In case you missed it, Rick Bloomingdale and Frank Snyder, leaders of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO put a spotlight on Senator Pat Toomey’s recent TPP flip-flop. Speaking on behalf of 800,000 working Pennsylvanians, the labor leaders noted Toomey’s advocacy for policies that profited global corporations by decimating local economies across the Commonwealth.
“Weighing Toomey’s recent TPP flip-flop against his extensive anti-worker record, how can we take him seriously?”, wrote Bloomingdale and Snyder. “With nearly every recent poll showing Senator Toomey’s political career on life-support, his about-face is nothing more than a deathbed conversion.”
Read the key points on Toomey’s trade record from the
op-ed:
* We’ve always said that the TPP is an outsourcing deal—not a trade deal, yet Senator Toomey voted to give this deal and future ones a fast-track through Congress, allowing them to be negotiated in secret and driven by corporate and investor interests. He has repeatedly praised the TPP, saying it would “knock down barriers”, be “very constructive”, and benefit Pennsylvania’s economy.
* This mirrors his decades long record of supporting at least seven other free trade deals, opposing cracking down on Chinese currency manipulation, and being a “big supporter” of China’s entry into the World Trade Organization.
* The Washington Post even unearthed a book Senator Toomey authored in 2009 containing a whole section where he “decried ‘The Siren Song of Fair Trade.’” In other words, Toomey thinks folks like us who believe trade should benefit working people are simply fools.
Uniontown Herald-Standard: Op-Ed: Toomey’s flip-flop isn’t sincere
By Rick Bloomingdale and Frank Snyder – August 26,
2016
U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., recently claimed that he “cannot support” the Trans-Pacific Partnership. “We should dump the TPP and return to the negotiating table to get an agreement that would create jobs and economic growth here at home,” Toomey wrote.
As the top officers of Commonwealth’s largest federation of unions, the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO, one might expect us to applaud this position. It’s true, the 800,000 working Pennsylvanians we represent decisively oppose unfair trade deals like the TPP. We still grapple with the devastating fallout from misguided trade deals like NAFTA and CAFTA. We saw first-hand at our own respective unions, AFSCME and USW, the devastating impact of bad trade deals on the private sector, as those jobs were shipped overseas, and how the absence of those family-sustaining jobs led to less bargaining power and lower wages in the public sector.
Bad trade deals have left broken homes, broken communities, and broken dreams in their wake, and we fear the TPP would simply double down on the incentives for corporations to outsource jobs to foreign competitors, destroying more communities across Pennsylvania. That’s why working people have led the fight to expose the TPP for the bad deal it is.
U.S. Sen. Toomey’s newfound opposition on the TPP made sense in many ways. But in this case, it’s impossible to separate the message from its messenger. The simple fact is we don’t trust Senator Toomey. He’s never been with us or our brothers and sisters in labor who wake up every day fighting to protect American workers. Make no mistake, Senator Toomey is beholden to corporate special interests – he’s no friend of working people.
From the beginning, working people, labor unions, and advocates have warned that the TPP will put Pennsylvanians at a disadvantage and allow big business to send our jobs overseas. We’ve always said that the TPP is an outsourcing deal—not a trade deal, yet Senator Toomey voted to give this deal and future ones a fast-track through Congress, allowing them to be negotiated in secret and driven by corporate and investor interests. He has repeatedly praised the TPP, saying it would “knock down barriers”, be “very constructive”, and benefit Pennsylvania’s economy.
This mirrors his decades long record of supporting at least seven other free trade deals, opposing cracking down on Chinese currency manipulation, and being a “big supporter” of China’s entry into the World Trade Organization. The Washington Post even unearthed a book Senator Toomey authored in 2009 containing a whole section where he “decried ‘The Siren Song of Fair Trade.’” In other words, Toomey thinks folks like us who believe trade should benefit working people are simply fools.
Weighing Toomey’s recent TPP flip-flop against his extensive anti-worker record, how can we take him seriously?
With nearly every recent poll showing Senator Toomey’s political career on life-support, his about-face is nothing more than a deathbed conversion. Toomey is throwing a Hail Mary, attempting to recast himself as the working man’s candidate while deceiving thousands of Pennsylvanians whose livelihoods hang in the balance because of bad deals and tax loopholes that help corporations send Pennsylvania jobs to China and elsewhere.
After eight years of difficult recovery, we need to elect leaders who will go to Washington to fight for us, to invest in our future, and to make sure our workforce comes second to none. But we also need to be able to trust them to say what they mean and mean what they say.
That’s not Senator Toomey, and this Commonwealth deserves better.
Rick Bloomingdale is president of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO, and Frank Snyder is secretary treasurer of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO.