Sherrod Brown, the Democratic U.S. senator from Ohio known for espousing the “dignity of work” and who has never before supported a trade deal in Congress, said Friday he intends to vote for President Trump’s renegotiated North American trade pact.
After initially siding with Democrats and labor leaders who felt the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement lacked sufficient enforcement for labor and environmental standards, Mr. Brown said he changed his mind after securing a union-endorsed amendment to address these concerns.
“One of my proudest votes was against NAFTA, because I knew it would encourage multinational corporations to close factories in Ohio and offshore jobs to Mexico. The agreement President Trump negotiated wasn’t much better, and I have spent more than a year working to make it more pro-worker,” he said in a statement posted to Twitter.
“We fought tooth and nail against the administration, and with the support of Speaker Pelosi, Senator [Ron] Wyden, and the union movement, we secured significant improvements for workers that President Trump’s initial agreement left out, namely stronger enforcement. The Brown-Wyden anti-offshoring provision is a worker-empowering, corporation-scaring enforcement innovation that amounts to the strongest ever labor enforcement in a U.S. trade deal, and that’s why this will be the first trade agreement I’ve ever voted for.”
Negotiations over Mr. Trump’s updated trade agreement lasted for more than a year. But in one whiplash-inducing day this week, the White House and Democrats came to an agreement on the deal just after the House Judiciary Committee announced articles of impeachment against the President. The trade agreement is widely viewed as a win for both Democrats and Mr. Trump, who ran on rewriting NAFTA.
Mr. Brown, representing a state that reeled from job losses as a result of NAFTA, voted against the original 1994 trade deal.
The USMCA is described as “NAFTA 2.0,” an update of the North American Free Trade Agreement for the 21st century that features rules on intellectual property and data. It incorporates environmental and labor protections, including a requirement that Mexico make it easier for workers to unionize.
The deal also aims to have more car and truck parts made in the U.S., mandating that vehicles must have 75 percent of their components made in Canada, Mexico, or the U.S. to qualify for no tariffs.
The negotiated changes on enforcement and prescription drugs were enough for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to announce on Wednesday that USMCA has Democrats’ backing. It also met the threshold for Mr. Brown, a leading voice on labor issues in Congress, who now joins his Republican counterpart, Sen. Rob Portman, in supporting USMCA.
“We have a lot more work to do to make hard work pay off, and one trade agreement alone will not fix President Trump’s economic policies that put corporations over workers. We must build on the successes we achieved here and make sure Brown-Wyden is in every trade agreement going forward to protect American jobs,” Mr. Brown said.
First Published December 13, 2019, 9:46 p.m.
