Shortly after September 11 last year US President George Bush fast-tracked a batch of controversial legislation through Congress. In the mood of national unity that followed the World Trade Center atrocity, few questions were asked about a bill which paved the way for the creation of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).
In essence, this is planned to be a trading block which will tear down national barriers across North and South America - profit-driven capitalism unleashed without any of the social benefits we have in the European Union's single market.
Alarm has been raised in the US labor movement over the job losses, environmental impact, and increased poverty throughout the continent, that FTAA will bring. At the time though, American union colleagues despaired that less than a tenth of their population even knew what the initials stood for. "Couldn't happen here", I though.
Well...it can. How many people in the UK know what GATS stands for?
Yet we have less than a month left before the UK government closes public consultation on changes to the General Agreement on Trade in Services, an international treaty which governs not only who can sell what to whom, but also the way global companies run their businesses around the world. FTAA for a planet, not just a continent.
By March, all countries in the World Trade Organisation, which oversees GATS, will submit their "requests" for liberalisation of other nations' trading rules. In a round of closed-door international horse-trading that could run until 2005, countries will be encouraged to drop trade barriers, privatise public services, and withdraw government subsidies.
For the UK, where 70% of the economy falls under the WTO definition of service industries, GATS could reach further into the arena of public policy than any trade agreement in history, not least in the audio-visual sector.
US trade negotiators have "requested", in GATS parlance, that: Europe and the UK should allow free access to the film, cinema, video, television, radio, and record industries; that quotas for the broadcast of local TV programming should be scrapped; and that "discriminatory subsidies", like the BBC licence fee, should be abandoned.
If granted, these requests would turn the European and British and cultural industries on their heads, and probably kill some of them off completely.
Other demands for liberalisation cover the full slate of service industries, many of them still publicly-run in Europe, including transport, healthcare, telecoms, utilities like water and electricity, and even education. In all of them, requests have been made for public monopolies to be banned.
In short, Europe is being asked to stop regulating key industries in the interests of society, and hand them over to transnational profiteers. For developing countries GATS poses equal risks - along with other developed nations, the UK government claims that liberalisation of global trade will be good for them, but has not published the full list of "requests" from rich nations to the third world, many of which are aimed at allowing global corporations to trample over fragile local economies in Africa and Asia.
On the other hand, the UK is one of the few countries to be running any consultation at all on the GATS negotiations, and thanks to its candour we know that Europe will be making no requests of other WTO members regarding the audio-visual sector in order to fend off demands from global entertainment companies, mostly American, who want to take over our cultural industries.
However, that won't stop deals being cut where concessions could be made in the audio-visual sector to win trade advantages in other industries - UK film subsidies could, for example, be scrapped in return for the right of British companies to buy Venezuelan power stations. Purely hypothetical of course, but not impossible.
Already, there are suggestions that a clause in the Communications Bill to allow non-European ownership of Channel 5, without any reciprocal promise that British companies could buy into the American TV industry, is some small part of the GATS negotiating game.
BECTU has been closely involved in steering the UK towards a steely defence of our sector once the GATS talks get going, directly with the Culture Ministry, and through the British Screen Advisory Council, the government's sounding board.
In the US it took almost a year for unions and other groups to get a campaign going against FTAA - we've got only a few months left, and will be pulling out all the stops to explain what the initials GATS actually stand for.
Tony Lennon
December 2002
