Rethink Trade was established to intensify analysis and advocacy regarding the myriad ways that today’s trade agreements and policies must be altered to undo decades of corporate capture and to deliver on broad national interests. This includes 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.
• Reversing Big Pharma’s use of trade pacts to protect monopolies over essential medicines, including COVID-19 vaccines, treatments and tests.
• 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 is undermining our ability to make or obtain essential goods.
• Repealing the extreme corporate-power and taxpayer-money grab  of the Investor-State Dispute Settlement regime.
• Helping workers to use the revised North American Free Trade Agreement’s new labor rights enforcement mechanisms to test if it offers a model going forward to counter multinational corporations’ use of trade pacts to drive down wages and working conditions.

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.