The South Korea deal could cost 159,000 jobs in the first eight years, and the Colombia deal 60,000 jobs.

Seven Democratic Members of Congress spoke out against the Obama Administration’s proposed Colombia “free trade” agreement and its onerous assassination stress tests. They were joined by the United Steelworkers Union, the first major union to speak out against the deal after the AFL-CIO labor federation. Each centered their opposition on the laughable “Action Plan” to reduce assassinations of union members.

The Obama Adminstration announced today it intends to move to Congress a NAFTA-style trade deal with Colombia (better known as Colombian “Free Trade”). The hold up for the last five years has been the little issue of union members being assassinated in Colombia. Specifically, 2,850 trade unionists have been assassinated in Colombia in the last 25 years, including 52 murdered in 2009.

Good news! The Obama Administration and Colombia have agreed to an “Action Plan” to reduce those assassinations in the next 3 months before Congress ratifies the NAFTA-style trade deal. As Marcy Wheeler noted, those checkpoints are essentially “assassination stress tests” – a meaningless series of goals without real enforcement, and without a requirement that the number of murders is actually, you know, reduced.

The Administration should take the opportunity to dissolve the Department and move its parts into other federal bureaus, and blame Republicans for forcing his hand to boot.

Virtually every time that Republicans or the Obama Administration talk about working together, they specifically cite the South Korea free trade agreement as a point of covergence. The agreement, modified by Obama’s negotiators last year but substantially similar to the corporate-written agreement originally negotiated under George W. Bush, looks like it’s on a glide path to passage, given that unanimity. In fact, the only person standing in the way is noted grassroots labor organizer Max Baucus.

In the 14 hours since the White House dumped the news of a NAFTA-style Korea Free Trade agreement on a Friday night, labor unions are deafly silent in opposing this job-killing agreement.

The US and South Korea are working on a revised free trade agreement that would differ somewhat from the original terms negotiated by George W. Bush’s Administration. It appears that President Obama would want to announce this reworked deal at the G-20 summit in Seoul this week. The plan would be to submit the free trade pact to Congress next year, when Republicans control the House.

Trade hasn’t been a subject that has received much ink during the Obama Administration. They haven’t sought to overhaul NAFTA or CAFTA, nor have they signed any new major trade deals. And in some cases, they have raised tariffs on certain imports, bolstering domestic manufacturing. The White House says they’d like to double exports as [...]

It’s been a couple of weeks since President Obama agreed to enforce U.S. trade laws in a case involving tire imports from China—and you’d think by the reaction in some anti-worker quarters he was creating the equivalent of death panels.

In 2008 alone, China’s tire makers sold more than 46 million low-cost tires to this country for stores like Wal-Mart. More than 5,100 domestic consumer tire production jobs were lost between 2004 and 2008 by the flood of Chinese tire imports that undersold producers in the United States. Domestic tire companies have announced they will close more plants and eliminate another 3,000 jobs by the end of this year. (Check out a fact sheet on the tire decision here.)

In July, the U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC) ruled in favor of a United Steelworkers’ (USW‘s) petition filed under Section 421 of the Trade Act of 1974 as amended. The USITC found that tariff relief was needed to urgently reduce those tire imports. The USW, which represents most U.S. tire workers, demanded the Obama administration act forcefully to counter this import surge. And on Sept. 11, the Obama administration agreed to provide tariff relief by increasing the duty on tires from China for three years.

AFL-CIO blog writer James Parks talked with Colombian trade unionists who traveled here last week to urge Congress not to pass the U.S.-Colombian Free Trade Agreement. As James relates below, Colombian trade unionists do not want Congress to reward that nation with a trade deal in a climate of fear and death that they and their union compatriots face daily.