"Fast Track" is a procedure through which Congress gives the president authority to negotiate trade agreements and provides special rules for considering those agreements. From 1975 to 1994, Fast Track authority outlined negotiating objectives for our trade negotiators, limited the time Congress could debate and consider legislation to implement trade agreements after they had been completed by the president and required an up-or-down vote on the implementing legislation with no congressional amendments allowed. The president can negotiate trade agreements without Fast Track authority, but he then has to let Congress debate the agreement at length and possibly add amendments that would modify the agreement.

The AFL-CIO and our affiliate unions have opposed Fast Track legislation vociferously because it has not required the president to include enforceable protections for the environment and workers' rights in our trade agreements. The AFL-CIO also has criticized the basic format of the legislation, since it lacks adequate procedures for consultation with Congress and the public and limits democratic debate about trade policy. The AFL-CIO worked with our allies in the environmental movement, consumer groups and fair trade coalitions to successfully defeat Fast Track in 1997 and again in 1998.

Now President Bush claims that he must have Fast Track authority in order to negotiate new trade deals, especially to complete the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), which is based on NAFTA. Although the Bush administration is trying to make Fast Track sound better by calling it "trade promotion authority," the administration has not proposed fixing any of the problems with previous Fast Track proposals.

Off the Fast Track and On the Right Track

U.S. trade policy needs to be dramatically reoriented before Congress grants Fast Track authority for major new negotiations. It is crucial that we have an open national debate over the content and form of trade policy before:

1. Proceeding further with negotiations toward the FTAA, which essentially would extend the flawed NAFTA model to the rest of the western hemisphere;
   
   
2. Negotiating additional bilateral free trade agreements;
   
   
3. Or launching new World Trade Organization negotiations.

Flawed trade policies cost American jobs, put downward pressure on U.S. wages and working conditions, erode the ability of governments to protect public health and the environment and have contributed to political and economic instability and growing inequality in the rest of the world.

Key principles that must be addressed in any trade negotiating authority include the following:

• Trade negotiating authority must require the inclusion of enforceable workers' rights and environmental standards in the core of all new trade agreements. New trade agreements must ensure that all workers can freely exercise their fundamental rights and require governments to respect and promote the core labor standards laid out by the International Labor Organization in its 1998 Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work. Workers' rights and environmental standards must be covered by the same dispute resolution and enforcement provisions as the rest of the agreement. An agreement that does not meet these principles must not be considered under Fast Track procedures. Monetary fines modeled on the NAFTA labor side agreement or the Canada-Chile agreement are inadequate and have proven an ineffective means of enforcement.
  

It is not sufficient simply to list workers' rights and environmental protections among the negotiating objectives. Workers' rights have been among our negotiating objectives for more than 25 years, with very little progress being made.

• Congress must ensure that ordinary citizens have access to negotiating texts on a timely basis, and that negotiators are accountable to both Congress and the public as to whether mandatory negotiating targets are being met.
  
  
• Trade agreements must not undermine public services or public health, nor allow individual investors to challenge state laws in secret. Trade authority must delineate responsibilities for investors, not just rights, and must not require privatization and deregulation as a condition of market access.

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