This article was originally published in Quartz.

Donald Trump’s promise to renegotiate or tear-up the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement was a major reason why he won the support of working class voters in the Midwestern states that were crucial to his election. It’s also a trap.

As US president-elect, Trump quickly scored some points with his Rust Belt constituency after claiming to get the Carrier and Ford corporations to reduce the number of jobs they are sending to Mexico. He also clearly exaggerated the effect of his personal persuasiveness: Carrier was moved by a $7 million tax break from the state of Indiana and Ford might well have made its decision before Trump intervened. In any event, as the Wall Street Journal reports, other companies, such as Rexnord, Caterpillar, and Nucor continue to send jobs south of the border. Renegotiating NAFTA is therefore the first real test of Trump’s pledge to create good new jobs by negotiating better trade deals.

Will he deliver on this pledge? No. But the reason is not, as the conventional economic wisdom has it, because outsourcing work to low-wage countries is the inevitable result of immutable global forces that no president can reverse. The problem for American workers is not international trade, per se. America has been a trading nation since its beginning. The problem is, rather, the radical new rules for trade imposed by NAFTA—and copied in the myriad trade deals signed by the US ever since—that shifted the benefits of expanding trade to investors and the costs to workers.

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78 percent of baby boomers are more afraid of retirement than of death. Sound extreme? Not really. The median retirement savings for near-retirement households is $14,500. At least half of households are at risk of having insufficient resources to maintain themselves into retirement. And four in 10 people age 56–61 have nothing at all saved for retirement.

How can this be? There are a number of reasons, including the demise of private and public pensions and growing income inequality, which has shrunk the capacity of workers to save. But one cause is fairly easy to fix: millions of people do not have access to 401(k) plans or other savings options at their workplace.

What if people who wait tables, wash cars, take care of children, or perform other low-wage jobs for small businesses—which often don’t offer 401(k) savings plans—could have money taken out of every paycheck and deposited into a low-cost retirement savings account operated through the state government? Five states have enacted plans that are making this possible, and 28 states are at various stages of considering such plans. If all of these states did enact these laws, 63 million people could have access to retirement savings options.

This was the goal of the Obama administration, which put in place regulations to help states that wanted to provide retirement savings options. Though some states had set out on this path before, this new policy that made it easier and safer for states to offer these plans, paved the way for this positive development in the states.

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EPI executive board member Paul Booth has been and continues to be a tireless advocate for American working people, and, in fact, for working people all over the world. Even though he is stepping down from his day job at AFSCME, we trust that Paul’s long career of union organizing and advocating for workers and social justice is far from over.

As a trusted advisor to EPI, Paul has served an important role—often encouraging us to take risks and see the long-game. He never stops pushing to make us more effective, to work harder, to make a bigger difference in the world and in the lives of the America’s working families.

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While the headlines are dominated by White House leaks and personnel scandals, the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress have been quietly helping the financial industry siphon off your retirement savings. First, the administration announced that it was reviewing a rule scheduled to take effect in April requiring financial advisors to work in their clients’ best interests. Yes, you read that correctly. Some people presenting themselves as financial advisors can now legally steer you to rip-off investments, a glaring problem the Obama administration addressed in a commonsense rule six long years in the making.

The rule, backed by the Consumer Federation of America, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Vanguard founder John Bogle, and others, applies to brokers, plan consultants, and others advising participants in 401(k)-style plans and IRAs who don’t already adhere to a fiduciary standard. Among other things, it prohibits financial professionals from pretending to offer disinterested retirement advice while working on commission and from steering retirement savers to higher-cost investments when similar but lower-cost options are available. Importantly, the rule protects job-leavers from being lured into rolling over their pensions and 401(k)s into higher-cost IRAs, at a time in their life when many people are vulnerable to bad advice.

How can anyone argue against the fiduciary rule with a straight face? The financial services industry counters that if some clients don’t get bad advice, they may not be able to afford advice at all. This is like dietitians arguing that clients may not be able to afford nutritional advice if it’s not paid for by Coca Cola. The industry also says the rule could put some people out of business, which isn’t reason to oppose it—it goes without saying that we shouldn’t prop up a business model where survival is dependent on fleecing savers.

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Brad DeLong posted a widely-read piece on Vox a couple of weeks ago effectively exonerating globalization and trade policy from accusations that it has contributed to economic distress for low- and moderate-wage American workers. He doubled-down on specific claims this week in a piece at Project Syndicate. Below I’ll assess some of his claims in a bit of detail, but here’s a “too-long; didn’t read” checklist of how I grade the accuracy of some of his main claims:

• Putting pen-to-paper on trade agreements contributed nothing to aggregate job loss in American manufacturing. This is almost certainly true.

• The aggregate job loss we have seen in manufacturing is due to automation plus declining domestic demand for manufactured goods, period. This is mostly false. Trade deficits, especially with China in the last 15-20 years, have contributed significantly to overall manufacturing job-loss..

• The source of these rising trade deficits is mostly an overvalued U.S. dollar, which has nothing to do with trade policy. It’s true that an overvalued dollar is what’s behind rising trade deficits, but saying that has nothing to do with trade policy is semantics. Call it macroeconomic policy if you want, but the way an overvalued dollar hurts Americans is through its impact on trade flows.

• The trade agreements we have signed are mostly good policy and have had only very modest regressive downsides for American workers. This is false.

• Globalization writ large has been tough on some American workers and policymakers have failed to compensate losers. This is true, but I think DeLong underestimates the number of losers and the size of their losses.

So, let me dive deeper into each one of these arguments:

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Wealth is a crucially important measure of economic health. Wealth allows families to transfer income earned in the past to meet spending demands in the future, such as by building up savings to finance a child’s college education. Wealth also provides a buffer of economic security against periods of unemployment, or risk-taking, like starting a business. And wealth is needed to finance a comfortable retirement or provide an inheritance to children. In order to construct wealth, a number of building blocks are required. Steady well-paid employment during one’s working life is important, as it allows for a decent standard of living plus the ability to save. Also, access to well-functioning financial markets that provide a healthy rate of return on savings without undue risks is crucial.

Failures in the provision of these building blocks to the African-American population have led to an enormous racial wealth gap. The racial wealth gap is much larger than the wage or income gap by race. Average wealth for white families is seven times higher than average wealth for black families. Worse still, median white wealth (wealth for the family in the exact middle of the overall distribution—wealthier than half of all families and less-wealthy than half) is twelve times higher than median black wealth. More than one in four black households have zero or negative net worth, compared to less than one in ten white families without wealth, which explains the large differences in the racial wealth gap at the mean and median.  These raw differences persist, and are growing, even after taking age, household structure, education level, income, or occupation into account.

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Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker recently visited the White House, prompting speculation that the Trump administration might be looking to follow Walker’s model of anti-unionism. But following Walker’s model means betraying the very people who put President Trump in office: frustrated working-class Americans.

In 2011, at the urging of the billionaire Koch brothers, Walker pushed through a law that effectively eliminated the right to collective bargaining for state and local government employees. School teachers and custodians, child case workers, and road repair crews all lost the right to bargain for decent wages and benefits. Walker portrayed his action as standing up for hard-working nonunion taxpayers in the private sector who were being bled dry by the Cadillac pensions of fat and lazy public employees. In fact, however, Walker’s bill was just one more part of a playbook written by corporate lobbyists to make the rich even richer and our economy even more unequal.

Public employees are working- and middle-class, and all of them suffered dramatic health insurance cutbacks. But when the state cut people’s benefits, what did they do with the savings? They certainly didn’t give it to hard-working families struggling to make ends meet in the private sector. Instead, more than half the savings were doled out in tax cuts to the richest 20 percent of the population. While Walker gave the rich— those who needed the least help— an extra $680 per year per person, those struggling to get by in the poorest fifth of Wisconsin families got less than $50 each. Walker’s model is not taking from the haves and giving to the have-nots: it’s taking from working people and giving to the elite.

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Valentine’s Day is next week, and with it one of their busiest days of the year for America’s restaurant workers. For the servers and bartenders who rely on tips for the bulk of their income, the influx of couples celebrating romance with extravagant meals and expensive bills holds the promise of a nice payout. Unfortunately, for restaurant staff in most states, their windfall may not be as big as it seems. In fact, by the end of the week, their Valentine’s Day pay may turn out to have been nothing more than minimum wage. This is because in 42 states and the District of Columbia, there is a separate lower minimum wage for tipped workers, allowing restaurants (and other employers of tipped workers) to subtract a portion of their employee’s tips from the base wage paid by the house. In 18 of these states, restaurants can pay tipped workers as little as $2.13 per hour so long as—over the course of the week—the combination of tips plus the base wage averages out to at least the regular minimum wage.

Setting aside the fact that in almost every state the regular minimum wage is far too low, consider the challenges this separate lower minimum wage creates for tipped workers. The bulk of their paycheck is up to the whims of the customer, and research has shown that quality of service often has little to do with what the customer chooses to tip. Weekly, let alone monthly, income is harder to anticipate, making planning and budgeting more difficult. (Imagine trying to evaluate a mortgage offer or a car loan payment schedule if you have little ability to forecast your monthly income.) Racial bias has been shown to affect tipping, and worker advocacy groups argue that the pressure to ensure customer satisfaction, particularly in a workplace where customers are consuming alcohol, forces restaurant workers to suffer high rates of sexual harassment. Furthermore, although the law requires that employers make up the difference so that tipped workers receive at least the minimum wage, this does not always happen in practice.

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President Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Labor, Andrew Puzder, has a new date for his confirmation hearing—February 16, a week from tomorrow. This marks the fifth time the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) will attempt to consider Puzder’s nomination. While much speculation surrounds the repeated delays, today’s announcement makes one thing clear—President Trump and Senate Republicans are doubling down on a nominee whose policy positions are bad for U.S. workers. Now, senators will have an opportunity to show where they stand.

When HELP Committee members finally get a chance to question Puzder on his positions and plans for the Labor Department, they should demand that he explain his views on minimum wage. Puzder has claimed that increasing the minimum wage costs jobs; senators should ask him how he explains that California has a higher minimum wage than the federal minimum wage yet has seen faster economic growth—including in the restaurant industry—than the country as a whole. Senators should ask Puzder if he knows how many Americans were killed at work before the Occupational Safety and Health Act was enacted in 1970. Does he know how many workers are killed each year now, in an economy twice as big? Still far too many, but fewer than before—demonstrating the importance of meaningful workplace safety standards. Finally, senators should demand that he explain his own company’s record of wage and hour and OSHA violations.

President Trump’s insistence on advancing Puzder as his nominee for labor secretary reveals that his agenda is to pursue an economy that works great for corporate owners and those at top, but does not work for low-and middle- income families. After decades of wage stagnation and weakened worker protections, we need a labor secretary who will advocate for a strong minimum wage and meaningful worker protections. The Senate now has a chance to demand that workers get a secretary who will guard their rights and advance an agenda that works for them. We will see if they agree that America’s workers deserve better than Mr. Puzder.