Posted August 24, 2015

 

Will Auggie Tantillo speak at Southern Textile Association (STA) and other organizations’ meetings next year? That may depend on how the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is written, when and if it passes.

 

Tantillo, president and CEO of the National Council of Textile Organizations (NCTO), said as much during STA’s Summer Marketing Forum in Belmont, N.C., this month. After providing an update on the massive, 12-country trade agreement, which is stumbling toward the finish line, he went off script to discuss a matter many in the industry may have pondered: Just why is NCTO supporting a trade deal that doesn’t figure to have much of a positive impact on the U.S. textile industry and, in fact, will probably do more harm than good?

 

“I have a board member here today that I’ve spent hours talking with about this,” he said. “And he has incredibly good arguments about whether or not we are doing the right thing. A year from now, after this is done, there may be somebody else from NCTO standing up here."

 

Indeed, one can’t help but wonder if the industry is selling the rope to hang itself. But Tantillo and his colleagues, over the last few years, have expressed good arguments of their own as to why the council and many of its powerful industry members are supporting TPP – even if Tantillo’s neck, and some of the industry’s, is on the line. You’ve read many of those arguments on these pages on numerous occasions.

 

But this day, Tantillo put aside his slide deck to argue the strategic reasons behind the decision, beyond the agreement’s provisions.

 

Tantillo, who has worked on policy matters in Washington for more than 30 years, said he has seen the U.S. sign free trade agreements with Israel, NAFTA and CAFTA countries, Singapore, Australia, Morocco, Bahrain, Korea, Chile and others. And each of those agreements has something in common, he said: They were highly controversial and were all passed by the U.S. Congress.

 

And, now, the TPP …

 

“When I became NCTO president (in 2013), I went to our board and we had discussions and those discussions have been quite lively over the past two years, which is OK,” he said. “Obama wants this agreement. We’re probably not going to be able to stop it. How then do we best position ourselves to ensure that the provisions contained are ones that allow us to survive and go forward after its eventual implementation?

 

“And what we did was segment the process into two compartments,” he continued. “One is the negotiating segment. The other is the congressional oversight and enactment segment. The negotiating segment is taking place. During this segment, our approach has been to tell the Obama administration, ‘We can support you on this agreement if …’ In other words, we didn’t go in and say, ‘We’re opposed to it. We don’t like it. We think you’re crazy. We will never support it. And therefore we are already building our opposition to your legacy initiative.’ If we had taken that approach, the White House would’ve said, ‘OK, then, you’re going to be the sacrificial lamb when we sign this deal. We’re not going to do yarn forward. We’re not going to give you long duty phase-outs. We will reserve better treatment for some other segment of the U.S. economy that is willing to work with us.”

 

Compelling reasons. But will working with the administration be enough to ensure a “reasonable” TPP?

 

Tantillo said he feels good about where the U.S. government is on the deal right now. It has kept is promises up to this point in negotiations, he added, and it’s time for the White House to deliver an agreement that has strong yarn-forward rules. “If not, I’m going to have to accept the consequences,” he said.