USTR Nominee Emphasizes Protecting Workers in Future Trade Policy

In a Jan. 12 speech to the National Foreign Trade Council, a business group that promotes free trade, President-elect Joe Biden's choice for U.S. trade representative said “U.S. trade policy must benefit regular Americans, communities and workers.” Katherine Tai added that it “starts with recognizing that people are not just consumers. They are also workers.”

Advocates of importing from lower-wage countries have argued that while some small number of manufacturing workers will be displaced, more Americans benefit from the ability to buy lower-priced goods.

Tai, who is the chief trade counsel for the majority Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee, described the work of Democrats and the current USTR to rewrite NAFTA as “remediating” the trade agreement “that started the erosion of U.S. political support for trade.” In addition to new language on labor and the environment, she hailed the inclusion of “enforcement mechanisms that address long-standing rules and grievances suffered by regular working people” in the replacement agreement, the USMCA. She said the U.S. government will need “to make sure that we continue to tend to this agreement to see what is working and to correct course when parties falter and stray from old and new commitments.” She asked that all stakeholders, including capital and labor, work together to make sure USMCA lives up to its promise and contend with the challenges of competing with China. Before heading to Congress, Tai was a career staffer at USTR on China issues, and she speaks Mandarin fluently.

Tai gave no hint of how the Biden administration would approach tariffs placed on European Union goods over steel and Airbus aircraft subsidies. The steel tariffs led to retaliatory tariffs on a range of U.S. products, while the EU set its own tariffs on U.S. goods over aircraft subsidies for Boeing.