The newest trade framework will face a very wary public

Nearly half of the global economy’s rules are up for grabs this week as the U.S. trade representative and secretary of Commerce convene trade ministers from 13 Pacific Rim nations in Los Angeles. Their task is to launch negotiations for a proposed Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) trade deal.

I want President Biden’s team to succeed in creating the “worker-centered” agreements the president pledged. To win a very wary public’s support for any Indo-Pacific deal, negotiators need to go in recognizing some major potential pitfalls.

Across the political spectrum, the public is united in thinking trade agreements emerge from a corrupt, secretive process. They think America’s billionaires and corporate monopolies, U.S. oil giants, pharmaceutical, Big Tech and telecommunications corporations, along with their lobbyists — write the rules.

My organization, Democracy Corps, conducted focus groups in July with service sector workers in Philadelphia, Republican men in Houston and Fort Worth and college-educated voters in Seattle. When asked about “trade agreements,” I realized they looked at it through a pretty distrustful first filter: Who has the power to shape them?

Many Americas no longer believe they benefit from globalization. And after a decade of battles over trade agreements, they also have opinions about why trade deals aren’t on the level. I conducted research for organizations that were skeptical about the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) during the last two years of President Obama’s term. I thought it was obvious: Voters’ biggest doubts would be about potential America’s lost jobs and lower wages.

I wasn’t close. Their biggest doubts were about the non-public advisory board in which corporate special interests were able to shape the agreement. Later, when I conducted research about the renegotiation of North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), I found that pact’s powerful corporate investor tribunals and its special privileges for pharmaceutical firms infuriated people across the political spectrum. Since then, public views about corporations rigging trade deals behind closed doors only seems to have intensified. Their views on corporate power certainly have.

This summer, we tested voter reactions to the term top 1 percent, and to our surprise it produced a lot more emotion than “America first.” When they hear it, voters respond: “rich,” “spoiled,” “don’t have a clue, entitled,” “elite,” “greedy,” “privileged,” “oligarchic,” “too concentrated,” and critically, “too powerful.” The Texas Republicans were indistinguishable in their reactions, with responses like “greedy” and “Jeff Bezos,” and not even they offered the anticipated responses about “wealth creators” or “job creators” we might have heard in years past.

When the moderator threw out the word, monopoly, the responses were immediate and required no explanation: “Privileged,” “Simply put, bad,” “I think they have so much money, these corporations, they don’t know what to do with it and don’t even take care of their employees.” And when you listen to people’s list of monopolistic companies and billionaires, it is mostly Big Tech – like Google, Facebook and Amazon. The sector is seen as excessively rich, greedy, powerful, controlling and unwilling to self-regulate.

Members of Congress, unions and civil society groups began sounding the alarm about the risk of Big Tech using its power, money and lobbyists to “hijack” trade agreements. It appears these corporations are aiming to replicate Big Pharma’s playbook from the 1990s when that industry locked in extended monopoly privileged through trade deals.

Today, Big Tech interests are lobbying trade talks worldwide to cement international rules to forbid countries from enacting new policies — or even maintaining existing ones — that protect our privacy and the security of our data, our children, online gig workers and the small businesses these monopolies regularly crush.

For a public that is particularly concerned about Big Tech’s undue influence, any IPEF provisions seen as limiting chances for greater protection of what should be our private data or more control over how and where that data moves or how content is targeted at our kids, would be especially damaging to a trade proposal’s future.

Convincing the public that a trade deal is being negotiated in their interest will not be easy. But avoiding a back-room process that’s controlled by Big Tech and other corporate lobbyists with the public shut out is one easy trap to avoid.

Stanley B. Greenberg is a founding partner of Greenberg Research, Democracy Corps, as well as Climate Policy & Strategy. Greenberg is a New York Times best-selling author and co-author of “It’s the Middle Class, Stupid!”