When asked about specific state and national legislation he and his colleagues support, Martinez resident and union leader Wilmer Ellis explained that currently he’s working on stopping Congressional approval of the South Korea-United States Free Trade Agreement.

Three-NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement] style trade agreements – with South Korea, Colombia and Panama are up for a final vote of approval by federal legislators on Wednesday.

One in particular, brokered by George W. Bush in 2006, the KORUS FTA would eliminate almost all trade tariffs between the U.S. and South Korea.

“It would eliminate another 159,000 trade union jobs,” Ellis said, speaking against the pact.

Proponents of the agreement, namely the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR), claim “the U.S. International Trade Commission estimates that the reduction of Korean tariffs and tariff-rate quotas on goods alone would add $10 billion to $12 billion to annual U.S. Gross Domestic Product and around $10 billion to annual merchandise exports to Korea.”

The agreement would also provide new protections for multinational corporate financial institutions doing business in the U.S. and Korea.

After making campaign statements against the agreement, similar to the position of Republican candidate John McCain, President Obama switched gears and moved the FTA forward last December.

Numerous unions and national lawmakers are opposed to KORUS FTA, and New York Congresswoman Louise Slaughter said, “I am surprised that the [Obama] Administration would try to slide this poorly written trade deal past the American public when Congress has already said that the deal is not good for our economy or workers.”

“To try and advance the Korean FTA when so many workers are still struggling to find work would simply move our economy backward. This trade pact was written by a Republican Administration with the corporate bottom line in mind.”

The KORUS FTA is an extension of NAFTA, or the North American Free Trade Agreement, passed by Congress in 1993.

Labor unions at that time opposed NAFTA, saying that it would eliminate American jobs.

“What we hadn’t anticipated was that NAFTA was much more than the acceleration of the race to the bottom. In fact it was the threshold of a major consolidation of power by multinational corporations, who through this free trade agreement gained the legal right to promote their business advantage over laws to protect public citizenry,” said Katie Quan, Director of the John F. Henning Center for International Labor Relations at U.C. Berkeley.

Several academic studies published since NAFTA’s passage have concluded that the trade agreement was a failure and a root cause to many of today’s economic woes.

“Farm incomes plummeted and bankruptcies escalated in the U.S., Canada and Mexico – while U.S. food prices increased 20 percent – during the first seven years of the North American Free Trade Agreement,” according to a study published by Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch.

“The study found that contrary to promises and predictions at the time of NAFTA’s 1993 passage, North America’s farmers and consumers have not benefited from the pact – but many large agribusinesses have seen record profits during the period.”