Keep Services Out of WTO: Gut the GATS!

APL activists protesting in the streets of Hong Kong (December 11, 2005)

The Alliance of Progressive Labor (APL) joins other social movements, trade unions and progressive forces on this International Day of Protest against the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) as the 6th WTO Ministerial Conference gets underway in Hong Kong.

As a component of the so-called WTO Doha Round, GATS aims to open up all services, including sensitive public services such as health care, education and public utilities, to allow private corporations to freely invest in them. To do so, GATS intends to alter investment policies in every country that transnational service-providers would like to penetrate. This would leave workers and the general public at the mercy of profiteers.

In the run up to the Hong Kong Ministerial, the GATS negotiations took a very dangerous turn as services exporting countries, under the prodding of transnational service providers, started demanding that negotiation framework be changed from one that allows developing countries to chose the services they want to open up, to one that forces them to deal with a group of countries with similar interest on ANY of its services.

Should this government trade away our future by agreeing to GATS, we will see a more intensified drive to privatize and deregulate more and more of our services resulting in massive losses in jobs and higher service rates. And in an environment where government regulation is almost non-existent, and public officials are unable and unwilling to maintain arm's length from the private corporations seeking private gains over public welfare, we will surely see more expensive hospital bills, inaccessible educational institutions and electricity and water rates hitting the roof.

The NAPOCOR experience shows the most glaring example of failed privatization. To this day we pay for higher electricity prices, while paying even more through government guarantees that are passed onto the public as taxes. Another is the Maynilad concessionaire where the private entities controlling part of the NCR's water systems have proven inadequate and ineffective in delivering quality service to more and more households as they valiantly pronounced when they were awarded these contracts.

But what is more dangerous is the fact that the GMA regime chose to believe in the illusion that GATS, though its provision on the movement of natural persons or Mode 4, would help solve the country's unemployment problem by facilitating the migration of our workers.

This is an illusion as developed countries will never allow the free movement of workers, even if they are professionals. Recently, several US legislators threatened to vote down the WTO Doha Round should GATS Mode 4 interfere with their exclusive domain to set immigration policies!

But more importantly, it is an illusion to think that migration is the solution to unemployment. Our decades-long migration policy should be enough to debunk that myth. It is only by generating sustainable jobs through a clear industrialization plan that we can solve the unemployment crisis that we are currently in.

Let us thus be vigilant. We cannot allow government to desert its responsibility to provide public services to its citizens. We should not allow our government to continue prioritizing foreign debt payments over the provision of public services. But even as we continue to demand that debt payments be rechannelled into social spending, we must at the same time keep public services away from profiteers.

As such, we should demand that services be taken away from WTO!