If so, let them vote on this.
These back room proposals and "agreements" are arguably
illegitimate unless the informed public is kept in the loop about the
whole picture.
The media coverage of the Indian proposal
has been largely confined to India and even there it is misleading.
People need to know that temporary service providers may stay up to
six years, per visa, a longer time than one thinks of when that term
is used.
Something that could possibly happen if the WTO
agrees with India's argument might be large increases in numbers
utilizing the program. We need to know that too, as well as the
underlying set of facts which leads technology experts to conclude
that the majority of jobs people do today are vanishing in a way
unprecedented in history in that replacements likely will not emerge
which cannot also be done by machines. That changes everything.
If we were not where we are today with technology improving at an
exponentially increasing rate, our wages might fall and theirs rise
until some median point was reached, but that I suspect would only be
the case if automation was not eliminating jobs as it is. being the
way it is rising, I think many of those jobs will vanish for good.
And lead to millions of broken homes and lives and a terrifying
economic implosion which neoliberal "reforms" would have
rendered us unable to do anything to reverse or fix. Our hands tied
by trade deals.
And of course, they will lead to extreme
levels of anger and tension as people lose their jobs and have to
train their replacements to get their last three months of pay.
I
think that the changes, irreversible as they are, would cause a
circling of the wagons and a backlash against the people perceived as
having been responsible, whomever they were.
It likely
would adversely impact the willingness of the country to allow the
settling of legitimate refugees and immigration reform. The other
side of the coin is that they would be bringing lots of new degreed
professionals to the country, many of them young and well educated
and willing to work for very low wages for the experience. Many from
well-to-do families in their home countries, speaking perfect English
and dressed well. If they are black or Indian, coming from an
aristocratic background and not a struggling urban or suburban one,
not burdened with debt. Not struggling. carrying resentments at
having spent lots of money to go to college only to be greeted with a
shift that left many people struggling, seemingly for no other reason
than to repay a ill-defined, arguably illegitimate odious debt-based
on a sort of shell game in the back rooms of the WTO by the famous
two timing presidential dynasties of America. They are not what they
pretend to be, any of them.
I don't know.
Negotiations
on GATS Mode Four have been, it seems, going on for twenty years.
At this point, a lot of work has been put into paving the way for substantial expansion of these guest-worker portions of both this long existing (GATS) and several pending new FTAs, that will expand guest workers, and allow them to be paid by their foreign employers. Some employers are truly legitimate -- firms that offer some product or unique service. But they should not be allowed to bypass host country wage regulations or even to pay minimum wage when the norm in that service sector is higher. Thats disrespectful of the relationship. It stinks of an abuse of the availability of the trade deal as a fix, and to push such a loophole will be to destroy the availability of trade deals to address -- by fine tuning, not a blunt instrument as they currently seem to be attempting, to fix problems.
I would like to propose that the temp staffing firms are an abuse of the system, as they are attempting to replace the hosts country's workers simply because wages are higher there.
If they allow companies that simply are temp-staffing providers, to come in and that becomes widespread it will lead to huge problems. But that is almost inevitable if it is allowed. And I think the secrecy shown by the lack of coverage and deceptive framing in the media (For example, only a very tiny number of stories on TiSA have been done in the US, virtually no media coverage of GATS has been done, and the Indian proposal has not been covered either, despite the fact that it likely will be bigger than TISA if implemented as it might apply to all WTO members on some level)
The deceptive lack of coverage for something so very important to peoples futures shows that they fully intend to do exactly that, the program likely would expand to impact huge number if they allow it. Millions.
And at the same time millions of back office administrative and clerical jobs likely will be being lost to a parallel attempt, via TISA to liberalize cross-border data flows.
Between the two a substantialpercentage of developed country white collar jobs could be lost, along with the professionalism that comes from being parts of communities businesses serve, and an important thing, which is rapidly vanishing, accountability. In health care, accountability is particularly important. To replace it we will get a potential nightmare an international shell game.
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