Workers’ Empowerment as U.S. Trade Policy

ABSTRACT

U.S. trade policy stands at a critical inflection point. While the Biden administration’s “workercentered” approach and the Trump administration’s “America First” platform sharply diverge, both recognize that trade deeply impacts domestic employment. However, both policies overlook how the treatment and costs of labor in partner nations directly protect U.S. workers from unfair competition. This Article argues that empowering foreign trade-sector workers to secure higher wages and better conditions must become a central pillar of U.S. trade policy. Drawing on an original empirical study of Mexico’s automotive sector under the United States-Mexico Canada Agreement (USMCA), I demonstrate that recent “worker-centered” efforts failed to truly empower foreign labor. Instead, they left workers vulnerable, incentivized corporate offshoring, and suppressed foreign consumer power—deficiencies that ultimately harmed domestic workers and fueled protectionist, tariff-driven alternatives. By uncovering the direct link between foreign supply-chain capacity and U.S. job opportunities, this Article challenges conventional narratives surrounding trade agreements and foreign aid. Ultimately, it underscores the urgent need to radically reconceptualize U.S. trade policy to protect the global workers who make trade possible.

INTRODUCTION

For many decades, we’ve enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry . . . One by one, the factories shuttered and left our shores, with not even a thought about the millions upon millions of American workers left behind. The wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and then redistributed across the entire world. — President Trump

In January 2025, the Trump administration announced an abrupt departure from the Biden administration’s U.S. trade policy. Pronouncing that it’s time to put “America First,” President Trump canceled the former administration’s aid and assistance to empower workers in trade. President Biden’s approach had assumed that helping workers abroad would disincentivize a race to the bottom, consequently helping workers in the United States. President Trump capitalized on Biden’s failure to accomplish that objective, announcing in its place a slate of high tariffs promised to “strengthen the international economic position of the United States and protect American workers.” Although Biden and Trump’s approaches appear to diverge, they share a core belief that U.S. trade policy should improve opportunities and conditions for workers in the United States. However, neither approach has succeeded in protecting workers in the United States from the deleterious effects of cheap labor in competitor countries.

This Article is about the relationship between U.S. trade policy, the empowerment of foreign workers, and the treatment of workers in the United States. My claim is that workers’ empowerment throughout the trade sector, when executed correctly, is necessary if U.S. trade policy hopes to preserve high wages and decent working conditions at home. In that sense, worker protection is neither a domestic nor international issue; rather, it is a structural feature of fair competition. Conceptualizing empowerment as a pillar of U.S. trade policy will help mitigate the perverse incentives in liberalized trade that prioritize short-term profits over productivity, efficiency, and global demand.

The stakes of U.S. trade policy for workers in the United States and abroad are high. The complex relationship between trade, global competition, and empowerment in contemporary trade policy has been obfuscated by a myopic focus on national protectionism. It is driven by a fundamental belief that U.S. trade policy is intended to enhance economic opportunities for businesses and workers within the United States, rather than to rectify the abuse of workers elsewhere. That is reasonable. After all, trade agreements are not human rights instruments; they operate under different legal and normative architectures. Trade agreements primarily focus on facilitating economic development and commercial exchanges, whereas human rights focus on the inalienable rights of individuals and communities. East remains East, West as West, never the twain shall meet.

Here’s the problem with that objection and the current direction of U.S. trade policy. As much as politicians and ideologues hope to decouple U.S. trade policy from the treatment of workers in trade sectors abroad, workers in the United States continue to bear the brunt of trade carried out with countries with low labor standards. When U.S. companies relocate to other countries to avoid costly labor laws, U.S. workers suffer. When countries produce goods and services under substandard labor conditions (such as suppressed wages), they export artificially cheapened goods that compete with goods and services provided by U.S. workers. While those cheap imports undoubtedly benefit workers as consumers in the United States, they do not help them secure jobs at home. Like it or not, the rights and standards afforded to workers in trade partner countries affect working conditions in the United States, and U.S. trade policy plays a direct and significant role in aligning them.

Unemployment in the United States is not a new problem. Scholars have advanced various domestic policy solutions, including innovative tax schemes, reshoring through industrial policy, revamped training and assistance for workers in offshored sectors, and the creation of new social welfare programs. This Article, by contrast, demonstrates how a U.S. trade policy could mitigate the perverse incentives in trade to capitalize on cheap labor by empowering foreign workers through aid and assistance.

Lacking a solid foundation upon which to assess how trade policy affects job opportunities and working conditions in the United States, politicians have dismissed most reform proposals, opting instead to rely on rhetoric to justify their ideological approaches to trade. For instance, President Biden used the ubiquitous term “empowerment” to justify his aggressive enforcement of labor laws in foreign countries, whereas President Trump uses it both as a signal of weakness and a shield to block foreign exports that compete with domestic industries. Neither has bothered to define empowerment, nor have their trade policies fulfilled their promise to preserve jobs in the United States.

Given that empowerment is a loaded yet frequently invoked term in the policy discourse, I want to pause to define it. It’s well worth giving this definition targeted attention because, as I will argue shortly, empowerment is key to protecting decent work and market opportunities in the United States, provided it’s correctly understood. Thankfully, I have a rich literature upon which to draw in this regard. Namely, I can point to the studious works of Amartya Sen who, after decades of work in the field, concluded that empowerment is “the expansion of freedom of choice and action. It means increasing one’s authority and control over the resources and decisions that affect one’s life.”

Sen’s definition makes intuitive sense. I’ll offer an illustration. Suppose the U.S. government negotiated with a trade counterpart and demanded specific wages and working conditions throughout trade sectors. Assume that those negotiations resulted in objectively higher wages and better conditions than workers or their union representatives could have negotiated with companies directly. We can all agree that those workers are better off because of the U.S. government’s demands. But are those workers empowered? And, if not, will the resulting conditions of production and trade resolve the systemic abuse of workers—the lack of voice, the inability to alert authorities about workplace violations, the ignorance of labor rights and laws—that contributes to unfair competition and decisions to offshore jobs elsewhere?

This Article’s empowerment-as-trade-policy thesis advocates for a radical reconceptualization of U.S. trade policy that views foreign worker awareness and capability as prerequisites for fair competition. It unfolds in five parts.

Part I describes how U.S. trade policy has managed the labor rights and standards of workers in trade partner countries. Because Mexico is one of the most important countries to the U.S. economy, it uses the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) as a case study. The Biden administration leveraged this Trump-era trade agreement to prove that its trade policy was “about using trade to empower workers and making sure that they can compete fairly and thrive . . . .” The results of an original field study I carried out in the Mexican auto sector in 2024 suggest these efforts failed.

Part II explains Sen’s theoretical approach to empowerment. It applies that approach to Biden’s empowerment efforts under the USMCA to elucidate why efforts failed to help the most vulnerable workers in Mexico’s trade sector.

Parts III and IV set out the stakes and limitations of an empowerment trade policy. Part III explains how the Trump administration’s tariffs policy and anti-trade rhetoric exploit residual job losses in the United States to garner political support for high tariffs. Part IV concedes that an empowerment trade policy is no silver bullet. Namely, it risks excluding informal workers from empowerment activities and imposing collective rights over workers’ individual rights. Furthermore, U.S. trade policy reflects congressional and executive agreements and decision-making, rendering it instrumentally inapposite to the bottom-up choice in empowerment.

Part V uses the International Labor Organization (ILO) Decent Work Agenda to exemplify how the U.S. government can overcome those challenges.

To read the full research paper as it was published by the University of Georgia School of Law, please click here.