[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 138 (Wednesday, September 28, 1994)]
[House]
[Page H]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: September 28, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
            WHY CONGRESS SHOULD NOT PASS THE GATT AGREEMENT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Brown] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, yesterday the administration sent to 
Congress the Uruguay Round of GATT, the General Agreement on Tariffs 
and Trade. It deserves to be defeated. The lawyers who wrote this 
3,000-page agreement included not one single provision for child labor 
laws, for worker rights, for labor standards, or even any prohibition 
against slave labor. Even NAFTA, as bad as it was, had a side agreement 
on labor.
  I believe strongly that our Government should begin to negotiate 
trade agreements that benefit the people in the plant floors, not just 
high-powered international financiers. GATT ignores labor issues. The 
administration tried but failed to get labor provisions included in 
this agreement. We are left with another international trade agreement 
that does nothing to promote fair trade. This agreement does nothing to 
address the cruelest and most prevalent unfair trade practice of all, 
the suppression of worker rights by governments seeking low wage, low 
standard competitive advantage on the world market.
  Why should American workers, the backbone of our country, the 
backbone of our economy, why should American workers have to compete 
with workers who make $2 a day if they are lucky? Until worker and 
labor standards are included in a trade agreement, we will never have 
fair trade, and American workers will continue to pay the price.
  GATT is especially bad, because it would create a powerful new 
bureaucracy, an international bureaucracy known as the World Trade 
Organization. The WTO is a threat to the sovereignty of the United 
States and more trouble down the road for our country, for consumers, 
for people that work. Under the WTO, each nation in the world has one 
vote. Japan has one vote, Cuba has one vote, Haiti has one vote, even 
Saint Lucia has one vote. Saint Lucia would have the same voting power 
in the WTO as does the United States.
  Of the 120 countries in the WTO, 80 of them as members of the United 
Nations voted against the United States more than 50 percent of the 
time. So if Cuba and Haiti and Saint Lucia decided the United States 
food safety laws violated the GATT agreements, our clean food, clean 
food safety laws, they could haul the United States before the World 
Trade Organization, which could impose sanctions on the United States. 
That would hurt our products when we try to sell them on the world 
market.
  If you like Japan writing trade rules, then you will love GATT. If 
you want to put the United States on the same level with countries the 
size of a postage stamp, then the World Trade Organization is for you, 
then GATT is for you.
  Meanwhile, the international trade deficit is killing America's 
competitive position in the world. The U.S. trade deficit in July 
alone, in 1 month, reached $10.99 billion, the second highest level in 
our country's history. We have done a good job the last 2 years getting 
the budget deficit down. Unfortunately, the trade deficit is getting 
larger and larger. The deficit with Japan alone in July was $5.67 
billion. The deficit with China, which uses slave labor and has all the 
human rights violations that people on this floor have talked about, 
the deficit just last month with China was $2.67 billion.
  For too many years, we have allowed other countries to write our 
trade laws. That trade deficit of over $100 billion this year kills 
American jobs. Balancing our international trade account would save 
approximately 160,000 jobs every month. That is why fair trade is so 
important to building a strong economic future for northeast Ohio and 
building a strong economic future across this country. That is why I 
will be voting against GATT next week.

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