WASHINGTON : The Biden administration has made digital commerce the centerpiece of its commerce negotiations, and the AFL-CIO needs a much bigger say in how the U.S. Commerce Consultant’s workplace units targets on this space, arguing they’re too usually dictated by massive expertise firms.
The most important U.S. labor group on Tuesday issued a set of ideas that it says is required to guard employees, the general public’s privateness and governments’ capacity to manage a quickly evolving sector because the USTR negotiates digital commerce agreements.
The USTR is anticipated to quickly suggest textual content on the digital chapter in negotiations for the Indo-Pacific Financial Framework, the Biden administration’s signature financial settlement.
U.S. Commerce Consultant Katherine Tai has pledged to create a “worker-centric” commerce coverage, however the AFL-CIO mentioned digital commerce negotiations too usually make no point out of labor requirements nor the employees who write software program or assist networks.
“To date, U.S. ‘digital trade’ agreements have sought to expand market access for large technology companies by granting broad digital data and intellectual property rights while narrowly constraining the ability of governments (of both the United States and our trade partners) to adopt measures to adopt measures to address the economic transformation,” the AFL-CIO mentioned in its plan.
The guts of the group’s calls for contain guaranteeing that digital commerce agreements are topic to robust and enforceable labor requirements, the AFL-CIO mentioned, discouraging the “exploitative” use of “gig” employees who usually are disadvantaged of advantages and subjected to troublesome working situations, and discouraging the offshoring of back-office or telemedicine jobs to nations with low labor requirements.
However the AFL-CIO’s calls for additionally push again towards a key element of latest U.S. commerce offers that prohibit nations from imposing “data localization” insurance policies to require knowledge to be saved domestically. The renegotiated North American free commerce deal, which went into impact in 2020, included such provisions, and USTR has sparred in recent times with nations together with India over their plans for such insurance policies, arguing that U.S.-based knowledge platforms ought to be free to function wherever on the planet.
The AFL-CIO mentioned that not all knowledge is created equal and in some instances, governments ought to have the power to require that people’ delicate private data, comparable to medical or biometric knowledge, be stored on-shore to make sure it’s protected.
DIGITAL ECONOMY RULES
The ideas additionally name for negotiating robust safeguards towards misappropriations of voices, photos or likenesses that might be utilized in digital content material generated by synthetic intelligence (AI) applied sciences.
“Corporations shouldn’t dictate the rules of the global digital economy with no regard for working people,” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler mentioned in a press release. “Their drive to monetize data frequently violates crucial privacy rights and exploits workers.”
Different AFL-CIO calls for for digital commerce negotiations embody:
– Requiring governments to enact robust insurance policies to safeguard people’ private knowledge versus the present largely voluntary “self-regulation” mannequin that has confirmed insufficient.
– Facilitate significant oversight of supply codes and algorithms to make sure compliance with labor legal guidelines. The labor group says automated worker monitoring methods and different AI-enabled instruments can undermine employees rights and promote discrimination.
– Handle “abusive” employment practices within the expertise sector, to discourage the usage of contractors and require corporations to remove labor abuses in their very own operations and provide chains.
– Defend and promote financial safety of artistic professionals in the USA, together with movement image, tv and music trade employees by aggressively addressing the stolen or unlicensed use of copyrighted content material on digital platforms.
– Handle the rise of cybercrime by state and personal actors by requiring improved cybersecurity requirements and a typical enforcement agenda.
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