A preliminary assessment of the bipartisan trade agreement announced last Thursday by the Bush administration and congressional Democrats leaves much that is opaque. But one point, at least, comes through clearly: the AFL-CIO (though representing less than 10 percent of American workers) has achieved a major triumph on the issue of labor standards and trade. Alas for the administration, however, sensing weakness, by Friday some major unions, including the Teamsters, the services union (SEIU), and the United Steel Workers signaled dissatisfaction and a desire for an additional pound of flesh, with the USW stating that it would be “hard pressed to support the agreement” in its present form.

Bush administration leaders adopted a brave face. US Trade Representative Susan Schwab and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson hailed the agreement as “an historic opportunity to restore bipartisan consensus on trade.” Similarly, congressional leaders from both parties expressed strong support and congratulated themselves.

Schwab stoutly averred: “We need not be talking about a Republican trade policy or a Democratic trade policy, but rather an American trade policy.” A more accurate statement, at least with regard to the labor provisions, would have been: “We need not be talking about a Republican trade policy, but rather a Democratic trade policy.”

The central area of contention concerned labor standards and trade agreements. Here, the issue was not, as some press accounts have inaccurately asserted, whether there would be labor provisions in future trade agreements. That issue had been settled some time ago—indeed, the entire history of the 1990s is one of the Republican retreat in this area. The real fight this time was over new language that mandated that our FTA partners (and by extension the U.S. itself) agree to enforce so-called “core labor” standards as defined by the International Labor Organization.

Each FTA partner must commit to adopt, maintain and enforce five core labor standards as listed in a 1998 ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work—freedom of association; the right to collective bargaining; elimination all forms of forced labor; abolition of child labor; and elimination of discrimination in employment. In addition, there is a further (and seemingly undefined and open-ended) obligation to provide “acceptable conditions of work.” Violations of these obligations will potentially subject either country to trade sanctions, a more draconian step than the fines included in earlier Bush administration FTAs

The Declaration, whose standing in international law is a distillation of eight formal ILO international labor rights conventions passed at various times since 1930. The United States has ratified only two of the eight. What the AFL-CIO and its Democratic supporters demanded last week was that the standards of the Declaration be directly enforceable, despite the fact that the U.S. never signed on to them. What Bush administration officials—and their allies in the business community—held out for was an explicit exemption of U.S. laws from potential obligations incurred under the Declaration. In the end Mr Paulson and Ms. Schwab folded.

As with all Washington stories, of course, the matter won’t end there. Attempting to assuage the legitimate concerns of the business community, the Bush administration is busily trying to undo as much of its commitment as possible through interpretation. The Fact Sheet immediately released by USTR stresses that the FTA compromise refers only to the Declaration, implying that the United States would not be bound by the underlying ILO conventions it summarizes—most specifically those relating to non-discrimination and right to organize.

Attempting to further reassure the U.S. business community, the Fact Sheet also notes that, to be actionable, labor violations must occur in a manner that affects trade or investment between the FTA partners, and that only governments (and not NGOs) can bring suit for a violation. And finally the trump card: panel decisions are not self-executing and cannot alter U.S. law. The point: even if we lose we don’t have to comply.

Thus, the administration may well have positioned itself on a slippery slope.

The claim that the “sovereignty card” will insulate the U.S. in the future is disingenuous. Strong domestic and international pressure will come down on future U.S. governments if a labor standards dispute occurs and the U.S. loses. Charges of bad faith and callous unilateralism will inevitably tip the political calculus against defenders of noncompliance.

Finally, there is one unfortunate political irony in the timing of the “bipartisan” agreement—it undercuts the internationalist wing of the Democratic party. On the day before the ACL-CIO’s triumph, two leaders of the Progressive Policy Institute, Will Marshall and Edward Gresser, penned a stinging critique of what they labeled the “neo-populist” and “social democratic” wings of the Democratic party. The neo-populists (aka “Lou Dobbs Democrats”), they contended, “simply offer…complaint” without real policy, except for an “indefinite halt to trade liberalization…along with trade protection.” They argued that “progressive” Democrats should insist that “robust economic growth and open trade policies are not bargaining chips but crucial policies for generating the resources and political support for a new social contract with American workers.” They went on the spell out internal domestic reforms that constitute this compact: portable pensions, health insurance, and economic adjustment policies for all dislocated workers, among other things.

A weakened Bush administration caved to the neo-populist and social democratic wings of the party and their drive to implement a dictat to “low-income countries” to “enforce labor and environmental standards that”—as the two authors correctly state—”it took Washington decades to develop.

Mr. Barfield is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. This article first appeared on American.com.