Your Civil Rights Are a Trade Barrier

As we've written about for a long time, "trade" rules are increasingly limiting how our own taxpayer dollars can be spent, namely by banning or rolling back Buy America, green procurement, and human rights conditionality in competing for state, local and federal government contracts - the use of which is one of the very few ways that our elected officials can directly create jobs, and shape the morality of the marketplace.

In a rare sign of morality (or at least political savvy) from the corporate class that drafts these agreements, they've generally excluded minority preferences and set-asides from coverage from trade pact rules.

But this may be ending. According to Luke Peterson's Investment Treaty News, the best source of information on investor-state proceedings anywhere, a group of European mining companies is suing South Africa under a bilateral investment treaty between their respective countries. Their gripe? Having to hire black South Africans.

The investors posit … that a series of obligations imposed upon mining companies, including hiring "historically disadvantaged South Africans," violates treaty undertakings by South Africa to provide fair and equitable treatment to foreign investors…