Shafted.: Free Trade and America's Working Poor

NAFTA. The WTO. Trade agreements are supposed to benefit us all. Instead, in the decade since they’ve been in effect, life has become much worse for millions of working Americans. In Shafted, working people-family farmers and farmworkers, fishermen and seamstresses-describe the ruin free trade has brought to them, their families, and their towns.

These aren’t theorists; these are the voices of experience. And they’re telling us, clearly and eloquently, that it’s time to stop the madness that enriches a few corporations at the cost of justice, human rights, community, family, and the dignity of work and of workers.

Praise for Shafted
“A moving testimony to the damage free trade wreaks on ordinary Americans. The people have spoken. Will the powerful deign to listen?”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, author, Nickel and Dimed


“Before our politicians sign one more disastrous deal, they should all be tied down and forced to read this extraordinary and important book.”

― Naomi Klein, author, No Logo


“Shafted is a first-person dissection of America’s trade policies. A trade policy crafted by the rich for the rich has incalculable effects on all. The poor, forgotten, and dislocated are not being heard, yet the ease with which corporations and governments ignore such suffering is a luxury even the rich cannot afford. It is imperative that we listen well, for the cost of indifference will never stop growing until these inequities are addressed and justice trumps cash as the motivating factor for economic development.”
― Paul Hawken, author, Ecology of Commerce


“Today in the name of free trade we are losing some of our most important freedoms. This book shows how farmers, workers, and consumers are being trapped by an unjust system and how to do something about it.”
― Eric Schlosser, author, Fast Food Nation


“This important book gives voice to those invisible workers often missing in the free trade debate. For them the only thing free about free trade is the free-fall in their standard of living. These voices are dramatic testimony about the challenges that globalization poses, and make a case for changing the terms of globalization so that its gains are far more widely distributed. Thanks, Food First, for a volume that lifts the voices of our nation’s working poor and shines light on a problem too many policy makers would rather ignore.”
― Julianne Malveaux, economist and author