The Irish Congress of Trade Unions: Begin a public awareness campaign and call for the scrapping of TTIP

The main goal of TTIP is to remove regulatory ‘barriers’ which restrict the potential profits to be made by transnational corporations on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet these ‘barriers’ are in reality some of our most prized social standards and environmental regulations.

Because TTIP would allow EU investors in the U.S. and U.S. investors operating in EU member states the opportunity to bypass established methods of complaining about laws and regulations they don’t like and sue sovereign governments of EU member states directly in private arbitration tribunals made up of for-profit arbitrators rather than full-time judges. This ‘investor-State dispute settlement’ (ISDS) mechanism effectively elevates transnational capital to a status equivalent to the nation-state itself and poses a grave threat to democracy.

We should oppose TTIP because multinational corporations’ lawyers have extended the definition of ‘expropriation’ to cover almost everything that is to their employers’ financial disadvantage. Egypt has been sued by Veolia for raising the minimum wage, Germany is in court for abandoning nuclear power, and Canada has been challenged by US pharmaceutical giants for restricting the use of high price drugs.

TTIP would threaten democracy, would attack worker’s rights; erode social standards and environmental regulations, dilute food safety rules and regulations on the use of toxic chemicals, rubbish digital privacy laws and strangle developing economies.