We already knew Rep. Peter Roskam doesn’t have much respect for American union members. An appearance on FOX Business yesterday proved he isn’t that worried about the well-being of foreign unionists either.

Discussing the proposed Colombia Free Trade Act, both Roskam and anchor David Asman used some slippery stats to argue life is safe in Colombia for workers trying to organize on the job. Watch it:

ASMAN: [Obama] was being fed, by the way, some terrible information -- just flat out wrong information about how [Colombian President Alvaro] Uribe had been killing more union leaders than have been killed in the past when it was absolutely the reverse: union leader deaths and murders have decreased under Uribe compared to his predecessor. So our president was getting fed really rotten information and hopefully now he’ll get better stuff.

ROSKAM: Well, and here’s the other thing. Uribe not only did what you said, he went actually a step farther to the point that today in Colombia, if you are a labor leader or a labor organizer, you are less likely to be afflicted with any sort of violence than a member of the regular population.

First of all, it’s Asman who is "flat out wrong" about what President Obama and others have said about Colombia.

Nobody has argued that more union leaders were murdered since Uribe took office in 2002, just that many were still being killed on his watch. As Rep. Phil Hare, a consistent critic of the deal, wrote after a committee hearing on the topic yesterday, violence against union members in Colombia continues at unacceptable levels:

According to ENS statistics, after dropping to 39 unionist assassinations in 2007, the number of killings increased once again to 49 in 2008. This represents a 25% increase. Ironically, 2008 was also the year that both President Bush and President Uribe claimed that the situation on the ground was improving as they lobbied Congress to pass the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement.

Uribe has also refused to bring any of the killers of trade unionists to trial; the Economic Policy Institute reports that zero prosecutions were recorded in either 2006 or 2007.

Roskam’s claim about the likelihood of violence against unionists is equally misguided. As Human Rights Watch researcher Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno said in her House testimony (PDF) yesterday, comparing the murder rate of organizers with the national murder rate glosses over many societal factors:

[T]his rhetorical claim compares apples and oranges: the supposedly “ordinary” citizen includes many people at unusually high risk of being killed, including drug traffickers, criminals, and people living in combat zones, which skew statistical results. The national homicide rate (33 per 100,000 in 2008) is exactly the same for all these people as it is for civilians in the safest neighborhood in the capital, Bogota.

The U.S. population is 7.5 times larger than Colombia’s. If 365 union leaders were murdered in America each year, it would be a national scandal. In Colombia, it’s swept under the rug. Their leaders should be held accountable, not rewarded with a trade agreement.