What is the WTO?
The World Trade Organization is a global commerce agency that went into effect on Jan. 1, 1995. The WTO administers 17 different commercial agreements, including the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). “Taken as a whole, the WTO and its underlying agreements set a system of comprehensive governance that goes far beyond trade rules and systematically prioritize commerce over all other goals and values. Countries are required to ensure “conformity of their laws, regulations and administrative procedures” to the WTO’s substantive rules. National policies and laws found to violate WTO rules must be eliminated or changed, or the violating country faces trade sanctions.

Whose trade organization is it?
While some corporations and G-8 governments (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) maintain that the WTO reduces trade disputes, social justice advocates argue that the WTO’s prioritization of trade above development and environmental goals benefit primarily the special interests profiting from this model of globalization.

What is the Iron Triangle?
“The IMF, World Bank, and WTO all work together in an iron triangle to carry out the corporate agenda of privatization, deregulation, and “free” trade… This triangle caters to the interests of transnational corporations above and beyond the interests of all other aspects of life… Under the guise of promoting economic growth, financial stability and development, the World Bank and IMF have forced more than 60 countries to open up their forests, minerals, fisheries, agricultural land, workforce, and financial markets to foreign investors without regard to domestic priorities such as food security; universal education and healthcare; the needs of local communities and domestic businesses; protections for workers, women, and marginalized peoples; and the limits on nature’s capacity to be exploited and polluted.” - Anita Roddick, Take It Personally

Does the WTO support child labor?
The WTO doesn’t officially condone child labor. But by creating incentives for poor countries to gear their locally sufficient economies towards sweatshop exports, the WTO model has helped give rise to exploitative labor conditions globally. While countries can get hit with trade sanctions for violating commercial terms of the WTO, there is no similar penalty for labor rights violations.

What is GATS?
GATS stands for the General Agreement on Trade in Services, and it’s one of the 16 additional agreements tacked on to the original General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (which dealt only with goods) and administered by the WTO.

GATS represents an unprecedented attempt to have trade deals limit what kinds of non-trade, non-tariff policies a country can have for domestic services. And there are GATS provisions that upset nearly everyone. Take Wal-Mart. Activists from California to Maryland have mobilized for years to keep big-box stores from setting up shop in their communities and contributing to sprawl and the destruction of mom & pop businesses. Outmaneuvered at the local level, Wal-Mart and other big-box stores have lobbied to tighten WTO GATS rules that limit the steps local governments can take to keep them out.

From Internet gambling to telephone services to just about anything you can’t drop on your foot, GATS rules sharply limit many common policies in the U.S. and elsewhere. Find out more here.

How does GATS Affect Healthcare?
Federal trade negotiators are bargaining away the ability of state governments to tackle our health care crisis by committing U.S. health-related services, prescription drug distribution, and health insurance to binding GATS rules.

The GATS represents a 180-degree turn from the U.S. approach to health care policy away from regulating *industries* for the benefit of the consumer and towards regulating *governments* for the benefit of industries. Effectively, GATS places binding restrictions on the exercise of democracy in order to promote the agenda of giant financial and insurance firms. These GATS and other WTO commitments will limit the ability of federal and state governments to adopt innovative solutions to some of our most pressing health care problems, including creating low-cost health care alternatives for working families, and addressing the high cost of prescription medicines.

What does “Free Trade” mean?
Although today’s trade agreements have the phrase “free trade” in their titles, they’re anything but. First, pacts like WTO and NAFTA put limitations on the free flow of medicines, music and other technology by requiring government intervention to protect monopoly patent and copyright holders. Moreover, these so-called “trade deals” sharply limit what kinds of non-trade, domestic health and environment policies countries can have.

Isn’t “Free Trade” good for the economy?
Increased trade can boost incomes and efficiency. But economic theory since the 1940s has shown that – for a country like United States – rich people would gain (a lot) from freer trade, while working people would lose out. Most economists don’t like to talk about this fact, or gloss over it by saying the rich can just compensate the poor for their losses, which never happens in the real world. Theory aside, the actual lived experience of the NAFTA-WTO model has been of manufacturing job loss, wage stagnation, and increased economic anxiety for the majority of people – both in the United States and abroad.

What is NAFTA and how does it relate to the WTO?
NAFTA is a lot like the WTO, except even more corporate friendly and for fewer countries. NAFTA stands for the North American Free Trade Agreement: it’s a pact between the U.S., Canada and Mexico that went into effect on January 1, 1994.

Like the WTO, NAFTA limits what policies the member governments can take to promote employment, environmental protection, and other goals. Unlike the WTO, however, NAFTA allows private corporations to directly sue governments for taxpayer dollars to block or chill these policies. Since NAFTA’s enactment in 1994, corporations in all three NAFTA countries have challenged a variety of national, state and local environmental policies and even civil judicial decisions under this so-called “investor-state” system. Over $35 million has been paid out in damages. While many NAFTA investor cases are still pending, some companies have succeeded with these challenges already. The mere threat of such a challenge has chilled governments from making policy innovations, including a threat under NAFTA against a Canadian province’s single-payer mandatory auto insurance program.

NAFTA has provided the model for other U.S. trade deals with over a dozen countries, from Bahrain to Peru, from Singapore to El Salvador. Because the names of many of these trade pacts rhyme with NAFTA – like CAFTA, for the Central America Free Trade Agreement – some fair traders have taken to creating slogans that poke fun at the names and highlight their negative impact on working people. Governor Brian Schweitzer of Montana, for instance, once said, “I was a critic of NAFTA, I was a critic of CAFTA and I’ll be a critic of SHAFTA.”

How does NAFTA impact the environment?
NAFTA and CAFTA undermine environmental protection policies of nation states by giving corporations the right to sue governments in unaccountable trade tribunals if environmental (or other public interest) policies get in the way of “free trade,” that is to say, profit. For instance, in 1997, a U.S. toxic waste company sued the Mexican government under NAFTA for $90 million because a local government had declared an environmental preserve where the company wanted to operate a dump. In the end, Mexican taxpayers had to “compensate” the corporation nearly $16 million.

What about the WTO today?
Corporate lobbyists and unelected bureaucrats have been attempting to expand the scope of the WTO since 1995. The ’99 Seattle protests slowed their progress, but the Doha Round of the WTO puts forth a sweeping trade agenda for the developing world, committed to opening agricultural and manufacturing markets, as well as expanding intellectual property regulations, including the patenting of seed. Worldwide protests of the G8 and the WTO continue.

Can the WTO and its agreements be changed?
Yes! Global trade rules have been changed many times. As recently as 1994, when the one-agreement GATT became the 17-agreement WTO. Or in 2001, when a new WTO rule was created that was meant to give governments more ability to address public health crises. Or in 2007, when the Bush administration proved you can change WTO rules when it unilaterally withdrew Internet gambling from America’s GATS commitments. And WTO negotiators are constantly meeting in Geneva and elsewhere to change the rules.

Citizens groups from Malaysia to Australia, from South Africa to Canada, are on the cutting edge of the effort to force a fundamental change in global trade rules. Using slogans like, “WTO: Shrink or Sink,” “Our World is Not For Sale,” or “Another World is Possible,” these groups have pressured their governments to keep from selling off the public interest in the name of corporate trade rules. With the WTO putting sharp limitations on how countries can address the global climate crisis, it is more urgent than ever before that we create trade rules that work for working families and the environment.

Read Public Citizen’s Pocket Trade Lawyer to dive deeper.