Will Progressives Vote for Trade Liberalization?

At the G20 meeting in Buenos Aires today, the renegotiated NAFTA — in the U.S., the new agreement is referred to as the United States — Mexico — Canada Agreement, or USMCA — was signed by the three parties. The big question now is, what will Congress think of the agreement as it decides whether to ratify it? One aspect of this question is, what will the Democrats who now control the House think of it? And to get even more specific, I’m very curious to see what progressives think of it. While she is in the Senate rather than the House, Senator Elizabeth Warren may be a good indicator of what many progressives think. Yesterday, Senator Warren gave a speech at American University in which she set out “her vision for a progressive foreign policy that works for all Americans.” She covered a lot of ground, and I won’t go through all of it, but here is a key bit on trade policy:

By the time the 2008 global financial crash came around, it only confirmed what millions of Americans already knew: the system didn’t work for working people — and it wasn’t really intended to.


And it’s still not working. Tomorrow, the Trump Administration will likely sign a renegotiated NAFTA deal. 


There’s no question we need to renegotiate NAFTA. The federal government has certified that NAFTA has already cost us nearly a million good American jobs — and big companies continue to use NAFTA to outsource jobs to Mexico to this day.


But as it’s currently written, Trump’s deal won’t stop the serious and ongoing harm NAFTA causes for American workers. It won’t stop outsourcing, it won’t raise wages, and it won’t create jobs. It’s NAFTA 2.0.


For example, NAFTA 2.0 has better labor standards on paper but it doesn’t give American workers enough tools to enforce those standards. Without swift and certain enforcement of these new labor standards, big corporations will continue outsourcing jobs to Mexico to so they can pay workers less.


NAFTA 2.0 is also stuffed with handouts that will let big drug companies lock in the high prices they charge for many drugs. The new rules will make it harder to bring down drug prices for seniors and anyone else who needs access to life‐​saving medicine.


And NAFTA 2.0 does little to reduce pollution or combat the dangers of climate change — giving American companies one more reason to close their factories here and move to Mexico where the environmental standards are lower. That’s bad for the earth and bad for American workers.


For these reasons, I oppose NAFTA 2.0, and will vote against it in the Senate unless President Trump reopens the agreement and produces a better deal for America’s working families.


…


How can we make the system fair for working Americans? Lots of ways.

• We can start by ensuring that workers are meaningfully represented at the negotiating table and build trade agreements that strengthen labor standards worldwide.
• We can make every trade promise equally enforceable, both those terms that help corporations and those that help workers.
• We can curtail the power of multinational monopolies through serious antitrust enforcement.
• We can work with our international partners to crack down on tax havens. 

Those four changes would fundamentally alter every trade negotiation. 

I disagree with most of her views on the impact of NAFTA, but putting that aside, what I’m curious about here is what it would take to get her to support the new NAFTA. I’ve read through her remarks a couple times now, and I still can’t figure out precisely what changes she wants and expects in NAFTA 2.0 in order to vote for it. First of all, the tax haven and monopoly issues are not likely to be addressed seriously through a trade agreement anytime soon, so we can ignore that part. On the other hand, the labor protections and worker issues are already in the new NAFTA, and the Trump administration pushed for changes in this area that gave labor groups far more than President Obama’s Trans Pacific Partnership did. So what is Senator Warren’s goal with these statements? Is she laying the groundwork for a “no” vote on the agreement, regardless of any additions to the agreement the Trump administration might accept? Or are there changes on labor rights that would satisfy her and get her to vote in favor?


My instinct is that she will not vote for any trade agreement negotiated by Trump, but we’ll see. Perhaps there is more potential with the younger progressives in Congress who are not as wedded to the economic nationalist views of senior Democrats. Has anyone asked Alexandria Ocasio‐​Cortez what she thinks of trade liberalization and whether there is a trade agreement she could support? I’m curious whether she and other young progressives who are open to immigration could also be open to trade. I’ve seen her sound skeptical about trade deals on Twitter, but now she will be governing rather than campaigning, and that could make her think more deeply about whether blocking trade with people in other contries is really a good policy.