 Good afternoon. Welcome to the Economic Policy Institute, and thank you for joining us today for this important conversation. I am Thea Lee, president of the Economic Policy Institute. I'd like to thank our partner, the Keo School of Global Affairs at Notre Dame University, for cosponsoring this event with us. And you'll hear a little bit more in a minute. But we are delighted to have a truly exceptional panel of experts and activists for today's panel. We have invited Tamara Kay, who will talk about her research on the evolving activism around trade policy since the battle over NAFTA, including her new book, Trade Battles, which is for sale outside. And she's been studying activism around trade policy since the early 1990s. And in fact, Tamara interviewed me when I was at the AFL-CIO to talk about the NAFTA battle many, many years ago, when we were both babies. And when I came to Washington in 1990, my first big job after grad school was as the trade economist here at EPI. And one of my early assignments was the North American Free Trade Agreement. So I've been working on this issue for more than 25 years. And so a lot of the work that Tamara has done really resonates with me in terms of the building of the global, the multinational, multi-sectoral coalitions of activists around these issues and around demanding a different and a better kind of trade policy. And this is, I think, an interesting and a perilous moment for trade policy. A lot of the normal party lines have broken down around who supports what. But I think it's also a moment of opportunity for progressive activists to define a new direction for trade policy going forward that is pro-worker, pro-consumer, pro-environment, but is also built on global solidarity. And that is our challenge in this particular moment. So we're thrilled to have the other panelists with us today, Guy Mollinou from Heart Research Associates, who has done polling on this issue for many, many years and has written extensively on it. Scott Paul, who leads the Alliance for American Manufacturing, who used to be a colleague of mine at the AFL-CIO and also on the Hill working with Dave Bonnier. And Scott has done some extraordinary work at Alliance for American Manufacturing, bringing together both business and labor interests to talk about a different kind of trade policy going forward. And finally, also my old colleague, Kathy Feingold, who leads the International Department at the AFL-CIO, and has worked with unions and activists all over the world in terms of building a different kind of policy. And now I'd like to invite Maura Pallicelli to say a few more words about the Keo School and our lead speaker. Thank you, Maura. Good afternoon, my name is Maura Pallicelli. I'm the executive director of the Keo School of Global Affairs Washington DC office. And on behalf of Dean Appleby from the Keo School of Global Affairs, I'm very pleased to see you all today. And we're honored to be collaborating with the Economic Policy Institute in sponsoring this event. The Keo School is a brand new school at Notre Dame, the first school in 100 years to be launched at the university. And we have offices here in Washington and are pleased to be engaging in such an important issue as trade policy as we begin to work on various global policy issues here in Washington. So I have the honor of introducing my colleague, Professor K, Tamara K. She's a sociologist and associate professor at the Keo School. Her research and teaching focuses on the political and legal implications of economic integration, transnationalism, and global governance for labor, environmental movements, NGOs, and policy formation. She earned her PhD at the University of California Berkeley and spent two years as a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for US Mexican Studies at the University of California San Diego. And she began her academic career at Harvard where she was associate professor of sociology and co-director of the Transnational Studies Initiative. Professor Kay has written two books that each take an in-depth look at the North American Free Trade Agreement and the social movement mobilization around it. She will be highlighting this research, sharing highlights from it that can inform today's trade battle. So please join me in welcoming Professor Kay. I am so excited, so excited to be talking about NAFTA. You know you're a trade geek when you wake up at 4 o'clock in the morning to download the new US Canada Mexico Agreement, right? Can't even get the acronym right. But thank you all for being here. Oh, we're trying to get this loaded. So can everyone hear me? So thank you all for being here. And thank you to my colleagues at the Keo School at my new home at the University of Notre Dame for organizing this along with her wonderful colleagues at the EPI. I really do appreciate this. And I'm very excited to talk about this today. So my work focuses on the impact of globalization and regional economic integration on social movements. And the reverse, the effects of social movement mobilization on state economic policy. And the lens through which I examine this is trade. I've written these two books and many academic articles on it. But I study trade not from an economics perspective, but I study the politics of trade. And each of my projects tackled central questions. I actually like to think of them as puzzles about movement's response to globalization. So for my first book, Naft and the Politics of Labor Transnationalism, the question was how did this neoliberal free trade agreement actually stimulate cross-border relationships and solidarity among not all but key US-Canadian and Mexican unions? And that was a really important question. And it was an unexpected outcome because a lot of pundits and scholars actually thought that NAFTA would intensify racism and animosity among US-Canadian and Mexican unions. Does everyone remember Ross Pro's giant sucking sound? That the Mexicans would steal US jobs. And so I went through a process of investigating what actually happened because the outcome was very different from what was expected. And so this process involved over 140 in-depth interviews with labor activists, lawyers, all kinds of government officials in the US, Canada, and Mexico, archival research, as you can see from the slide. And I found that quite unexpectedly by creating this new transnational legal arena, it actually started to create relationships among unions that began when they started fighting against NAFTA and were really solidified when they started using actually NAFTA's labor side agreement. And so NAFTA's labor side agreement actually, if you were a Mexican worker in a factory in Mexico and there were health and safety violations, for example, you couldn't file the labor rights violation in Mexico. It said you had to file them in the US or Canada or both. And so I actually interviewed workers in Mexico, for example, who the company turned off the safety equipment and there was a certain number of amputations every month. And this was actually created to thwart solidarity, but it had the unanticipated consequence of actually stimulating transnational relationships because it was nearly impossible for Mexican unions to file these labor rights complaints from Mexico without the support of US and Canadian unions. And so this actually stimulated relationships. And it wasn't actually created to do this. Negotiators actually constructed this to make it more difficult, but it backfired. And the implication of this is that it matters how free trade agreements are built and constructed. And even free trade agreements with weak enforcement mechanisms and we can all agree that NAFTA's labor-side agreement has very weak enforcement mechanisms and not very good policy outcomes, even these kinds of trade agreements can actually have strong social movement outcomes. So for my second book, I did a deeper dive in the US story of the NAFTA fight and how movements tried to influence it. And the first question was, how did trade become politicized in the US? In the first place, how did this trade agreement, NAFTA, generate so much public outrage and create a movement to oppose it? And second, how did activists succeed in getting the governments to actually add environmental and labor protections, even though they were weak, given the weakness of these activists in the trade policy arena? And these are compelling questions actually because surprisingly in the decades prior to 1993, international trade policy was a non-issue politically, right? People didn't talk about it, the dinner table, organizations, NGOs weren't organizing and mobilizing around it. And it was really considered something that economists and policy wonks would deal with. So for this project, I added another 53 in-depth interviews and a lot of archival research. And I found first that NAFTA generated so much outrage because it blurred the boundaries between domestic and international policies in potentially new and devastating ways for labor, the environment, consumers, farmers, among many others. So as many of you probably know, prior to NAFTA, trade was primarily about tariffs. But NAFTA added a slew of provisions that allowed corporations to undermine domestic laws meant to protect workers and consumers and the environment in ways that could not be checked by domestic courts in any of the three countries. So when we say neoliberal globalization, this refers to this shift to really a corporate-led trade policy. An example of this is California passed a law to outlaw a cancer causing additive to gasoline and the Canadian company that produced that additive sued the US government for lowering its profits under NAFTA's Chapter 11. Second, I found that activists were able to influence trade policy during NAFTA's negotiation despite their relative weakness in the trade policy arena and despite efforts by the state to thwart their participation by creating a new set of both institutionalized insider strategies and disruptive grassroots outsider strategies. And what did this mean on the ground? It basically meant intense lobbying in D.C. and home districts by multiple coalition members. So going to lobby environmentalists with labor folks, consumer groups together. And they did this, combined this with mobilization and protest at key moments during the NAFTA battle. And the goal of this was to leverage public hostility to NAFTA, to influence the legislators and thereby threaten NAFTA's passage. And when these were deployed together, these strategies allowed activists not only to successfully challenge trade elite's ideological commitment to trade liberalization but also to influence NAFTA itself by forcing the government to link labor environmental and consumer rights to trade and to include labor and environmental protections, however weak, into the agreement. So if you remember back the USTR at the time, Carla Hill said prior to the negotiation starting, there will be no labor and environmental linkages to this free trade agreement. And that's when the battle began. And we ended up with a trade agreement that had not only were they linked but there were actually now protections of some kind. And we see today now what the activism around is getting those to be in the body of the agreement, not as side agreements. So this is actually really important. So the key questions we're going to tackle today are the lessons from NAFTA. And how can this trade agreement, 25 years old, I'll tell you a little secret, prior to Trump's election, it was actually quite difficult for me to get this book published because publishers said, who cares about NAFTA? It's old, it's not relevant anymore. And then the election happened and everybody wanted my book. So how can this 25-year-old trade agreement and the battle around it, what can it teach us about current activism around the USMCA and future trade agreements? Basically, what are the core lessons from NAFTA? We should be attentive to now. So talk about those in turn but put them up for you to think about. So first, NAFTA shows that broad transnational coalitions matter. They increase constituencies, they coalesce rights issues. So what emerged from this battle over NAFTA was the linkage of a labor environmental rights frame that benefited both sides. They bring folks more likely to expand the scope and positions that are offered. So we get folks during NAFTA battle who pushed against racist responses to NAFTA. We got folks who pushed for it to be more internationalist, more inclusive, and this strengthened the coalition. It created relationships that led to new struggles. I actually argue in the first book that relationships built with progressive Mexican unions was one of the many factors that pushed unions in the United States to change their position on immigration and start fighting with and for Mexican immigrant workers. And coalitions in various countries had key successes. They contributed to the demise of the free trade agreement of the Americas, the WTO round, Doha round, and we could argue the TPP. So strong coalition around the USMCA battle will also be important. Second, NAFTA shows that these insider-outsider strategies matter. These coalitions need all the tools in the toolkit to be effective, and they need to be deployed at the right moments. Timing is key. Also, NAFTA shows that the structure of trade agreements matters, meaning how they are built and leveraged. As I mentioned in the beginning, they can be built in ways to thwart movement building or to stimulate it. So as I said, NAFTA was constructed in a way the side agreement that had this unanticipated effect of helping build solidarity among unions. But its weak enforcement mechanisms meant that although they came to the table, they did not stay, right? So it started off, they started using this adjudicatory mechanism, filing complaints together, and there was basically no redress and then they stopped using it. And when they stopped using it, it was harder to actually build solid campaigns because there was no solid concrete mechanism around which to engage. So I argue that having some kind of mechanism to engage is really important for transnational movement building. Also, free trade agreements can create new opportunities for activists. So an annex on worker representation in collective bargaining in Mexico was attached to the USMCA's new labor chapter. That's what I was downloading at four o'clock in the morning. It ties the agreement's entry into force to Mexico passing legislation to improve labor rights for Mexican workers. Now the US media has framed this as the US forcing Mexico to reform, but actually it was progressive Mexican activists and lawyers who helped write the annex and they have been pushing this reform for decades. What's interesting though is that the USMCA creates pressure on the Mexican government for their forms and the election of López Obrador, the new president of Mexico, his election, provides the opportunity and leverage to make it happen. Why? Many of the activists who pushed for this for 30 years are now in his administration. One is the new secretary of labor. Framing. NAFTA shows that framing matters. Activists figured out how to frame issues around trade agreements so that they resonated with the public. Focus groups were used in the years after NAFTA to determine what messages would resonate. And so these focus groups showed that people really understood the problems with the investor state dispute mechanisms. Even Paul Krugman and Joe Stieglitz came out against the TPP while they had previously supported NAFTA and their reasoning had to do with these ISDS mechanisms. And ISDS, for the most part, is now out of the USMCA. Framing also matters because there are unintended economic and political consequences of unchecked neoliberal globalization. When we ignore the inequalities trade agreements create and the plight of workers on its front lines, it paves the way for events like Brexit and the election of an anti-free trade US president who rooted his opposition to trade in economic nationalism, xenophobia, and then married it to a virulent racism in his domestic immigration policies. So Trump addressed those workers in ways that resonated. And so it's important for the coalition to be out front on the message because that message can become co-opted. Democratic practices. I think this is one of the keys of this new book. NAFTA teaches us lessons about economic, about democratic erosion. For 25 years, trade has been a proxy for the decay of democratic institutions and practices and an epicenter of the battles to preserve them. Starting with NAFTA, governments tried to thwart democratic practices around trade by limiting transparency access and participation for citizens. In effect, the governments of North America have severed economic policy from democratic intervention. And I argue in the book that when governments close citizens access to state institutions by limiting participation and transparency, they also weaken and undermine democracy. It was at moments during NAFTA negotiations when activists had information and access, often through leak documents, that they had the most leverage to shape policy and to push back. My final point, my final point, is that NAFTA shows that globalization is not inherently positive or negative. The rules governing globalization determine who benefits and who is harmed by it. Fair trade activists, remember, they actually weren't anti-trade, they were actually for fair trade. They realized this early on, they understood that NAFTA would lay the foundation for the rules governing the global economy that would ultimately affect workers, migrants, farmers, indigenous people, the environment, access to land, water, medicine, and even cultural production. It was to protect these collective goods and collective rights, around which they built their struggle against NAFTA. And although they did not succeed in killing NAFTA, they shifted the framing of the trade debate, expanded the constituencies who demanded space in the trade policy arena, and ensured that social policy concerns were legitimized and incorporated into NAFTA and future trade agreements. And I think this is significant because as my colleague, Jamie McCallum, eloquently argues, victory is not as simple as winning. It is about building the power to fight in the first place. So those are my comments. And to kick off the panel discussion, I wanna pose two questions. First, what opportunities and challenges does this current moment with its unique players and distinct trade battles offer various civil society groups concerned about the impact of globalization? And second, what opportunities does it present for promoting healthy democratic systems involved in executing global policy? In answering both questions, we wanna examine how trade plays out in the midterm elections, and I leave it to my fellow participants to opine on that given their expertise in the political arena. Good afternoon. I just wanna make three short points about the public opinion environment regarding trade and in the current political context. The first is that we are in a period, sort of a little counter-intuitively, of broadly speaking rising public support for trade and free trade. Just as one example, this is a question that the Pew Research Organization has been asking for a few years, asking whether broadly speaking, people believe that free trade agreements between the US and other countries has generally been a good thing or a bad thing for the country. And you can see that while the country was sort of divided on that starting in 2011, the general trend with one notable exception has been toward rising sense that free trade is a good thing for the country rather than a bad thing. During the course of the 2016 election, interestingly, the gap narrowed quite a bit as a function of then candidate Donald Trump being so critical of trade agreements at that time. What's interesting is to look sort of underneath this, though, and look at how Democrats and Republican political views have evolved over that same timeframe. On the left are Republicans who up through 2015 had almost the exact same view of trade as Democrats did. But then suddenly in the course of one year, shift dramatically, I think trade's a bad thing. And so Republicans moved there. What's interesting now is they are, Republicans are moving back down, perhaps feeling a little conflicted that is believing that old trade agreements were bad, but whatever their President Trump is doing is making things better in some way. And so probably Republicans are a little unsure how to answer this question. Democrats, though, have been becoming steadily more pro-free trade over this entire period, to the point now where it's an overwhelming margin, six, seven, to 19. And on NAFTA, for example, we see a very sharp partisan gap with Democrats overwhelmingly positive in their view of NAFTA now, whereas Republicans, at least until recently, have been quite negative. There's been no polling to show how Republicans or the public are reacting to the new US-Mexico-Canada agreement. But at least through last year, that was the case. So you have Republicans kind of in flux here, having moved sharply anti-trade, but perhaps moving back now, if they feel that the trade agreements the country has have been blessed by President Trump. Democrats very strongly pro-trade, I think reflecting not only the influence of President Obama, but probably also reacting now against Trump as sort of anti-trade rhetoric is linked to sort of xenophobia, anti-immigrant sentiment, other things that Democrats don't like. You can see a very strong kind of almost pro-trade consensus building on the Democratic side that's probably unlikely to change anytime soon. Second point I want to make is that, at least thus far, the Trump administration's approach and trade recently has not been a political success. Here's a sample question where we asked in the survey that my firm does for NBC News and the Wall Street Journal, asking people how they'd react to a candidate who favors imposing tariffs to respond to trade practices of other countries. And you can see that it's essentially an even split between being more likely or less likely to vote for that kind of candidate overall. But both Democrats and independent voters are actually move away from a candidate who expresses support for tariffs. It's really only Republicans who express any real enthusiasm for that approach. And poll questions that specifically ask about the Trump administration's tariffs and trade policies in recent times have gotten very negative reactions from the general public. The president's approval rating on handling trade, the last time it was measured, was only 38%. In the same poll, his approval on handling the economy broadly was 50%. So his trade approach is getting very negative marks. By 50 to 39%, voters say that the president's trade policies have been bad rather than good for the American economy, which is really pretty remarkable given how upbeat voters are about the state of the economy right now. And by two to one, 53 to 26%, they say that Trump's tariff policy specifically is more likely to hurt than help average Americans. So whether it's question format specifically about the administration and their policies or broadly, no sign that at least that the sort of approach of threatening or imposing tariffs has been at all popular with the country. They say we don't know yet whether the public, what kind of judgment they have formed about the new trade agreement, but at least up till then no sign that the administration's approach has been popular outside of the Republican electorate. And the last point I wanna make is that I think that it's important to recognize that when voters think about the problem of jobs in this country and they still, many of them still think we do have not enough good paying jobs, they don't see it fundamentally as a problem of bad trade deals. That's the result of the right. They really see this as a problem of outsourcing and corporate greed. So the discussion that we have here in Washington often is about the trade agreements, but for the public, their starting point really is the problem being US corporations taking jobs that have been in this country and sending them to other countries. And trade deals obviously can provide a context for that, but what they focus on is, in other words, they're not thinking about the job problem as a problem of the US versus other countries and other countries somehow getting the better of us or taking advantage of us, much more it's about large corporations moving jobs to other places to take advantage of low wages or weaker environmental protections or other things that make it attractive to outsource. And that's their real starting point. And so I think to engage the broad public, you need to sort of deal with this sort of framework that the public brings to the debate, which is about fundamentally a problem of outsourcing and the decisions of corporations to leave. One policy idea that is extremely popular with the public on that is the idea of ending tax policies that in any way reward or encourage companies to outsource or send jobs overseas. I've done lots of polling on tax policies and other economic policies and consistently that is one of the most popular policies that you can ask the American public about. Interestingly, the President Trump tapped into that other framework, the sort of the outsourcing, much more effectively, very early in his presidency when he started pressuring companies like Carrier and so on to keep jobs in the US. That was very popular actually, whereas this whole move toward tariffs has been very unpopular, that was generally well regarded by the, and obviously there's a lot of debate about how successful any of those efforts were by the President, but at least as a matter of optics and politics it was very, very popular. The idea of trying to put pressure on companies to keep jobs here or to invest more at home is a popular, a very popular approach, but one that we hear less of these days. For progressives, I think we, progressives need to also, if they want to sort of build broad public support on these issues, understand that starting point of that concern about outsourcing and to explain as was done successfully with activists in the NAFTA campaign, the broader public, to have them see the link between trade agreements and the decisions of companies to stay or leave the country. That's it. It disappeared. Yeah, excellent. Powerpoint, the perpetual curse with or without NAFTA. So, it is, we'll blame NAFTA, right? So, thank you, Thea. And I appreciated the topic today and also C-SPAN's coverage because I realized looking back at C-SPAN stuff that C-SPAN covered an internal meeting of the Citizens Trade Campaign in 1993 as we were talking about a strategy to build this transnational coalition and also try to defeat NAFTA. And here we are 25 years later having an older conversation in the 21st century. I wanted to, I think, build on some of what Guy said and then answer Tamara's questions. A lot of the polling that you see on trade is very top level stuff and most people, as we know, tune into the news or the president's Twitter feed only occasionally and that's the beginning and the end of what they know about the topic unlike most people in this room who do this for a living. And so, we wanted to ask some more granular questions and I wanted to provide these as kind of framing of the debate that we're about to head into. So, Mark Melman and Bill McIntyre for a bipartisan team have done polling for us for about eight years. They put a poll in the field last month and so we're able to draw a few conclusions from that although it opens a number of other questions and Guy posed some of these as well. And just to reiterate the fact that people's views on this are basically informed about how they feel about a political figure or about what they hear a political figure say. I think there's no more proof than this is that people hear Donald Trump talking about these issues a lot about creating manufacturing jobs or creating jobs. And so, that kind of message repetition is something that's unique to the president because he has a national platform, he swallows all the news. Debates like the one that we're having today don't tend to rise to that level and so therefore as a result a lot of his supporters think he's doing a great job of this and even people who don't agree with him think that he's talking about this because he is talking about this. On the other hand, people think Congress across the board is doing a lousy job because they don't hear that and in fact the president crowds out a lot of that news. So, and this is a China question per se but you can use it somewhat as a proxy and that is trying to disaggregate a little bit this issue from a political figure. If you ask people kind of generically, are you willing to get tough on countries who cheat on international trade or free trade is a goal but in the real world we cannot get there unless we are also willing to use tough measures at the same time. There is strong agreement with that across almost every demographic including Democratic voters and voters who view the president unfavorably. I would add that I'm sure our intrepid social media team will have a link to all of this up but it's available on our website as well because I know that some of these numbers are kind of hard to read but there is near, I don't call it universal support but there's strong support for this idea of having a tougher trade policy. And then when you put the question directly to them are voters willing to take strong actions against unfair trade practices or are they afraid of them because of retaliatory tariffs on and we name specific products like soybeans, cars and what have you, if you put that question there is even a majority for yes I'm willing to take some actions and about the only exception to that is folks who identify themselves as Democrats or who view Trump unfavorably. But while Guy is right, I don't think anybody's gonna necessarily win an election based on this, there's also the public is willing to at least grant this administration a little bit of leeway as they're pursuing some of these approaches and if you take it out of the context of the president's agenda in particular there's a lot of underlying support for this idea of fair trade or tougher measures on trade policy. When you ask a specific question and no one else has asked the question like this about the tariffs that the president specifically put on China which is probably the most newsy thing that folks would be aware of in the trade arena right now. Again, it's kind of a mumbo jumbo when you look at this but if you combine the number of voters that are willing to support the tariffs or at least give them more time it's a strong majority versus those who want to end them right away and who say this is a terrible mistake and again even among Democratic ID voters there's a slim majority who say either keep the tariffs or give them more time versus those that would say end them right now. And so it's not necessarily I would argue that a lot of the top level questions on trade I think are largely cast by how people feel about the president and his policies and it's a proxy for that but if you dig into it there's a lot of public support for the types of changes that we want to see and this gets me to my last slide here which is very relevant to the NAFTA conversation and that's what do people think is an important outcome of trade agreements and raising wages is the records the strongest major that's a specific kind of labor goal as well to have raising wages promoting strong foreign policy alliances again something that is transnational in nature but also reducing the trade deficit increasing the amount of American-made content in automobiles reducing barriers so that more American-made goals are sold in foreign markets there's generally a lot of broad support conceptually for a lot of these ideas as they play out and so I think public opinion will probably crystallize as we get more into the debate and as these lines are drawn but there's a lot of support for a reform trade policy along the lines of what many Democrats and the labor movement have proposed for a long time and won that President Trump in some way says he's for well as Tamara notes infusing it with a lot of other dog whistles that certainly complicate things as well and so a couple of the answer to the kind of the framing questions that she provided I think that we're gonna be at an interesting time and just as I think everyone can agree that this NAFTA 25 years ago was an incredible experiment it was the first large merger of a developing and a developed economy without a safety net keep in mind the EU had safety net components to it and it was built in the context where we had a fair amount of economic strength Bill Clinton had a fair amount of economic support and all of this but you also had kind of this figure who was a demagogue out there Ross Perot saying all sorts of bad things about it along with a lot of labor leaders it was certainly complicated to build these transnational alliances but I think that that was one of the real strengths through the outcomes of this because the economic performance wasn't and as was just pointed out about the outsourcing I mean there's still this issue of job migration today in Indiana with Carrier and Rexnerd moving operations to Mexico so this is something that is still fresh in many people's mind it's not some distant notion of something that may have happened 25 years ago so the USMCA in a similar way is going to also be a grand experiment and it is can you roll back kind of embedded practices of corporations and governmental attitudes towards free markets that have been locked into place for 25 years and that's the question I think in a lot of ways that the USMCA is going to pose with this investor estate rollback how real can it be? This idea of trying to raise wages through an agreement how real will this be? And I think there's a lot of exciting possibilities here but these are unanswered questions because we tried the exact opposite of this 25 years ago and we saw what the outcome was which was something that was completely inadequate for the working people of Canada, Mexico and the United States and something that served to weaken rather than strengthen the middle class in all three countries and I think that one of the overriding challenges for progressives for the labor movement for Democrats is to remind folks that they were here with this issue long before President Trump ever arrived there and even though he may share some of the goals fairness for whom is a very important point and it's about fairness for working people in the middle class in all three countries as opposed to something that's much more nationalist and Trumpian and again, we're kind of entering an experimental phase here because we haven't seen a debate like this in modern trade politics in the United States and I for one am looking forward to it. Thanks. Thanks so much Scott and thanks to the panelists and thank you so much to Tamara for actually writing a book about transnational alliances. I see lots of my colleagues here who have been in those fights and we rarely have time to take a pause and reflect. So thank you so much for all the work that you're doing. So I wanna talk about the transnational partnerships that we have been building. I've been doing this for about 18 years and working with Thea and others here. So a few reflections about this current moment. First of all, Tamara, you're completely right when you say that the current moment is built upon years and years of relationship building. This type of work, these types of alliances take a lot of work and it is not always that easy. And so I would say that it's a relationship building that is not only about trade. Right before Peña Nieto and Obama met, we sent a letter highlighting human rights abuses because that was the concern in Mexico at the time. So it's a broader agenda just beyond trade. It's one that we're constantly building and it takes a lot of work. And I think the 2005 defeat of the FTA really sort of inspired the movement because it had been a long slog and we really proved with that alliance the hemispheric social alliance that when we come together and it's a broad based inclusive alliance, we really can have an impact. So we're building upon work that we've been doing. I would say that the recent tri-national work that we've been doing actually goes beyond complaints in the labor chapter of NAFTA. And I think a lot of people focus on that aspect. And yes, we have had lots of them. Lots of them that are actually still pending the one with the Esme, the electrical workers. Few people probably know that in 2018 we submitted another one regarding the labor law reform process that we saw is undermining NAFTA. And that was actually rejected by the administration. And so one piece of the work that we have been doing is around the labor chapters, but I really want to say it goes beyond. And a few examples is that in the past years I would say the tri-national movement has really focused on the issue of protection contracts. And protection contracts are the contracts that are the dominant model. They're collective bargaining agreements that are really the employer signs off on them or they get a bribe from a company that's coming into Mexico. And that really became the focus of the work of the union movement and our allies to say that until you address that system you cannot shift the economic model. You cannot have workers bargaining to improve their wages as productivity is going up. You cannot improve working conditions. So protection contracts really became the focus of a lot of the tri-national work. I would also say a really interesting piece of the tri-national work is our trade union leader from the Mineros who was exiled in Canada. Napoleon Gomez was exiled in Canada for critiquing a big mining company. His life was threatened. He was on Interpol. And that became a tri-national focus to get Napoleon back to Mexico. Now some people might say, okay, what implication could that possibly have right now? Well, in a interesting shift in the politics of Mexico he was unable to go back because of his own safety and being on Interpol's list and he went into alliance with the Morena political party and when Alamo won the presidency he became a senator. And we have seen in just the first few months the impact and I would just say give a shout out to the steel workers that are here because that really was work you did for years and years and led us all in that work. So thank you. So that alliance has led to in these first few months of the new Congress. So for people that are not watching closely in Mexican politics we have a new Congress before the president actually takes position on December 1st. And so the new Congress in just a few months, Napoleon Gomez as a senator and as the chair of the Labor Commission has ratified the International Labor Organization Freedom of Association Convention. Again, important step for Mexico. And he will be the key person on that labor commission to shepherd through the labor law reform which we're hearing about. So really important, that's alliance building. I have to say when I sat in front of people at the state department with steel workers and others and Canadian colleagues talking about getting Napoleon Gomez off of the Interpol list when we had him come to the AFL-CIO Executive Council Convention people kind of rolled their eyes. Like, you know, this is never gonna happen. Well, this is a testament to what happens when you're dogged and when tri-national alliances can go on for a very long time and they're built on trust. So a real impact in this current moment. Our transnational work also recognizes that we have had to struggle to have a common narrative together. And I think that gets at what people have talked about that instead of this us against them they're taking our job narrative. I think during this NAFTA debate you have seen for the first time solidly people recognizing that if we do not address protection contracts, if we do not address the fact that only 1% of workers in Mexico have an independent union, the rest are in these protection contracts unions, then we cannot make a change. It will always be imbalanced. You cannot shift that imbalance. And I think this time, you know, again, building off of the relationships we had over these years, we really put this issue of Mexican wages, Mexican working conditions and protection contracts front and center. We're all in this together. If you don't fix what is happening on the other side of the border, you don't fix what's happening here and in Canada. And we have a shared analysis of the fact that the attacks happening on unions here, the protection contract system in Mexico is a common struggle that we have together. And so we've been building a shared economic analysis. We also have a shared economic analysis around the fact that it is a common economic model that leads to neoliberal trade policies and anti-immigrant policies. One way that we're addressing that together is we are working to shape the global compact on migration. Again, another way that this alliance is coming together around new issues, not just labor chapter issues. We recognize what happens with trade also needs to be seen as what happens with migrants. Is it going to be a corporate dominated model that gets negotiated by governments at the United Nations, or will it be through a rights framework that gives migrant workers the protections that they need? So another really important example. On the question of democracy, I would say that this is one that is still a challenge. Democracy and transparency is what brought us to the street in the trade battles from Seattle to here in Washington to all the FTA and Miami battles. And to this day, the three countries have very different approaches to democratic structures and the trade negotiations. In the US, we have the Labor Advisory Committee that brings together union leaders who can look at text, although we do often get the text through other ways because it takes so long to get the text. That is one place where labor gets to consult. In Mexico, there is no consultation process or body. So the Mexican workers just today, the Mexican unions still aren't clear about what the text says. They don't have the text in Spanish. They haven't had access to the negotiators. A huge problem. In Canada, there is no lack equivalent. So again, a huge problem. So I would say that we have a huge challenge as we're moving forward with our transnational partnership and alliances. I think at this point, we need to make sure that the labor movement continues to reach out to our allies, continues to strengthen the partnerships that we have. And just as I end, and I was coming over here today, we are again crafting a new narrative together on our position towards this new draft agreement, which will be coming out shortly with the Canadian and the Mexican unions. Again, trying to show that going forward, we have a similar critique of the model. We see some good things, possibilities, opportunities like labor law reform process in Mexico, but we have a long way to go together. Thank you. Well, thank you to all the panelists for really extraordinarily rich and deep comments. And I want to maybe do one lightning round and then we will open it up to questions from the audience. But I wanted to just say a couple of quick things. One is that I think, you know, Kathy raised these connections between the international solidarity that she talked about and the trade babbles and now the immigration issues as well. And I think that actually underscores the disconnect that we have right now because Donald Trump brings to this debate the opposite of global solidarity. He brings a very kind of almost a personal hostile nationalism that is tainted with racism and xenophobia. And so trying to sort of bridge back into that where we have this situation where Donald Trump is raising the issues that, as Guy said, have been neglected by many politicians, both Democratic and Republican politicians for decades, that they haven't confronted, you know, the corporate malfeasance, the rigged rules, the ways in which our trade agreements are about outsourcing. And I think, you know, that's one thing about Guy's polling results. The contrast between these two questions is it bad trade agreements or is it outsourcing? I think the argument we've been making in the global justice world is that the reason our trade agreements are bad is that they are designed to facilitate and lead to more outsourcing. And so, you know, in some ways, that is the same thing. And I think that actually also brings up something. Some of you may have noticed there's some contrast between the polling that Scott talked about and that Guy talked about. And for those of us who have been in this business for 25 years, the polling on trade is notoriously malleable. That people go into the same group of people and ask them the same question, but in somewhat different ways. And the results are often very different because people, I think, are struggling with this issue. That nobody's against trade or for trade. People want trade policy that will create good jobs and will preserve our democratic decision-making, but we aren't always presented with that. And the debate around trade, I think, is remarkably dishonest. So all that said, I wanted to just ask the panelists to do sort of lightning round, like a minute or two on each one because I do want to get to your questions about can we address the underlying concerns that Americans have and people all over the world have around failed trade policy without accepting the Trump frame, which is anti-worker and tainted with a racist and the xenophobic top notes. And do we see any of that playing out in three weeks in the midterm elections? So, vroom. I'll just let you all take a stab at that. I'm starting with Tamara. Touch the chalk. So Trump is interested in a certain outcome, but he's not really motivated by an ethical grounding in all of this. And so I think that it is up to the Democrats and to all the progressive organizations that have been working on this for 25 years to really reclaim that. I think that, you know, economy, I'll do a little economists turn here, but you know, economists that have argued forever that there are trade winners and there's trade losers. And, you know, that, well, jobs are lost to NAFTA and we have over a million jobs documented as being lost to NAFTA, but there's all these jobs that are gained. And I think, you know, the problem with that line of thinking is that one, it's not, it doesn't reflect a lot of empathy for the workers in actual communities and the communities themselves who are impacted by trade. And it's also not a very politically savvy strategy, right, because we saw the impact in the 2016 election of actually neglecting those folks. What I think will be interesting, you know, an interesting possibility would be to actually think about how to build into the new USMCA enforcement mechanisms that could actually, this would be interesting, counteract some of the administration's anti-unionism in the United States, right? And so we saw this actually from the labor side agreement where some of the folks in US Union said to the Mexicans, file those labor rights violations against us so that we can try to improve our labor laws. So in the face of the Janus decision and all kinds of attacks on US labor, I think it'd be interesting to figure out ways that the AFL-CIO and other unions could actually turn the tables and figure out ways now, in the next few months as this is being hammered out, of making sure that there's things in this agreement that actually protect US workers too in the face of the attacks that have already come from the Trump administration that are surely to come in the next two years. Okay. I think, Thea, you're exactly right that the question for progressives is how to change the sort of the public discussion about trade agreements so that they're not about, not framed as the way President Trump would choose to, which is, is this a good deal for the US versus other countries, but is this essentially a pro-corporate trade agreement versus a pro-worker or pro-environment or pro-consumer safety deal? I think the, I mean, unfortunately, I think probably the framing of the US versus other countries is a little simpler and more intuitive a story, so our job's a little harder. Although, in the public debate over TPP, before the election, it seems to me that some of those dynamics were part of a public debate about whether this was an agreement that essentially was just being written by and for large corporations was part of the public. I don't want to overstate that. I don't think your average rank-and-file voter had a very strong opinion about TPP, but it was part of the public debate, but that is the real, I think that's the real challenge. The good thing is that I think voters would find it entirely plausible and even likely that trade agreements are negotiated more to look out for the interests of large corporations than the public as a whole or working people. So it's not like we're trying to tell them a story they will find unlikely or implausible, but it's a story we need to figure out how to tell better, as for whether that's possible in the next three weeks, probably not. So yeah, I don't think that the US MCA or trade are gonna be major election issues, and if you look at any of the poll, like it's healthcare, education, I mean the idea of either trade wars or four against tariffs are way down the list. I think an interesting question though is how does this agreement get passed? Because ultimately the Congress has to approve it, and if you think about, there's not a good past reference to this, because again in 93, you had a largely kind of democratic set up Bill Clinton promise changes, it squeaks through with a number of deals and log rolling built into it, and we're coming off of a bad economy and do a better economy. In 2015, 2016 TPP gets done, you have a Republican Congress that should wanna do this because they're all free traders, a president who largely agrees with their agenda on this, and it doesn't happen. So what happens here? I think there's a dilemma for, and recognizing that the Economic Policy Institute is nonpartisan and all of this, it does great work, the best work on trade analysis by the way. I think parties have something to consider here. For Republicans it's like, do you vote with the Koch brothers in your money or do you vote with where your base is? I mean, as you see in this polling, Republicans want big changes. For Democrats, I think it's for, particularly for industrial workers, they've strived for years to make changes like this, and we'll see how real they are, but if they are real, how do national Democrats respond to this? Because there is a cost to working with the president. There's an activist base that wants to see impeachment and everything else, and working with the president on trade is probably not high on their priority list. So how do national Democrats respond to this when this is gonna be an issue that's critically important to the heartland and to a lot of people in the middle class? And those are simply questions, we don't know the answer to that, but I think there's a lot of opportunities, particularly among progressives, to make some progress. You know, in the short term, I would say, I recently came back from a training with one of our industrial unions, and someone raised their hand and said, look, I'm sort of confused. I've had on my hard hat for the past 25 years, say no to NAFTA, what are you telling me? What's the new message? So I would say in the short term, when you talk about the base and the electorate, I think we have a lot of education to do, and I think we haven't done all the work that we need to do to get people to really understand what's happening on the trade front. So I think the next three weeks, we probably will not be able to do all that, but I do think there's a lot of work that we need to do with our own base in terms of educating them. And the way we wanna do it is actually, again, looking at trade and immigration as part of the same economic model that allows employers to exploit workers. And so I would say that's where we're heading, and I just wanna say that the piece of enforcement is the key piece. If we don't get the enforcement piece right, no one, we've been down this road with Columbia, with CAFTA, with every single trade agreement, what will be the key to this trade agreement is how will it be effectively enforced? And that's what going forward we're gonna need to be working on. Okay, great, thanks. And now we'd like to invite questions from the audience. We should have microphones. Please wait for the microphone when you get the microphone. Just state your name and if you have an affiliation, go ahead right up here in the second row. It's coming. Ellen Ferguson, CQ Roll Call. I have something that's a little more off topic. It's about Congress and beyond the midterms. If the Senate changes, which seems unlikely, the Democrats will take it, or the House, which seems more likely, where would you expect Democrats to come down on the USMCA? I wish they came up with something different. And you mentioned some of the educational work you have to do with your basis. I mean, how are politicians supposed to kind of navigate this, especially Democrats who have long cited some of the same issues that you have as their concerns in trade agreements? But now you have President Trump moving forward a trade agreement that incorporates many of the kind of touchstones that a lot of the politicians have campaigned on. Kathy, do you want to start? So I just want to be clear, first of all, that there isn't some good things on paper. But we don't know, like we say in the labor movement, a collective bargaining agreement is only good when you see the final language and it gets signed. And so I think to be very clear right now, there are some positive steps, the changes in ISDS, some of the rule of origin issues, the labor chapter, but we are far from saying that this could be an agreement that is where we need it to be. So that's the first thing. And the one thing I would say that I'm concerned about in terms of the Dems is this current moment, I think you hear a confused message from the Dems. Some are like, well, we should go back to that TPP model. And we just saw articles in the press around the, the Vietnam is no longer feeling pressed to move forward on labor reforms. I wanna be very mindful that that is not what needs to happen. That model was a problem. And so what we need to be doing is having a discussion with the Dems about our vision for a very different model where labor is enforceable. Thanks, Kathy. Anybody else like to jump in on that issue? Dems, let's take another question from the audience. Back there. Hi there, thanks for holding this then. I'm Megan Cassella with Politico and I just had pretty much a follow-up on that question and that Scott and Kathy in particular, given your roles and likely that you will be working with Congress if Democrats should take the House, what is some advice that you would give Democrats who are grappling with these issues and who will likely want to make their mark on the USMCA should they, before they consider voting in support of it? You're assuming they would listen to our advice. So, which is a big assumption, but look, I think, and Kathy is right here. We have an agreement on paper that everybody doesn't have access to right now in all three countries and so anybody familiar with the trade debate and those that the beginning point is not the end point, that there's the implementing legislation, there's a lot of other changes that need to take place and so what you see now is not what Congress is gonna be asked to vote on, that's point number one. Point number two, if I were a Democrat, I would say maybe we can get an infrastructure package, maybe we can find mechanisms that are gonna guarantee workers' rights supports that we don't have right now. I would be looking to put a little extra into it, understanding that that's how these things always get passed, use it for the force of good rather than the force of evil as it's been used in the past where there were carve outs for getting airplanes made in different places and cruise ship giveaways and how many others. I mean, all this crazy stuff but do something that's gonna positively impact workers and provide that kind of enforcement but also that economic boost that they're gonna see that they didn't see from the tax cut or something like that, that would be my counsel to them. And I would just add to that wise counsel that I think right now in order to enforce trade agreements you really rely on the labor movement to submit complaints. I mean, the GAO has written a few reports documenting that. So if I was a Democrat, I would say, what is it that needs to be done so that if there's a violation, there is actually repercussion. So maybe you cannot bring your product into this country. We have that type of arrangement with some of the forced labor issues. We can look at government procurement issues. I think there are a whole host of enforcement mechanisms that should be looked at and some of them exist piecemeal already like the forced labor pieces that are semi-effective. We would need to strengthen that but we have some existing models. We need to have a vision for other models so that the onus is not on the labor movement to say, hey, this isn't working but we need the structure to your structural piece that is constantly monitoring and enforcing the agreement. Tamara or Doug, do you wanna add anything? Just to move to another question. All right, up here on the front. Identify yourself. Quad Fontime, Fontime International. With regard to the message to Democrats and how that's shaped, obviously if Democrats take control of the house, the house is a very leadership controlled body so it becomes very much about the leadership which presumably puts labor in a good position. However, Trump will try to set this up as a choice between this deal and no deal. So you can have this. You may not like it but would you rather have this or NAFTA ends? How do you, what's the answer to that, basically? I will just say that ultimately the thing that will drive this is how do they get the votes to pass it and what's the kind of coalition that will form those votes? And again, this is a grand experiment. There's never been kind of a deal framed as an improvement of a pastial that a lot of the one party rejected. And it will, you know, there's gonna be an interesting calculation. We don't know what's gonna happen in the Senate yet as well but this will be driven by what's gonna get this passed. And a lot of this you don't know until the clock starts ticking and it gets real because there's not a lot of members that wanna stick out a position on this if they don't think it's ever gonna happen. But I think that so far, you know, if you look at the US Trade Representative's Office, they have done a lot of outreach. In fact, outreach that hasn't been done that was never done by Mike Froman to labor and progressives. So, oh, Bob Leihheiser and it is too. Froman is the former. Oh, Mike Froman is the former USTR, of course. So it will be very interesting but there's a, you know, it's a jigsaw puzzle because you can't do too much that is gonna alienate too many Republicans. You're like the DJ at the mixing board. You gotta have the base in trouble just right. It's not an easy task. I just wanted to make a point on Mexico because that kind of game of chicken, you know, the really interesting thing again, because we haven't seen this before, not in TPP. It wasn't like Vietnam was changing its labor laws before TPP. Mexico is going to change its labor law. Lopez Obrador has asked that before he takes office in December 1st, the labor law legislation gets passed. The political party, Morena has the votes. Man, I talked to you about before the head of the Mineros Union, Napoleon Gomez is the one that will be shepherding through the labor commission. So this is a unique moment where NAFTA or no NAFTA, we see real change because there's a commitment to do constitutional reform in Mexico. And so that is a different situation in terms of pressure points from other countries that are already in this, already moving forward. And so I think that's something we haven't seen before. Dennis Olson with the United Food and Commercial Workers Union and just taking off on the point made about Robert Lighthizer, excuse me. I was wondering what people's thoughts are as far as a political strategy that's sort of being emerging from Sherrod Brown, who of course has worked with Lighthizer for years in Ohio and going back to when Trump actually suspended NAFTA and so forth and all the big companies were screaming and Brown's comment was well when big corporations start screaming at like that. I think it may be that there's probably something good in it even though 90% of the time I don't agree with Trump. Does he provide the Democrats with a template as far as threading the needle politically here and also a second part of that question being with people like Lighthizer, there's others I've heard that are in the administration. You have like the Wall Street and the populace segments of the administration. That same sort of question on that. I'll just jump in very quickly and say Sherrod Brown should be the North Star for Democrats on trade policy. I think we have time for I think just one more. So sorry and introduce yourself. I'm John Russo. I'm a Georgetown visiting scholar at the Kalmanovets Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor but former director of the Center for Working Class Studies at Youngstown State and the question, okay. My question is pretty serious one about and I think I mentioned it to Scott is about a Sherrod situation and to a lesser extent Tim Ryan's, both from my area and what type of NAFTA agreement is gonna make sense for him because what you're talking about right now is a type of incrementalism in terms of his actual policy. And what's gonna be, and it's a question actually a lot of reporters remember I got a question comment or a question last week from Bloomberg asking me what's Brown gonna do and I said, I don't know because a lot depends like you guys said what's actually in the agreement and the reporter was sort of pushing me. And I said, perhaps the best agreement would be no agreement and the person just sort of stopped because that would give everybody a type of political protection. Brown and the base in Ohio that supports Brown are gonna be with him regardless but it does raise a question about how this moves forward and the other question is is the Democratic Party and this is Scott and I've talked about this if you, it's how many people on the foreign relations committee are from farm states how many congressmen have what the average manufacturing amount and in our congressional districts have the average manufacturing, very small so how this gets played out is very difficult and I think the final thing is the question about can we overcome what I call the suspension of your disbelief about the Democrats? In my area it's very difficult this piece I recently wrote and published in the Democratic Strategist and it was really about, oh sorry, I'm sorry, Ithea. Go ahead. It was basically that since the Lordstown plant has lost 3,000 workers since Trump got elected and every indication, by the way, 40% of that local voter for Republicans in 2016. My observation with talking to leadership and to members is that there's been very much, hasn't been very much less than that support and part of it goes back to what you guys talked about about NAFTA originally because the workers will stay out there and remember what you told us, this is talking to their leadership. You said anybody who voted for NAFTA is gonna get punished and in 2000 that's exactly what happened so it's more of a comment than a cautionary tale. Maybe I'll take this opportunity to wrap up and thank you all for coming today and for your attention but especially to thanks to all of our panelists who did an extraordinary job here so join me and let me just say one word in terms of your question John about trade policy and how difficult this moment is and how complicated it is for both Democrats and Republicans I think and part of the issue is that there's a lot of attention right now in the US MCA but that is first of all not complete and so it's of course politicians and major constituency organizations are not going to come out with a position until they know what it really is and whether it's gonna be enforced the second thing is that this is sort of one small piece of trade policy and even what's wrong with trade policy I think here at EPI we would say in terms of the major economic impact on American workers we're talking about our imbalanced trade relationship with China and dealing with currency and workers rights more broadly and then the third thing is in the context of the Trump administration and other anti-worker actions that are also in the context of the tax bill which definitely creates outsourcing incentives and rewards you know you have a very complicated overall picture and I think that's one of the reasons we're all struggling but I think it's particularly for that reason that I'm happy that we were able to have this conversation today and I look forward to further conversations with all of you it's a great crowd today and thanks for joining us.