In the end, all of these arguments are nothing more than a smokescreen. For example, one of the main charges used by the AFL-CIO bureaucrats is that China employs prison and slave labor to make products that are exported to other countries, including the U.S. and Canada. While this is true in and of itself, it is the height of hypocrisy for the bureaucrats to attack this. The U.S. capitalists have made a regular habit of using prison labor for certain products. The classic cartoon image of prisoners making license plates has a bitter truth to it.
Prison labor is used for everything from road repair to telemarketing.
Prisoners are used in many areas as a wedge for unionbusting and strikebreaking. In fact, many of the AFL-CIO union officials have given backhanded approval to these barbaric programs. A major part of the union bureaucrats' attack on China is also peppered with relics from the Cold War hysteria that dominated the U.S. for the last half of this century. This is in spite of the fact that China has, in the last decade, done everything it can to dismantle the gains of the 1949 Revolution. The fight against bodies like the World Trade Organization must be bound up with the struggle against the capitalist system as a whole.