Last week, Michigan Congressperson Sander Levin was finally given a copy of a suppressed Department of Labor (DOL) report on workers rights in the Central American countries involved in the Central American Free Trade Agreement. The report, which demonstrates that many CAFTA countries do not have basic laws protecting workers rights, was not released for over a year by the DOL, despite a Freedom of Information Act request filed in May of 2004 asking that the report be released in light of the pending trade agreement. After Levin stated that he would introduce a resolution in the House requesting the report, the DOL subsequently, and unexpectedly, released the report, which has been made available on Levin's web site. As Levin has long suspected, the suppressed report shows that most CAFTA countries do not protect basic workers rights, a fact detailed both within the report and in Levin's analysis of the report.
The text of the report is split into sections dealing with the different countries:
