About Rethink Trade

Rethink Trade leads on analysis and advocacy regarding the myriad ways that today’s trade agreements and policies must be altered to undo decades of corporate capture and deliver on broad public interests including resilient supply chains and fair markets, the creation and support of good jobs with workers empowered to earn decent wages, public health and safety delivered by strong consumer and environmental protections and the ability for those who will live with the results to decide the policies affecting their lives.

Rethink Trade builds synergies between trade justice and anti-monopoly work to create and implement policies that can harvest the benefits of trade and promote healthy economies and local businesses without undermining our democracy, livelihoods and labor rights, health, or environment.

Some of the select issues Rethink Trade is currently prioritizing:

• Stopping Big Tech efforts to hijack “trade” agreements and policies to lock in monopoly power and evade governments’ efforts to safeguard the rights of workers, consumers’ safety and privacy, civil rights and fair competition.
• Trying to improve the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement during its mandatory six-year review that started in 2026 so the pact delivers the promised benefits. To date, USMCA has not only failed to meet President Trump’s first-term promises that it would end job offshoring, create more U.S. manufacturing jobs and balance trade, but the opposite outcomes resulted.
• Tracking the outcomes for manufacturing jobs, trade balance and more from trade policies and agreements.
• Developing new international trade and finance proposals that break from the neoliberal agenda of NAFTA and WTO and Trump’s erratic tariffs to benefit U.S. workers and producers while bolstering our national security, enhancing resilience, building fairer markets, and deconcentrating political power with models designed to distribute production with more key goods made here and more diverse imports, promote balanced trade and definancialization, and set a floor of labor, environmental, and competition standards.
• Helping workers to use the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement’s new labor rights enforcement mechanisms to raise wages and improve working conditions.
• Advocating for strategic uses of tariffs to enforce strong labor and environmental standards, to defend against mercantilist trade distortions that undermine domestic production, and to develop industries vital to economic and national security while also pushing for the complementary competition, tax, investment, procurement, and other industrial policy tools needed for tariffs to deliver for working people, consumers and small businesses.
• Replacing dominant corporations’ hyperglobalization agenda with pro-worker, pro-resilience rules for the global economy to repair the supply chain meltdown now causing prices to spike and that undermines reliable access to some essential goods.
• Repealing the extreme corporate-power and taxpayer-money of the Investor-State Dispute Settlement regime.
• Reversing Big Pharma’s use of trade pacts to protect monopolies over essential medicines and promoting production of more generic medicines domestically, so there are more producers in more countries to bring down prices and ensure resilient supplies.
• Countering any efforts to reopen the de minimis loophole that previously allowed four million packages daily to evade tariffs and inspection so as to stop imports of unsafe and forced labor products and deadly fentanyl-laced pills and e-commerce retail monopolists like Shein, Temu, and Amazon from crushing domestic manufacturers and retailers.

Rethink Trade is a division of the American Economic Liberties Project (AELP). AELP, a non-profit research and advocacy organization, is a thought leader in the anti-monopoly movement and promotes policy changes to address today’s crisis of concentrated economic power.