Labor Back From The Dead In Free Trade Battle

Relatively powerful service and public employee labor unions – including the International Association of Firefighters – have concluded that the threat of international trade agreements will extend to them, and they have lobbied Democrats strenuously to reject those agreements, says an article in The New York Times. Their clout combined with that of the industrial unions that traditionally lobby on this issue apparently is working, at least for now, to thwart President Obama and what the Times calls “a top priority of the final years of his office.” The article includes a telling, if somewhat mangled, quote from Andrew L. Stern, former president of the Service Employees International Union. Said Stern, in the context of a suggestion that public sector unions are starting to see the trade deals as part of a broader attack on labor: “It’s whatever that version of the statement was in Germany. ‘First they came for the Gypsies, then they came for me.’” -Today’s General Counsel/DR