Perhaps resigned to the inevitability of its passage, many of the most vocal critics of the proposed South Korean free trade agreement are now calling for the bill to be renegotiated instead of scrapped altogether.

The one-time stalwart opponents of the leftover Bush administration agreement say that, if properly negotiated, a well crafted agreement could create a paradigm shift in the way America practices trade.

“We believe the Administration must focus on driving a hard bargain with Korea — one that shows success in gaining market access while combating unfair trade practices, and providing a new framework that gives confidence to American producers and manufacturers that global trade deals produce jobs and better living conditions at home and abroad,” Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) wrote in a letter to the president.

Critics of the deal have expressed concerns about South Korea’s lack of market access for American automakers. In 2007, the U.S. sold 7,000 American vehicles in South Korea, or less than one percent of the entire market. South Korean automakers, on the other hand, sold 615,000 vehicles in the U.S. that same year, according to Pat Choate’s book Saving Capitalism.

Lorri Wallach, Director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch division, has raised a host of other concerns, however.

She points out that the agreement currently includes financial deregulation provisions that could undermine the recent congressional Wall Street reform efforts and leave the U.S. economy vulnerable to another meltdown of a similar magnitude.

As currently constructed, the agreement also allows both nations to ignore the International Labor Organization’s core conventions. According to Wallach, that makes the pact’s labor provisions effectively useless.

The trade pact, much like the North American Free Trade Agreement, would also provide Korea business with powerful foreign investor rights that would allow them to challenge U.S. laws and regulation in foreign tribunals.

“The Obama administration’s negotiation of new trade pacts, in the context of the Trans-Pacific Partnership process, provides an opportunity to start from scratch in considering how to deliver the new American trade agreement model, as President Obama promised during the campaign,” Wallach writes in Roll Call.

But Wallach and Congressional Democrats are not the groups admitting defeat on the South Korean Free Trade Agreement. In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, Richard Trumka, AFL-CIO president, seemed to wave the white flag on the issue.

“We don’t oppose trade,” he said in an interview. “We oppose the type of one-way trade we’ve had in the past.”

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