The New Yorker:

As the Trump Administration forces the U.S. to retreat from labor-protection programs abroad, American workers might end up suffering, too.

By E. Tammy Kim

In late February, the Office of Management and Budget instructed all federal entities to align themselves with “the President’s America First foreign policy.” It required agencies and private institutions that receive government grants to conduct a kind of self-audit, to weed out foreign programs that do not promote “American prosperity by advancing capitalism, markets that favor Americans, competition for American partnership, and economic self-reliance.” There would be no more “global welfare mentality.” As part of the audit, any grantee receiving money for “foreign assistance” would have to answer the question “Does this project create measurable benefits for U.S. domestic industries, workforce, or economic sectors?”

U.S.A.I.D., the government’s primary conduit of development and disaster assistance abroad, was already being liquidated. The United States had withdrawn from the World Health Organization and the U.N. Human Rights Council; the State Department seemed more preoccupied with deportations than with diplomacy. Yet some international work remained possible inside agencies with a primarily domestic agenda. At the Department of Labor, for instance, grants were still funding nonprofits that educated migrant farmworkers about their rights to fair recruitment, and groups that tackled human trafficking in countries that export products to the United States, from Congolese cobalt to Colombian flowers. (The Tariff Act of 1930 bans imports of goods made by forced labor, and campaigns against such exploitation have been historically bipartisan.) The Labor Department’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs, or ilab—which was created just after the Second World War—was still sending investigators to factories and training judges abroad to enforce labor provisions in various trade accords, including the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (U.S.M.C.A.), the update to the North American Free Trade Agreement (nafta) that Donald Trump negotiated in his first term. “This work is of interest to the Administration,” one ilab employee told me. “That’s the thing I thought would save us.”

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