Beginning was Bretton Woods agreements. Culmination is WTO in 1994. Organized labor recognizes that free trade puts pressure on wages to go down, and jobs to go overseas to lower wage countries. Increases in free trade means painful adjustments lower wages, lost jobs etc. Adjustments are painful, real and expensive.
Corporations gain leverage against workers.
Places with no environmental or labor standards. Often called promoting the lowest common denominator of costs and standards nations compete to have fewer costs and standards because of the competitiveness of attracting industries. Ratcheting up Some argue that eventually there will be rising levels of economic affluence because of free trade. In a truly free trade world all people could compete fairly to produce scarce products. People could move to a location of scarce resources to capitalize on or people could access the education to become pharmaceutical scientists and develop their own scarce medicines.