Some Elements of a Progressive International Trade Policy

The 90-day pause on President Donald Trump’s “reciprocal tariffs” is set to expire on July 9 (today). The tariffs that Trump threatens to establish, ranging from 10% to 50% on imports into the United States from up to 180 countries, would come at a great cost to people in the United States and elsewhere. They would seriously disrupt international commerce and, in turn, the functioning of the U.S. economy.

 Yet, the so-called “free trade” that has been imposed by the neoliberal policies of the last several decades also placed great costs on people in the United States and elsewhere. Neoliberalism hollowed out much of the U.S. economy and has been a major cause of rising economic inequality. This damage created the opening for the dramatic policy changes that Trump is implementing. 

There are other ways to organize U.S. international trade. The neoliberal free trade of recent decades and the trade restrictions of Trumpian tariffs are not the only options.

A progressive trade policy, like any reasonable trade policy, should start with the recognition that there are real gains that can be obtained, and should be preserved, from international commerce. Some of these gains are economic—there are goods and services that can be produced more effectively in some places than in others due to differences, for example, in natural resources and in the historically developed skills and specializations in different places. There are also great cultural, culinary, and scientific gains that can be obtained by international connectedness.

However, many progressives, and others, see trade as destroying jobs. For example, when more and more cars and car parts are imported from other countries, jobs are lost in the auto industry. But this does not mean that a progressive trade policy should throw up tariffs to protect those jobs. There is nothing intrinsically more valuable about those jobs than many other jobs. It is the workers, not the jobs, that need protecting. Just like workers who lose their jobs because of automation or because their bosses made stupid mistakes, workers who lose their jobs to foreign competition—which is not the workers’ fault—should be protected.

Because it is workers, not jobs, that should be protected, it becomes clear that a progressive trade policy depends on a progressive domestic policy. For example, a national, single-payer health care program (such as Medicare for All), would ensure that workers who lost their jobs for whatever reason would not lose their health care. Similarly, higher education and skills training should be free, so that for workers who lost their jobs, their children would not lose educational and training opportunities, and the workers themselves could be readily trained for other jobs. 

Further, those other jobs need to have reasonable wages, which requires a progressive domestic policy of generating higher wages and reducing overall inequality. A good place to start would be with pushing the minimum wage up and up. Also, workers need to eat while they are getting retrained, which means a progressive trade policy would provide income during the retraining period. 

Still, there could be issues of markets being flooded with products produced abroad with very, very low wage labor. There are times, then, when restrictions on imports might be reasonable. The extreme cases would be when products are produced by prisoners, slaves, or children. Then there are situations where workers do not have the right to organize to form independent unions. Similarly, when goods are produced abroad in environmentally destructive ways, restrictions on importing those goods could be reasonable.

But, again, the issue of domestic policy arises: How can we defend, through trade barriers, the rights of workers elsewhere when many workers in this country have their rights to organize greatly restricted? Or when child labor is on the rise here? How can we demand that other countries follow good environmental policies when our own are so insufficient?