New Trade Pacts

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel and the White House are close to agreement on reworking labor measures in trade pacts with Panama and Peru and hope to reach a deal next week.

Rangel has been negotiating with Representative Jim McCrery of Louisiana, the top Republican on his committee, and U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab. He is predicting that a deal based on changes he outlined last month might persuade a majority of Democrats to vote for the two pending trade agreements.

The agreement, which is still being worked out and might be announced as early as May 1, is likely to leave unsettled the fate of pending free-trade deals with Colombia and South Korea or the possibility of renewing the president's trade promotion authority, which expires at the end of June.

A breakthrough in talks on labor rights is at the heart of the accord. In a proposal released last month, Democrats said new trade agreements must require countries to "adopt, maintain and enforce basic international labor standards.''

Those standards, including prohibitions on child labor and protection of the right to organize, will benefit workers in developing countries by eliminating the worst forms of worker abuse, help create a middle class to buy U.S. exports and ensure that the benefits of global integration are widely shared, Democrats say.

Business groups say that those standards may rebound against the U.S., leading to challenges of U.S. law, including restrictions on strikes by government workers or the use of prison labor.