Political Quotes

“I thank Senator Wyden. I thank him for his help in putting this all together. Not even close. We have seen trade agreement after trade agreement that simply is not--even when labor standards look fairly strong, they are not ever really enforceable. Part of what we recognized--we went back and looked at what happened after NAFTA was passed, and not just what people promised but what happened with NAFTA and what happened with CAFTA. We have seen that, with any attempts at labor enforcement, the companies or the governments that don't want to enforce labor laws find a way, as lawyers are very good at doing, of just taking forever. They slow-walk. So whenever you push them to do something, they end up staying in court. There was a Central American case in Guatemala, I believe, that went on for 7 or 8 years. You know the old saying: Justice delayed is justice denied. You can't really get enforcement if the people who have done the violation, who have committed the violation, take forever. So speed is one of the things. Mr. Wyden mentioned at the outset how important that is. Another part of it is and one of the things we knew would speed it up, No. 1, and would mean that enforcement would work was that the workers would have an ability to kick off the investigation, to literally call a toll-free number.…”