The long list of gifts the Trump administration has already handed out to corporate America makes it clear that Trump’s strategy for “making America great again” by reviving manufacturing is to make American manufacturing cheap again. Without all those pesky regulations, with far lower corporate tax rates, with Trump’s all-out assault on environmental protections, American workers will indeed be closer to competing on cost with workers in low-wage countries like Mexico.
Trump told us all we needed to know about his attitude toward workers with his first pick for labor secretary, the cabinet post that is supposed to protect the US workforce. He chose Andrew Puzder—a nomination that ultimately failed, but one so egregious that it’s worth recalling as a marker of Trump’s intentions. Puzder is the CEO of a restaurant empire that includes the fast-food chains Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr., and he is widely considered to be among the most abusive employers in the country. Dozens of lawsuits have alleged that his company and its franchises have failed to pay workers for overtime and other work, leading to millions in settlements. The correct term for this is wage theft. He has also mused publicly about the benefits of working with machines instead of workers: “They never take a vacation, they never show up late, there’s never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case,” he told Business Insider. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer called Puzder, worth an estimated $45 million, “probably the most anti-worker” choice ever. What Trump’s admiration for Puzder suggests is that his real plan for luring back manufacturing is to suppress rights, wages, and protections to such a degree that working in a factory will be a lot like working at Hardee’s under Andrew Puzder. In other words, it’s yet another plan to take from the vulnerable to benefit the already outrageously rich.
What we are witnessing is not a silver lining of any sort. It’s the push to the finish line in the “race to the bottom” that opponents of these corporate trade deals always feared.
Yes, It’s Possible to Make Bad Trade Deals Worse
Trump is not planning to remove the parts of trade deals that are most damaging to workers—the parts, for instance, that prohibit policies which are designed to favor local, over foreign, production. Or the parts that allow corporations to sue national governments if they introduce laws—including laws designed to create jobs and protect workers—that businesses deem to be unfairly cutting into their profits.
Contrary to campaign pledges to penalize companies that move production outside the United States, the actual plan seems to be to expand protections for corporations that move production offshore. This is not speculation. Just two months into the new presidency, a draft letter was leaked of the administration’s notice to Congress stating its intent to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). According to Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch’s analysis, the administration plans to take the worst elements of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and add them to, or strengthen them in, NAFTA—while not even scrapping the language that denies the US the right to implement “Buy American” rules. As Lori Wallach, director of Global Trade Watch, put it, “for those who trusted Trump’s pledge to make NAFTA ‘much better’ for working people, it’s a punch in the face.”
One of the most insidious parts of many trade deals is the aggressive protection they provide for patents and trademarks, which often puts lifesaving drugs and critical technologies out of reach for the poor. The Trumps have built a global empire that relies, above all else, on being granted trademarks and licenses and having them fiercely protected—so we can expect the parts of deals concerning intellectual property to become more harmful, not less.
The strongest evidence of Trump’s plans is the person he has chosen to oversee his trade negotiations. His commerce secretary is Wilbur Ross, a former banker and billionaire venture capitalist who made a fortune taking over firms and restructuring them to make them more profitable—a feat almost invariably accomplished by laying off workers and moving production to cheaper locations. In 2004, for example, he bought Cone Mills, an American textile company. After less than a decade of restructuring, corporate mergers, and outsourcing, the US workforce in one North Carolina factory dropped from over 1,000 to just 300 while Ross expanded production in China and Mexico.
Putting a CEO like Ross in charge of trade is just one more example of the corporate coup—cutting out any pretense of a neutral government mediator and instead placing corporations directly in charge of the final stage of the decimation of the public sphere and the public interest.
If this agenda is fully realized, workers in the United States will find themselves with fewer protections than they have had at any point since the Dickensian nightmares of the Gilded Age.
But resistance is rising. Andrew Puzder was forced to withdraw his nomination for labor secretary, in part because of organizing by restaurant workers across the country. And when Trump was invited to address a convention of two thousand members of North America’s Building Trades Unions, the organization that had sung his praises at the White House, a group of workers decided they were fed up with their union’s decision to cozy up to the “billionaire-in-chief.” When Trump spoke to the room packed with union members, they stood up, turned their backs on him, and held up signs that said #RESIST—until they were removed by security.
Not all trade unions have fallen for Trump’s trade swindle. Most labor leaders, particularly those representing multiracial workforces—including National Nurses United, unions representing public transit workers, and the Service Employees International Union—understand that Trump represents an existential threat to their movement and are organizing accordingly. And yet the earlier question remains: how could Trump’s transparently absurd posture as a champion of the working man find a ready audience with a not-insubstantial part of the US labor movement in the first place?
A large part of the answer has to do with the fact that much of this political battleground has been ceded by liberals to the Right.
Remembering a Powerful Global Movement
Beginning in the 1990s, I was part of a global movement warning that corporate free trade agreements, and the model of global commerce they accelerated, were leading to a level of human dispossession and environmental destruction that would rapidly be untenable. It was a multigenerational movement that spanned dozens of countries and sectors, bringing together nonprofit organizations, radical anarchists, Indigenous communities, churches, trade unions, and more. It was messy, ideologically inchoate, imperfect—but it was also large and, for a time, powerful enough to clock some major wins.