Trum­ka filed the report more than five weeks before­hand, on April 16, with the USTR. Accord­ing to gov­ern­ment pro­ce­dure, as an offi­cial LAC doc­u­ment, the report had to go through the USTR and the Depart­ment of Labor (DOL) before reach­ing the hands of Con­gress. How­ev­er the USTR delayed the report’s release; as a result, no one in the Sen­ate saw it. On May 22, the Sen­ate passed fast track by 62 to 37, with 14 Democ­rats vot­ing in favor.

Trum­ka is a mem­ber of the Labor Advi­so­ry Com­mit­tee for Trade Nego­ti­a­tions and Trade Pol­i­cy (LAC), which serves as labor’s rep­re­sen­ta­tive body in TPP nego­ti­a­tions. On April 13, the LAC authored an ​“Inter­im Report” on the Unit­ed States Trade Rep­re­sen­ta­tive (USTR)’s ​“fail­ure to mean­ing­ful­ly engage with labor unions” in the craft­ing of the TPP. Their intend­ed audi­ence was mem­bers of Con­gress who were set to vote on the Bipar­ti­san Con­gres­sion­al Trade Pri­or­i­ties and Account­abil­i­ty Act of 2015. The bill, more com­mon­ly known as ​“fast-track,” strips Con­gress of the author­i­ty to amend or address spe­cif­ic pro­vi­sions of trade deals for the next six years.

Richard Trum­ka, Pres­i­dent of the AFL-CIO, has been an out­spo­ken oppo­nent of the Trans-Pacif­ic Part­ner­ship (TPP), a free trade agree­ment that will cov­er trade from 12 coun­tries as diverse as Japan, New Zealand and Chile, which account for rough­ly 26 per­cent of world trade. Trum­ka oppos­es the deal because he feels it will strip jobs and rights from work­ers and give for­eign cor­po­ra­tions too much influ­ence in domes­tic policy.

On June 2, Trumka’s office released the 16-page report, 11 pages of which were entire­ly redact­ed by the USTR, with the remain­der heav­i­ly edit­ed and in some places redact­ed, as well as an accom­pa­ny­ing let­ter that protest­ed the delay and out­lined pre­cise­ly how it happened.

The let­ter details a time­line span­ning from the day the report was filed to the day the Sen­ate passed the fast track leg­is­la­tion, dur­ing which the USTR and the DOL appar­ent­ly tried to drown the report in bureau­crat­ic pro­ce­dure and gov­ern­ment inep­ti­tude. Accord­ing to Trum­ka, the report intend­ed to serve as ​“a read­ing guide to sen­a­tors and mem­bers of Con­gress to high­light the numer­ous places in which the TPP fails to adopt rec­om­mend­ed work­ing-fam­i­ly friend­ly pro­vi­sions” as well as to per­suade the USTR to adopt the LAC’s rec­om­men­da­tions into the trade agreement.

The DOL’s expla­na­tion for block­ing the report is an incred­i­ble les­son in seem­ing­ly point­less bureau­crat­ic rea­son­ing. The depart­ment explained on May 7 — three weeks after its ini­tial fil­ing —that the report could not be accept­ed as an LAC doc­u­ment because it hadn’t been cre­at­ed in a way that was com­pli­ant with the Fed­er­al Advi­so­ry Com­mit­tee Act (FACA). The USTR and DOL said that because of this, they couldn’t share the report with mem­bers of Con­gress who request­ed it. How­ev­er, a let­ter and annex dat­ed Sep­tem­ber 3, 2014, which made up 11 pages of the report, were FACA-com­pli­ant and the LAC mem­bers asked whether these could be released to Congress.

As of May 22, the AFL-CIO had received very lit­tle feed­back. As Trum­ka explained in the sec­ond page of his let­ter, they were per­mit­ted to pub­licly release the first five pages of the Inter­im Report if they edit­ed and redact­ed spe­cif­ic por­tions. The USTR and DOL ​“failed to review” the remain­ing 11 pages (the let­ter and annex) due to time con­straints — most of their lawyers were nego­ti­at­ing in Guam. The con­tent of those pages there­fore had to be blacked out. And nei­ther the USTR nor the DOL pro­vid­ed an answer regard­ing whether any of the report would be released to Con­gress until June 5, when they final­ly made it avail­able in the secure read­ing room as the LAC had request­ed near­ly two months before.

The less-redact­ed five pages of the report out­line a lack of trans­paren­cy from the USTR and Oba­ma Admin­is­tra­tion regard­ing the TPP, as well as severe­ly restric­tive and silenc­ing reg­u­la­tions in pro­vid­ing any com­ment about it, an unwill­ing­ness to hear the LAC’s requests and demands, and seri­ous con­cerns about the trade agreement.

Despite being ​“cleared advi­sors,” the mem­bers of the LAC main­tain that they had been giv­en out­dat­ed infor­ma­tion — if any — on which to base their oft-ignored rec­om­men­da­tions. The most recent ver­sion of the labor chap­ter of the TPP avail­able to all cleared advi­sors was post­ed on their secure web­site on Decem­ber 15, 2011.

As well, cleared advi­sors are, as a con­di­tion of their becom­ing such advi­sors, pro­hib­it­ed by USTR pol­i­cy from dis­clos­ing any spe­cif­ic infor­ma­tion about the deal to the pub­lic, mean­ing that their crit­i­cisms can only come off as vague and are unable to com­bat the Oba­ma Administration’s unsup­port­ed promis­es.

By keep­ing the pub­lic and the public’s rep­re­sen­ta­tives — from mem­bers of Con­gress to union pres­i­dents — in the dark about the TPP, the Oba­ma Admin­is­tra­tion is craft­ing a deal that appears to only ben­e­fits cor­po­rate inter­ests. Among oth­er things, the agree­ment will allow for­eign cor­po­ra­tions to sue gov­ern­ments for reg­u­la­tions that impinge on their prof­it mar­gin, in the same way that Philip Mor­ris Inter­na­tion­al is suing Uruguay for tight­en­ing its smok­ing laws.

Through secre­cy, incom­pe­tence and bureau­cra­cy, the USTR and the Admin­is­tra­tion are turn­ing a deaf ear to the Amer­i­can peo­ple. Thus, it should come as no sur­prise that the five pub­licly-released pages of the Inter­im Report on the TPP con­clude that ​“based on the total­i­ty of infor­ma­tion cur­rent­ly avail­able, [… the agree­ment] will, on bal­ance, have a neg­a­tive impact on jobs, wages and oth­er issues impor­tant to America’s work­ing people.”

The fast-track leg­is­la­tion that was pushed through the Sen­ate will make chal­leng­ing the TPP in Con­gress much more dif­fi­cult. Though it passed by a large mar­gin in the Sen­ate, the bill is fac­ing steep­er odds in the House, where it will be debat­ed this month.