Competing Visions on Trade: A Race to the Bottom Vs. Building the Middle Class (with Thea Lee featuring Todd Tucker)

Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer

Civic Ventures

Business, Government, News, Politics

4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 28 October 2025

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the final episode of our Trade series, Nick and Goldy talk with Thea Lee, former Deputy Undersecretary for International Affairs at the U.S. Department of Labor, to challenge the core assumption behind decades of U.S. trade policy: That trade is about efficiency, not power. Lee explains how past trade deals were written to protect capital while ignoring worker exploitation abroad—a model that suppressed wages overseas and undercut American workers at home. She also makes the case that worker-centered trade isn’t hypothetical anymore by pointing to the US–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA), where labor rights were finally enforced with the same seriousness as intellectual property, resulting in real wage gains and democratic union elections in Mexico. This conversation lays out the choice clearly: Trade can strengthen middle classes, democracy, and supply chain resilience, or it can deepen inequality and instability. This episode makes the argument for choosing the first option on purpose, not by accident. Thea Lee is an economist and longtime advocate of pro-worker trade policy who most recently served as Deputy Undersecretary for International Affairs at the U.S. Department of Labor, where she focused on global labor protections, including enforcing labor rights under trade agreements and combating forced and child labor worldwide. Todd Tucker is a political scientist, author, and the Director of Industrial Policy and Trade at the Roosevelt Institute and Roosevelt Forward, where he leads work on how national and global institutions shape economic transformation. He’s the author of Judge Knot: Politics and Development in International Investment Law. Social Media: @theameilee.bsky.social @TheaMeiLee @toddntucker.com @toddntucker Further reading: The New US Trade Agenda: Institutionalizing Middle-Out Economics in Foreign Commercial Policy Judge Knot: Politics and Development in International Investment Law Website: http://pitchforkeconomics.com Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics Threads: pitchforkeconomics Bluesky: @pitchforkeconomics.bsky.social Twitter: @PitchforkEcon, @NickHanauer, @civicaction YouTube: @pitchforkeconomics LinkedIn: Pitchfork Economics Substack: ⁠The Pitch⁠

Transcript

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0:00.0	The rising inequality and growing political instability that we see today are the direct result of decades of bad economic theory.
0:10.9	The last five decades of trickle-down economics haven't worked. But what's the alternative?
0:16.3	Middle-out economics is the answer. Because the middle class is the source of growth, not its consequence.
0:23.1	That's right.
0:28.7	This is pitchfork economics with Nick Hanauer, a podcast about how to build the economy from the middle out.
0:36.9	Welcome to the show.
0:42.3	One of our first guests on Pitchfork economics, Nick, was the physicist Cesar Hidalgo.
0:50.3	And he made this statement, I know you've repeated in the past that the original sin of economics is that it starts
0:58.8	with trade.
0:59.8	Yeah.
1:00.8	When in fact what we need to start with are the things that we trade, the things we make.
1:07.4	And of course, we don't make those things without workers yeah so it's really hard to
1:15.5	talk about trade international trade without considering the rights and conditions and wages
1:24.9	of those workers making the things we're importing and exporting.
1:30.3	And yet, that's all...
1:32.3	You say that, but we have kind of ignored that.
1:35.3	That's right.
1:36.3	It's often missing from the conversation.
1:39.3	Weird.
1:40.3	Yeah, it's so weird.
1:41.3	Yeah.
1:42.3	We talk a lot about protecting intellectual property. We talk a lot about protecting intellectual property.
	...

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