Expediting TTIP Could Allow US Gov't to Avoid Dialogue on Workers' Rights

Efforts by chief negotiators to expedite the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) agreement indicate they are trying to avoid complex issues like workers’ rights, American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) Trade Policy Specialist Celeste Drake told Sputnik.

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — On Friday, US chief negotiator Daniel Mullaney told reporters that it was critical to finalize TTIP before the end of President Barack Obama’s term.

Earlier in the week, a chief negotiator conceded that not a single chapter of the TTIP had been concluded, which is actually a good sign for labor unions, Drake said on Friday.

"To us [AFL-CIO], the fact that chapters aren’t concluded is good news because that potentially gives us more time to move those chapters in a direction [toward] a more worker-centered trade," she explained.

When TTIP chapters are closed precipitously by negotiators, it usually indicates that the text was largely "a copy and paste job" from prior free trade agreements, which contain rules that are not conducive to worker rights, Drake claimed.

If the US government expedites the TTIP agreement, Drake argued, beneficial modifications will not be implemented because changes take time, considering they entail digesting new rules and legalities that cannot be addressed on the fly.

On Friday, the week-long eleventh round of the TTIP talks wrapped up in Miami, Florida, during which negotiators were supposed to finalize the precise language of the agreement.

The hotly-debated TTIP agreement seeks to deregulate trade between the United States and Europe and create the world's largest trade zone, encompassing more than 60 percent of global production.