From National Capitalism to Shareholder Globalism: Reclaiming Trade Policy for Workers.
The modern debate over “globalists,” tariffs, and trade deficits is often framed as nationalism versus free trade. That framing is misleading. The real transformation in American political economy was not simply a shift in tariff rates — it was a structural break between American corporations and American workers.
For much of the twentieth century, those two were aligned. They no longer are.
I. When Corporations and Workers Were Tied Together
In the 1920s, under Republican presidents such as Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover, tariff policy was designed to protect American manufacturers from foreign competition.
The underlying assumption was straightforward:
American corporations produced in America.
American workers worked in those factories.
Protecting domestic industry protected domestic labor.
That alignment largely existed. Capital was geographically rooted. Industrial production was domestic. The national interest and corporate interest were intertwined.
When President Franklin D. Roosevelt pursued reciprocal trade agreements in the 1930s, it was not a surrender to globalism. It was an attempt to expand trade within a framework that preserved domestic industrial strength. Capital controls, labor protections, and regulatory authority remained national. Factories remained overwhelmingly domestic.
Even after World War II, the Bretton Woods system — supported by institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade — allowed global trade expansion while capital mobility remained constrained.
Trade was international.
Production was still national.
This was not borderless capitalism. It was global commerce embedded within domestic industrial policy.
II. The Structural Break of the 1970s
The true rupture occurred in the early 1970s when President Richard Nixon ended the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system. At the same time, containerized shipping reduced transportation costs, financial deregulation expanded capital mobility, and advances in communications allowed multinational coordination on a new scale.
For the first time, corporations could:
* Manufacture abroad
* Sell into the U.S. market
* Retain American legal protections
* Reward shareholders at home
* Avoid domestic wage, safety, and environmental standards
The old equation broke.
American corporation ≠ American worker.
Shareholder value became the dominant corporate metric. Executives were incentivized to minimize labor costs and regulatory burdens — wherever in the world they could do so.
This shift accelerated in the 1990s with the creation of the World Trade Organization and China’s entry into it in 2001. Global supply chains deepened. Wage competition became international. Environmental standards became variables in cost calculations.
III. Asymmetrical Trade and Worker Displacement
For decades, multinational corporations maximized shareholder returns by relocating production to lower-wage countries while continuing to benefit from American infrastructure, courts, consumer markets, and national defense. American workers absorbed the wage pressure and job losses.
Consider the model pioneered by Nike, Inc., which designs and markets its products in the United States but manufactures almost entirely overseas, relying on labor markets in Vietnam, Indonesia, and China. Or Apple Inc., which retains high-value design and intellectual property functions domestically while assembling most of its products abroad through contract manufacturers. In the industrial sector, firms such as General Motors expanded production in Mexico and China even as American manufacturing employment declined.
In each case, shareholders benefit from lower labor costs and global supply chain flexibility, while displaced workers face downward wage pressure and community-level economic contraction.
These firms continue to rely on U.S. patent law, financial markets, contract enforcement, transportation networks, and national security guarantees — all funded by American taxpayers.
That isn’t free trade — it’s asymmetrical trade.
If corporations want access to the largest consumer market in the world, they should meet enforceable labor and environmental standards.
IV. The Case for a Global Labor Floor
The central problem in modern trade is regulatory arbitrage.
Once capital became globally mobile, corporations gained the ability to relocate production to jurisdictions with:
* Lower wages
* Weak worker safety enforcement
* Minimal environmental regulation
* Suppressed collective bargaining
This created a race dynamic. Nations could compete not by becoming more productive, but by becoming less protective.
That is not free competition. It is distortion.
This is why I favor the proposal advanced by then Democratic House leader Dick Gephardt (D-MO) for a worldwide labor minimum tied to trade access.
A global labor floor functions as a guardrail against regulatory arbitrage. It does not prevent competition, but it prevents competition based solely on wage suppression, unsafe workplaces, or environmental degradation.
Countries could still compete based on:
* Productivity
* Infrastructure
* Innovation
* Education
But they would not gain trade advantages simply by allowing dangerous factories or poverty-level wages without protections.
Access to the American consumer market should be conditioned on meeting baseline labor and environmental standards.
V. Tariffs as Standards Enforcement
In this framework, tariffs are not instruments of isolationism. They are enforcement tools.
If a nation refuses to:
* Enforce worker safety
* Prevent forced labor
* Protect basic labor organizing rights
* Regulate environmental dumping
Then higher tariffs become corrective equalizers.
Without such enforcement, American workers are forced into direct wage competition with regulatory systems that do not internalize safety or environmental costs.
That is not a level playing field.
Standards-based tariffs align trade policy with labor and environmental policy instead of allowing them to undermine each other.
VI. Why Congress Should Revoke China’s MFN Status
If policymakers believe China represents a systemic economic rival, trade policy must respond structurally rather than episodically.
Historically, China’s Most Favored Nation (MFN) status was conditional. Each year, Congress was required to assess whether China met certain human rights and trade benchmarks before granting MFN access. These annual reviews were designed to pressure China to improve labor rights, allow religious freedom, and reduce persecution of ethnic and religious minorities, including Uyghurs, Tibetans, and other marginalized groups. MFN status was explicitly tied to compliance with international standards, not automatic access to the U.S. market.
Over time, these annual reviews were waived, culminating in the 2000 grant of Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR). At that point, MFN status became automatic, removing leverage Congress previously held to enforce human rights and labor standards. Since then, the Chinese government has continued to:
* Persecute ethnic and religious minorities, including mass detention of Uyghurs and repression in Tibet
* Restrict freedom of speech, assembly, and religion
* Enforce forced labor practices in industries such as textiles, electronics, and agriculture
These actions demonstrate that granting unconditional market access without enforceable standards was a structural mistake.
Revoking MFN status—or conditioning trade privileges on measurable human rights, labor, and environmental benchmarks—would restore congressional authority and give the United States leverage to promote basic standards. Congress could:
* Replace ad hoc, retaliatory tariffs with a consistent statutory framework
* Tie market access explicitly to enforceable human rights and labor standards
* Make trade conditional on China meeting benchmarks similar to those required during the original annual MFN reviews
Trade access is not a unilateral entitlement. If a country seeks to benefit from the American consumer market, it must meet enforceable minimum standards for labor rights, human rights, and environmental protections. This approach aligns structural trade policy with democratic values and ensures that access to the U.S. market is a tool to encourage compliance rather than a reward for inaction.
VII. Restoring Democratic Alignment
The core political problem of the last fifty years is that capital became globally mobile while labor and democratic accountability remained national.
Workers vote in national elections.
Corporations relocate capital across borders.
If trade rules do not account for that imbalance, wage suppression and regulatory arbitrage become systemic features.
The solution is not isolation. It is structural reform:
* A global labor floor
* Tariff enforcement tied to standards
* Congressional reassessment of MFN classifications
* Trade rules aligned with worker safety and environmental responsibility
Global commerce should reward productivity — not exploitation.
Trade policy should serve workers and communities, not just shareholders.
(c) 2026. Becky Romero
Permission is granted to republish in full online or in print so long as a link is provided back to this page and to BeckyRomero.com
For much of the twentieth century, those two were aligned. They no longer are.
I. When Corporations and Workers Were Tied Together
In the 1920s, under Republican presidents such as Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover, tariff policy was designed to protect American manufacturers from foreign competition.
The underlying assumption was straightforward:
American corporations produced in America.
American workers worked in those factories.
Protecting domestic industry protected domestic labor.
That alignment largely existed. Capital was geographically rooted. Industrial production was domestic. The national interest and corporate interest were intertwined.
When President Franklin D. Roosevelt pursued reciprocal trade agreements in the 1930s, it was not a surrender to globalism. It was an attempt to expand trade within a framework that preserved domestic industrial strength. Capital controls, labor protections, and regulatory authority remained national. Factories remained overwhelmingly domestic.
Even after World War II, the Bretton Woods system — supported by institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade — allowed global trade expansion while capital mobility remained constrained.
Trade was international.
Production was still national.
This was not borderless capitalism. It was global commerce embedded within domestic industrial policy.
II. The Structural Break of the 1970s
The true rupture occurred in the early 1970s when President Richard Nixon ended the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system. At the same time, containerized shipping reduced transportation costs, financial deregulation expanded capital mobility, and advances in communications allowed multinational coordination on a new scale.
For the first time, corporations could:
* Manufacture abroad
* Sell into the U.S. market
* Retain American legal protections
* Reward shareholders at home
* Avoid domestic wage, safety, and environmental standards
The old equation broke.
American corporation ≠ American worker.
Shareholder value became the dominant corporate metric. Executives were incentivized to minimize labor costs and regulatory burdens — wherever in the world they could do so.
This shift accelerated in the 1990s with the creation of the World Trade Organization and China’s entry into it in 2001. Global supply chains deepened. Wage competition became international. Environmental standards became variables in cost calculations.
III. Asymmetrical Trade and Worker Displacement
For decades, multinational corporations maximized shareholder returns by relocating production to lower-wage countries while continuing to benefit from American infrastructure, courts, consumer markets, and national defense. American workers absorbed the wage pressure and job losses.
Consider the model pioneered by Nike, Inc., which designs and markets its products in the United States but manufactures almost entirely overseas, relying on labor markets in Vietnam, Indonesia, and China. Or Apple Inc., which retains high-value design and intellectual property functions domestically while assembling most of its products abroad through contract manufacturers. In the industrial sector, firms such as General Motors expanded production in Mexico and China even as American manufacturing employment declined.
In each case, shareholders benefit from lower labor costs and global supply chain flexibility, while displaced workers face downward wage pressure and community-level economic contraction.
These firms continue to rely on U.S. patent law, financial markets, contract enforcement, transportation networks, and national security guarantees — all funded by American taxpayers.
That isn’t free trade — it’s asymmetrical trade.
If corporations want access to the largest consumer market in the world, they should meet enforceable labor and environmental standards.
IV. The Case for a Global Labor Floor
The central problem in modern trade is regulatory arbitrage.
Once capital became globally mobile, corporations gained the ability to relocate production to jurisdictions with:
* Lower wages
* Weak worker safety enforcement
* Minimal environmental regulation
* Suppressed collective bargaining
This created a race dynamic. Nations could compete not by becoming more productive, but by becoming less protective.
That is not free competition. It is distortion.
This is why I favor the proposal advanced by then Democratic House leader Dick Gephardt (D-MO) for a worldwide labor minimum tied to trade access.
A global labor floor functions as a guardrail against regulatory arbitrage. It does not prevent competition, but it prevents competition based solely on wage suppression, unsafe workplaces, or environmental degradation.
Countries could still compete based on:
* Productivity
* Infrastructure
* Innovation
* Education
But they would not gain trade advantages simply by allowing dangerous factories or poverty-level wages without protections.
Access to the American consumer market should be conditioned on meeting baseline labor and environmental standards.
V. Tariffs as Standards Enforcement
In this framework, tariffs are not instruments of isolationism. They are enforcement tools.
If a nation refuses to:
* Enforce worker safety
* Prevent forced labor
* Protect basic labor organizing rights
* Regulate environmental dumping
Then higher tariffs become corrective equalizers.
Without such enforcement, American workers are forced into direct wage competition with regulatory systems that do not internalize safety or environmental costs.
That is not a level playing field.
Standards-based tariffs align trade policy with labor and environmental policy instead of allowing them to undermine each other.
VI. Why Congress Should Revoke China’s MFN Status
If policymakers believe China represents a systemic economic rival, trade policy must respond structurally rather than episodically.
Historically, China’s Most Favored Nation (MFN) status was conditional. Each year, Congress was required to assess whether China met certain human rights and trade benchmarks before granting MFN access. These annual reviews were designed to pressure China to improve labor rights, allow religious freedom, and reduce persecution of ethnic and religious minorities, including Uyghurs, Tibetans, and other marginalized groups. MFN status was explicitly tied to compliance with international standards, not automatic access to the U.S. market.
Over time, these annual reviews were waived, culminating in the 2000 grant of Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR). At that point, MFN status became automatic, removing leverage Congress previously held to enforce human rights and labor standards. Since then, the Chinese government has continued to:
* Persecute ethnic and religious minorities, including mass detention of Uyghurs and repression in Tibet
* Restrict freedom of speech, assembly, and religion
* Enforce forced labor practices in industries such as textiles, electronics, and agriculture
These actions demonstrate that granting unconditional market access without enforceable standards was a structural mistake.
Revoking MFN status—or conditioning trade privileges on measurable human rights, labor, and environmental benchmarks—would restore congressional authority and give the United States leverage to promote basic standards. Congress could:
* Replace ad hoc, retaliatory tariffs with a consistent statutory framework
* Tie market access explicitly to enforceable human rights and labor standards
* Make trade conditional on China meeting benchmarks similar to those required during the original annual MFN reviews
Trade access is not a unilateral entitlement. If a country seeks to benefit from the American consumer market, it must meet enforceable minimum standards for labor rights, human rights, and environmental protections. This approach aligns structural trade policy with democratic values and ensures that access to the U.S. market is a tool to encourage compliance rather than a reward for inaction.
VII. Restoring Democratic Alignment
The core political problem of the last fifty years is that capital became globally mobile while labor and democratic accountability remained national.
Workers vote in national elections.
Corporations relocate capital across borders.
If trade rules do not account for that imbalance, wage suppression and regulatory arbitrage become systemic features.
The solution is not isolation. It is structural reform:
* A global labor floor
* Tariff enforcement tied to standards
* Congressional reassessment of MFN classifications
* Trade rules aligned with worker safety and environmental responsibility
Global commerce should reward productivity — not exploitation.
Trade policy should serve workers and communities, not just shareholders.
(c) 2026. Becky Romero
Permission is granted to republish in full online or in print so long as a link is provided back to this page and to BeckyRomero.com
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