A ‘Worker-Centric’ Trade Agenda Should Focus on Competitiveness, Says ITIF in New Report Rebutting Anticorporate Progressives

WASHINGTON—As the Biden administration pursues its “worker-centric” trade agenda, the White House should reject the counsel of anticorporate progressives who deny that U.S. companies’ interests align with U.S. workers’ interests, according to a new report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), the leading think tank for science and technology policy. The administration should instead embrace a competitiveness-focused approach that prioritizes opening markets, protecting intellectual property, and enforcing agreements to simultaneously advance the interests of U.S. firms and workers in traded sectors of the economy.

“Crafting a ‘worker-centered’ trade agenda to advance the political agenda of anticorporate progressives would be a major strategic mistake, because U.S. workers’ interests actually often go hand-in-hand with U.S. companies’ interests,” said ITIF President Robert D. Atkinson, who co-authored the report. “The administration should focus on weaving strategic-industry competitiveness into a trade agenda that opens markets and provides strong IP protections, among other measures, because helping U.S. firms boost their sales benefits U.S. jobs.”

ITIF’s report examines three alternative paths for trade policy: first, maintaining the status quote of the mainstream approach, which has traditionally prioritized lower prices for imported products over U.S. workers’ welfare; second, veering toward a progressive populist approach, which views large-firm interests as antithetical to U.S. worker and national interests and supports the interests of foreign workers ahead of U.S. workers; and third, embracing a new competitiveness-focused approach that recognizes how the interests of companies in the United States can align with the broader interests of the U.S. economy and American workers. The report then focuses on intellectual property protections as a key aspect of trade policy that illustrates how advancing the interests of companies can benefit workers.

The report concludes with a series of recommendations for the Biden administration:

• Expeditiously reengage with the rest of the world on a robust trade agenda grounded in a competitiveness-focused approach.
• Continue to be the world’s leading supporter of strong IP provisions in trade agreements.
• Work with like-minded partners to establish new tools to counter IP theft, especially from China.
• Enact new measures to better protect IP at home so U.S. firms can protect themselves from state-sponsored IP theft, especially from Chinese-backed firms.

“When a foreign company infringes on a U.S. company’s IP, it takes sales and jobs from the U.S. firm,” said Jaci McDole, a senior analyst at ITIF and co-author of the report. “The United States can’t allow foreign and state-sponsored entities to profit at the expense of U.S. workers and companies. There has long been an active anti-IP camp in trade policy debates. They were strident in opposing IP provisions in the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, and they helped turn the tide against the Trans-Pacific Partnership. But they were wrong then, and they are still wrong now.”

Read the report.