administration to unilaterally negotiate and sign the TPP before Congress gets an expedited vote, with no amendments allowed and debate strictly limited.

Fast Track faces widespread opposition in the U.S. Congress and among the U.S. public.  Though a Fast Track bill was tabled about one year ago, it has gone nowhere due to massive opposition from most Democrats and a sizeable bloc of Republicans.  This past September, nearly 600 organizations sent a letter opposing Fast Track to Chair Ron Wyden.  A poll earlier this year found that 62 percent of U.S. voters oppose Fast Tracking the TPP.  

Civil society and lawmakers have good reason to reject corporations' push to Fast Track the TPP. Although it’s impossible to know the full scope of the secret deal, leaks have confirmed some of the worst speculations: the TPP would empower corporations to offshore jobs, increase the price of medicines, weaken environmental standards, and chill domestic interest laws by "suing" the government for public interest policies that frustrate their "expectations." 

Given the stakes, the energy of the rally was high.  Protestors circled the building carrying signs and chanting the death knell of Fast Track and TPP: “Fast Track is a sneak attack -- we’re taking our democracy back! Good paying jobs are what we need, but TPP spells corporate greed!"

If you weren't able to make it to the rally, you can still make your voice heard by writing to your member of Congress to urge them to voice their opposition to Fast Tracking the TPP.

Obama Laments Inequality, Calls for Another Inequality-Spurring Trade Deal

Yesterday President Obama, speaking to a room full of corporate executives, tried to downplay the contribution of corporate-pushed trade deals to the historic rise in U.S. income inequality.  

Obama knew his audience -- corporate representatives eager to expand the status quo trade model by Fast Tracking through Congress the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) are probably keen to deny that this model has been exacerbating inequality.  

But such denial defies a consensus position among economists that recent trade flows have indeed contributed to today's yawning gap between rich and poor -- the only debate is how big of a role status quo trade has played.  

It also defies U.S. public opinion -- in a recent Pew poll, a mere 17 percent of the U.S. public thought that trade has boosted U.S. wages, while 45 percent, across the political spectrum, saw trade as contributing to falling wages for U.S. workers.

Obama acknowledged yesterday that TPP proponents will have a tough time arguing that this time is different -- that reviving Fast Track authority in attempt to push through Congress another more-of-the-same trade pact would not fuel further inequality growth. Fast Track was the Nixon-created maneuver that allowed the executive branch to railroad through Congress controversial, inequality-spurring pacts like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) by negotiating and signing the pacts before Congress got an expedited, no-amendments, limited-debate vote.  A study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research finds that were the TPP to be Fast Tracked through Congress, all but the wealthiest among us would lose more to inequality increases than we would gain in cheaper goods, spelling a pay cut for 90 percent of U.S. workers.

Recognizing the unpopularity of Fast Track and the TPP, Obama told the business executives: “There are folks in my own party and in my own constituency that have legitimate complaints about some of the trend lines of inequality, but are barking up the wrong tree when it comes to opposing TPP, and I’m going to have to make that argument.”

Having to make that argument is not an enviable position -- it requires explaining away decades of evidence that Fast-Tracked deals have fostered greater U.S. income inequality.  Here's a sampling of that evidence:

U.S. Wages Stagnate, Despite Doubled Worker Productivity

• U.S. wages barely increased in real terms since 1974, the year before Fast Track was first enacted, even as American worker productivity doubled.In 1974, the average hourly wage for American workers in today’s dollars was $19.24, while in 2014 it is up only 7 percent to $20.56. Over the same period, U.S. workers’ productivity more than doubled. Economists now widely name “increased globalization and trade openness” as a key explanation for the unprecedented failure of wages to keep pace with productivity, as noted in recent Federal Reserve Bank research. Even economists who defend status-quo trade policies attribute much of the wage-productivity disconnect to a form of “labor arbitrage.” 

• Trade agreement investor privileges promote offshoring of production from the United States to low-wage nations. Today’s “trade” agreements contain various investor privileges that reduce many of the risks and costs previously associated with relocating production from developed countries to low-wage developing countries. Thus, many imports now entering the United States come from companies originally located in the United States and other wealthy countries that have moved production to low-wage countries. For instance, nearly half of China’s exports are now produced by foreign enterprises, not Chinese firms. Underlying this trend is what the Horizon Project called the “growing divergence between the national interests of the United States and the interests of many U.S. multinational corporations which, if given their druthers, seem tempted to offshore almost everything but consumption.” American workers effectively are now competing in a globalized labor market where some poor nations’ workers earn less than 10 cents per hour.
  

• Manufacturing workers displaced by trade have taken significant pay cuts. The United States has lost millions of manufacturing jobs during the Fast Track era, but overall unemployment has been largely stable (excluding recessions) as new low-paying service sector jobs have been created. Proponents of status quo trade raise the quantity of jobs to claim that Fast Tracked deals have not hurt U.S. workers. But what they do not mention is that the quality of jobs available, and the wages most U.S. workers can earn, have been degraded. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, about three out of every five displaced manufacturing workers who were rehired in 2014 experienced a wage reduction. About one out of every three displaced manufacturing workers took a pay cut of greater than 20 percent. For the average manufacturing worker earning more than $47,000 per year, this meant an annual loss of at least $10,000.
  

• Trade policy holds back wages even of jobs that can’t be offshored. Economists have known for more than 70 years that all workers with similar skill levels – not just manufacturing workers – will face downward wage pressure when U.S. trade policy creates a selective form of “free trade” in goods that non-professional workers produce. When workers in manufacturing are displaced and seek new jobs, they add to the supply of U.S. workers available for non-offshorable, non-professional jobs in hospitality, retail, health care and more. As increasing numbers of American workers, displaced from better-paying jobs by current trade policies, have joined the glut of workers competing for these non-offshorable jobs, real wages have actually been declining in these growing sectors. 

• The bargaining power of American workers has been eroded by threats of offshoring. In the past, American workers represented by unions were able to bargain for their fair share of economic gains generated by productivity increases. But the investor protections in today’s trade agreements, by facilitating the offshoring of production, alter the power dynamic between workers and their employers. For instance, a study for the North American Commission on Labor Cooperation – the body established in the labor side agreement of NAFTA – showed that after passage of NAFTA, as many as 62 percent of U.S. union drives faced employer threats to relocate abroad, and the factory shut-down rate following successful union certifications tripled.
  

• Even accounting for Americans’ access to cheaper imported goods, the current trade model’s downward pressure on wages outweighs those gains, making most Americans net losers.  Trade theory states that while those specific workers who lose their jobs due to imports may suffer, the vast majority of us gain from trade “liberalization” because we can buy cheaper imported goods. But when the non-partisan Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) applied the actual data to the trade theory, they discovered that when you compare the lower prices of cheaper goods to the income lost from low-wage competition under current policies, the trade-related losses in wages hitting the vast majority of American workers outweigh the gains in cheaper goods from trade. U.S. workers without college degrees (63 percent of the workforce) have lost an amount equal to 12.2 percent of their wages, even after accounting for the benefits of cheaper goods. That means a net loss of more than $3,400 per year for a worker earning the median annual wage of $28,000.

Income Inequality Increases in America

• The inequality between rich and poor in America has jumped to levels not seen since the robber baron era. The richest 10 percent of Americans are now taking more than half of the economic pie, while the top 1 percent is taking more than one fifth. Wealthy individuals’ share of national income was stable for the first several decades after World War II, but shot up 51 percent for the richest 10 percent and 146 percent for the richest 1 percent between 1974 and 2012 – the Fast Track era. Is there a connection to trade policy?

• Longstanding economic theory states that trade will increase income inequality in developed countries. In the 1990s a spate of economic studies put the theory to the test, resulting in an academic consensus that trade flows had indeed contributed to rising U.S. income inequality. The pro-“free trade” Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE), for example, found that nearly 40 percent of the increase in U.S. wage inequality was attributable to U.S. trade flows. In 2013, when the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) updated an oft-cited 1990s model estimate of trade’s impact on U.S. income inequality, it found that using the model’s own conservative assumptions, one third of the increase in U.S. income inequality from 1973 to 2011 – the Fast Track era – was due to trade with low-wage countries. The role of trade escalated rapidly from 1995 to 2011 – a period marked by a series of Fast-Tracked “free trade” deals – EPI found that 93 percent of the rise in income inequality during this period resulted from trade flows. Expressed in dollar terms, EPI estimates that trade’s inequality-exacerbating impact spelled a $1,761 loss in wages in 2011 for the average full-time U.S. worker without a college degree.
  

• Changes in technology or education levels do not fully account for American wage pressures. Some have argued that advances in computer technology explain why less technologically-literate American workers have been left behind, asserting that more education – rather than a different trade policy – is how America will prosper in the future. While more education and skills are desirable for many reasons, these goals alone will not solve the problems of growing inequality. First, as documented in a Federal Reserve Bank paper, inequality started rising as systematic U.S. trade deficits emerged, in the early Fast Track period, far before most workers reported using computers on the job. Second, college-educated workers have seen their wage growth stagnate, even in technologically sophisticated fields like engineering. Thus, addressing trade policy, not only better educating American workers, will be an essential part of tackling rising income inequality.

U.S. Workers Should Not Be Pitted against Child Labor in Vietnam

by Global Trade Watch intern Allie Gardner

You’ve likely heard about the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a sweeping deal under negotiation that would expand the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) model of trade across the Pacific.  And you probably know of the damaging effects the TPP would have on American jobs, public health, food safety, and Internet freedom.  But have you heard what the TPP would mean for labor rights? 

Vietnam, one of the countries negotiating the TPP, is notorious for its labor rights abuses.  Today, the Department of Labor issued a report declaring Vietnam as one of just four countries in the world that uses both child labor and forced labor in the apparel sector.

Through the use of such unethical labor practices, in addition to union repression and abysmal wages, Vietnam has been able to keep its production costs low. Under the TPP, U.S. businesses and workers would be forced to directly compete with Vietnamese firms on this uneven playing field.

A report last year by the Worker Rights Consortium found the Vietnamese apparel industry guilty of “the trafficking of persons as young as twelve years old from rural areas to work in ‘slave labor factories’… in Ho Chi Minh City.”  In another recent report on Vietnam, the International Labour Organization revealed that more than nine out of ten Vietnamese factories it audited were violating the legal overtime limit for workers, who still did not earn a living wage. The average minimum wage in Vietnam is 52 cents per hour, half of the average minimum wage in China

Given Vietnam’s labor abuses, in addition to human rights violations such as an increased crackdown on political dissidents, voices ranging from the Washington Post editorial board to Human Rights Watch have lambasted the Obama administration’s plan to sign the TPP with Vietnam.  

You can add your voice to this chorus of support for labor and human rights: ask your congressional representatives to say no to Fast Tracking the TPP. Tell them that U.S. workers should not be pitted against workers in Vietnam whose basic rights are being violated.

While telling Congress to say no to unfair trade, you can also say yes to fair trade. Tomorrow is “Fair Tuesday,” an opportunity to support workers by buying fairly traded products that respect their rights.  Because the apparel and textile industries are part of buyer-driven commodity chains, consumers have the power to influence production practices by selectively buying from only those brands and companies that choose to treat their workers well. 

Just as consumer activism means telling companies we do not support unethical labor practices, political activism means telling Congress that we do not support trade deals with countries in which such labor abuses are rampant.  As this year’s holiday shopping season gets underway, say yes to workers’ rights by saying no to the TPP.