Word: labors
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...high as last week's conversation on trade with the Seattle Post Examiner. In a hotel-room conversation with the paper's Michael Paulson while anti-WTO demonstrations raged outside, Clinton casually suggested that the U.S. should ultimately impose sanctions on nations that violate a set of core labor standards...
...comment may have been the obvious palliative to throw out to the legions of labor activists - core Democratic party voters - in Seattle to protest, but it got U.S. trade negotiators in a panic. And with good reason. Within hours of the paper hitting the streets, delegations representing developing countries had dug in their heels, convinced that the world's most powerful trading nation planned to deny many of them their only competitive advantage - cheap labor. They vowed to block any progress on further trade liberalization, and claimed victory when the conference ended in failure late Friday. "Protesters weren...
...Despite the best "what-the-President-meant" spin efforts of his trade negotiating team, the specter of labor conditions being used as a reason to block imports to the U.S. from developing countries prompted their leaders to block any progress. In the end, Washington was unable to win even the relatively nebulous commitment - agreed upon by its most important rival trading bloc, the European Union - to form a WTO working group on the issue of labor rights. Thus the pitfalls of an organization whose decision-making process demands absolute consensus...
...putting at least a question mark over its passage in an election year. But what's bad for Bill Clinton may not be altogether bad for Al Gore, and the Seattle debacle may, in fact, work to the vice president's advantage: The Clinton administration's tough talk on labor rights won support from union leaders, and the summit's failure means there's no trade-talk framework agreement for the vice president to defend against Democratic party skeptics. U.S. trade representative Charlene Barshefsky, who chaired the Seattle talks, closed the conference Friday calling for a "time...
That's the kind of news the market likes to hear. The Labor Department Friday sent the Dow scooting up 300 points to a record 11,340 and NASDAQ blasting up to 3,500 for the first time. The impetus was an unemployment report that contained the best possible scenario for Wall street - continued healthy job growth but no sign of wage inflation. "In investor psychology, the unemployment figures are the most important of all economic indicators," says TIME senior business writer Bernard Baumohl. "It indicates both the strength of the economy and the potential for inflation, and Friday...