Cargill enlists workforce to push back on trade
MINNEAPOLIS — On Cargill’s new FedByTrade website, the Houfek family tells how selling meat to foreign countries has supported two generations working at the company’s packing plant in Schuyler, Neb.
Four hundred miles north, in Hopkins, Brian Donovan, an operations manager in Cargill’s salt division, stands ready to explain how providing de-icing and water conditioning products to Canadians keeps dozens of U.S. workers on the payroll.
As President Donald Trump’s disparagement of free trade agreements pushes America away from deals like the 11nation Trans Pacific Partnership and the 23-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada, Cargill, one of the world’s largest private companies, is pushing back.
The Minnesota-based shipping and agriculture giant has enlisted its 155,000-person workforce in a political trade war. It just launched FedByTrade, where its employees, customers and communities can tell stories of regular Americans who depend on international trade for their livelihoods.
The company also plans more direct outreach to rural communities and other places that profit directly and indirectly from global trade.
Cargill CEO David MacLennan said Trump’s “America First” agenda in his first year in office “defies past conventions and defies history.” The Trump administration’s insistence that big trade deals cost American jobs reveals that the White House does not have “a full enough understanding of the complexity of negotiating agreements,” MacLennan said.
So at a time when MacLennan says free trade “has become surprisingly out of favor politically and therefore socially,” Cargill believes it must connect the dots from things like meat packing and salt production in the global economy back to individual jobs in America.
“I can go to Washington and talk to politicians and to Cabinet members,” MacLennan said. “But we think engaging our employees and our rural communities” to connect with Washington will put things in perspective.
U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, who is renegotiating NAFTA and who would be responsible for negotiating future deals, believes in tariffs to protect U.S. jobs. He thinks trade deficits are bad. And he specializes in two-nation trade deals instead of multinational pacts like Trans Pacific Partnership, on which Cargill worked for years.
Lighthizer’s office declined to comment on Cargill’s new program. It referred questions to the White House, which did not respond to requests for comment. But in a September talk, Lighthizer noted that Trump has long “been critical of the prevailing U.S. trade policy of so-called free trade deals and of their effects on workers. So we will have change in trade policy.”
“I believe — I think the president believes — that we must be proactive and that we must use all instruments we have to make it expensive to engage in noneconomic behavior, and to convince our trading partners to treat our workers, farmers and ranchers fairly,” he said.
Minnesota corn and hog farmer Bruce Peterson said free trade agreements have treated him fairly. Peterson sells some of his products to Cargill. He said he’s glad the company is standing up to the administration.
The “rhetoric coming from Trump” has a lot of people in the state’s vital agricultural sector “nervous,” Peterson said. If international trade, which is worth billions of dollars to Minnesota farmers, “all of a sudden falls apart, that could be really disruptive.”