Sides Get Closer to A Deal On Trade

In the compromise, Democrats would satisfy a long-standing demand. Provisions would be written into the text of the trade pacts requiring that trading partners "adopt, maintain and enforce in their own laws and in practice" the five core standards of the International Labor Organization, a body of the United Nations. Those standards bar forced labor, child labor and discrimination in the workplace, while protecting the rights of workers to organize unions and bargain collectively.

Just as important to Democrats is that when countries do not follow those standards, it would trigger the same enforcement mechanism that governs other areas of dispute, potentially resulting in punitive tariffs. Previous deals have simply obligated the government of an offending country to pay a fine.

Some Democrats have argued that previous trade deals have helped ship U.S. factory jobs to countries in which workers are exploited. They cast the new rules as redress.

"What this does is elevate the standard under which competition occurs," said Rep. Sander M. Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of a House subcommittee on trade. "This is the most effective anti-sweatshop provision. For a country to benefit, they have to give workers their rights."

The administration had been resistant to including the ILO standards without language guaranteeing they could not be used to influence U.S. labor law. Some Republicans, echoing the fears of industry, noted that the United States has not signed several treaties of the International Labor Organization, and some U.S. labor laws may violate its standards. Prison work in the United States, for example, could be considered a form of forced labor.

American industry groups have lobbied the Bush administration to demand a provision that would prevent the international standards from rewriting American law.

The sources said some industry groups have grown comfortable that it would be difficult for foreign governments to bring claims against the United States that would change American labor law. But others still oppose the compromise as a back-door way for American labor to use foreign trade deals to increase its power at home.

In the end, the sources said, the Bush administration faced up to the political reality that Democrats now run Congress. To gain votes on Capitol Hill, it embraced a compromise that could produce a backlash from business, rather than hold firm while its trade deals die.