This arti­cle went viral among pro­gres­sives, with many declar­ing they would join the boy­cott. But pro­gres­sives are not alone. In an inter­view not long after Katz’s arti­cle, Don­ald Trump also con­demned Nabis­co for mov­ing man­u­fac­tur­ing to Mex­i­co and tak­ing jobs away from Chica­go work­ers. He, too, swears off of Oreos.

In a wide­ly shared In These Times arti­cle from ear­li­er this year, Mar­i­lyn Katz laments the news that Nabis­co is clos­ing down some of its pro­duc­tion lines in Chica­go and replac­ing them with new facil­i­ties in Mex­i­co. Six hun­dred Chica­go work­ers are los­ing their jobs as a result. Katz calls for a boy­cott of Ore­os in protest of this ​“off­shoring.”

More recent­ly, he has returned to this theme in stump speech­es and in the GOP debates, promis­ing, ​“We’re going to bring, frankly, jobs back from Mex­i­co, where, as you prob­a­bly saw, Nabis­co is leav­ing Chica­go with one of their biggest plants and they’re mov­ing it to Mexico.”

Trump is, of course, approach­ing this issue with dif­fer­ent val­ues: He is a xeno­pho­bic mon­ster, and through­out his cam­paign for the Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial nom­i­na­tion he has delight­ed in attack­ing Mex­i­cans and Mex­i­co. Katz is a long­time pro­gres­sive activist and communicator.

But Trump’s reac­tionary premis­es lead him to share Katz’s con­clu­sion. That Don­ald Trump would join a protest of ​“off­shoring” Amer­i­can jobs should sug­gest to us that per­haps such protests are not actu­al­ly as pro­gres­sive as they might seem.

Any pro­gres­sive pol­i­tics wor­thy of the name should, of course, seek to pro­tect work­ers. But there is a prob­lem with chan­nel­ing pro­gres­sive anger about job loss­es into an attack on ​“off­shoring.” This intro­duces a kind of nation­al­ism which dis­torts pro­gres­sive pol­i­tics by intro­duc­ing a bat­tle line not just between the work­ing class and the boss­es, but also between two groups of work­ers sep­a­rat­ed by a bor­der. This isn’t the jin­go­is­tic nation­al­ism of the reac­tionary Right, dri­ven by xeno­pho­bia or racism. But it’s still a huge prob­lem on the Left.

There are some ugly ideas implic­it in this form of pol­i­tics: that Mex­i­can work­ers and U.S. work­ers can only ever be com­peti­tors, nev­er com­rades, and that we must take the side of U.S. work­ers against their much poor­er Mex­i­can coun­ter­parts. Tak­en to the extreme, this men­tal­i­ty leads even a staunch pro­gres­sive like Bernie Sanders to demand that ​“cor­po­rate Amer­i­ca start invest­ing in this coun­try rather than in coun­tries all over the world.”

Sanders is think­ing pri­mar­i­ly of low-income coun­tries. Implic­it­ly this means: cut the poor­est peo­ple in the world off from the cap­i­tal of wealthy coun­tries, and con­demn them to per­pet­u­al pover­ty, mal­nu­tri­tion and disease.

Of course, no pro­gres­sive would explic­it­ly endorse such a posi­tion, since they con­tra­dict the core egal­i­tar­i­an prin­ci­ples which all pro­gres­sives aspire to uphold. (Trump, on the oth­er hand, has no such qualms.) Nation­al­ists on the Left try to avoid this con­tra­dic­tion by por­tray­ing the work­ing con­di­tions in Mex­i­co and oth­er low-income coun­tries as lit­tle bet­ter than slav­ery. And if their jobs are tan­ta­mount to slav­ery, then we aren’t hurt­ing them if we take those jobs away at all — we’re actu­al­ly lib­er­at­ing them!

But the sit­u­a­tion is con­sid­er­ably more com­plex than that. While forced labor is still a very real prob­lem, many work­ers in poor coun­tries are also ris­ing up and fight­ing for bet­ter wages, ben­e­fits, and work­ing con­di­tions — often strik­ing in num­bers that are rarely seen in the U.S. They are not pas­sive vic­tims but poten­tial com­rades. And while work­ing con­di­tions in low-income coun­tries can be hor­rif­ic and must be improved, the jobs which neolib­er­al glob­al­iza­tion has pro­vid­ed to the world’s poor­est coun­tries have dras­ti­cal­ly improved the stan­dard of liv­ing for bil­lions of peo­ple world­wide.

A form of pol­i­tics which aims to cut off this life­line is not pro­gres­sive — it’s cru­el and immoral.

Of course, the neolib­er­al glob­al econ­o­my is indeed intol­er­a­bly unjust to work­ers both here in the U.S. and in low-income coun­tries. The cul­prit is the intense com­pe­ti­tion that has tak­en place under neolib­er­al­ism, which pits work­ers against each oth­er in a glob­al race to the bot­tom in wages and work­ing conditions.

So what is to be done? We have to end the neolib­er­al race to the bot­tom by cre­at­ing a floor under all work­ers. Instead of attempt­ing to expel for­eign work­ers from ​“our” labor mar­ket (as white work­ers in the US did to Chi­nese immi­grant work­ers in the late 19th cen­tu­ry), we should fight to improve stan­dards for work­ers glob­al­ly. This could include, for exam­ple, a régime of liv­ing wage stan­dards across glob­al sup­ply chains.

A régime of glob­al labor stan­dards would of course great­ly improve the wages and work­ing con­di­tions of work­ers in low-income coun­tries. But it would also cre­ate a bet­ter future for U.S. work­ers (and do so bet­ter than any restric­tions on ​“off­shoring”). First, it would great­ly reduce the inten­si­ty of labor mar­ket com­pe­ti­tion between U.S. work­ers and work­ers in oth­er coun­tries, increas­ing secu­ri­ty and bar­gain­ing pow­er for U.S. work­ers. Sec­ond, it would take huge num­bers of peo­ple now mar­gin­al­ized in the world’s sweat­shops and slums and inte­grate them as full mem­bers of the glob­al econ­o­my, cre­at­ing new mar­kets for goods made in the U.S. (includ­ing Oreos).

In order to win glob­al labor stan­dards, labor orga­niz­ing must become as glob­al as the labor mar­ket already is.

This is not a new idea. To vary­ing degrees, some unions like the Unit­ed Elec­tri­cal Work­ers and the Unit­ed Food and Com­mer­cial Work­ers have explored cross-bor­der orga­niz­ing from the begin­ning of the age of neolib­er­al free trade under NAF­TA to now. Admit­ted­ly, for decades the results have been mixed. But times have changed. Today, neolib­er­al­ism is in a state of glob­al cri­sis, lead­ing to waves of labor unrest and anti­estab­lish­ment pop­ulism, and also unprece­dent­ed soul-search­ing among the glob­al elite.

In this his­tor­i­cal con­text, we see signs of new orga­niz­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties at the transna­tion­al lev­el. In response to hor­rif­ic dis­as­ters at gar­ment fac­to­ries in Bangladesh in recent years, labor activists and civ­il soci­ety groups from around the world have come togeth­er with Bangladeshi work­ers to form the Accord on Fire and Build­ing Safe­ty in Bangladesh, which aims to hold glob­al cloth­ing brands account­able for safe­ty stan­dards. Mean­while, cloth­ing giant H&M has respond­ed to work­er ​“riots” in Bangladesh and Cam­bo­dia by intro­duc­ing a ​“fair wage” plan for its fac­to­ry work­ers across Asia. More than any time since the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, there is the poten­tial for a glob­al labor move­ment to win trans­for­ma­tion­al con­ces­sions from cap­i­tal­ists at the glob­al level.

But this is no easy task. A glob­al labor move­ment requires an increased sense of sol­i­dar­i­ty and shared self-inter­est between work­ers in dif­fer­ent coun­tries. Polit­i­cal edu­ca­tion among work­ers is nec­es­sary, but it is at least as impor­tant to build work­er-to-work­er rela­tion­ships across bor­ders. Advances in com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nol­o­gy have the poten­tial to make this eas­i­er than ever. In addi­tion, immi­grant work­ers in Amer­i­can unions can pro­vide a link to work­ers in oth­er countries.

There are many ways for work­ers and their unions to act in sol­i­dar­i­ty with their coun­ter­parts in oth­er coun­tries. Trade nego­ti­a­tions, such as around the Trans-Pacif­ic Part­ner­ship, pro­vide one oppor­tu­ni­ty for devel­op­ing and orga­niz­ing around a transna­tion­al work­ing-class agenda.

But the gold stan­dard would be cross-bor­der col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing. For exam­ple, Nabis­co work­ers and their unions in Mex­i­co and the U.S. could orga­nize togeth­er to force their shared employ­er to meet a shared set of demands around wages, work­ing con­di­tions and job secu­ri­ty — in oth­er words, a cross-bor­der labor contract.

In Mex­i­co, labor orga­niz­ing faces seri­ous obsta­cles, some­times esca­lat­ing to state-sanc­tioned vio­lence. But this has not stopped Mex­i­can work­ers from coura­geous­ly orga­niz­ing and strik­ing. Recent exam­ples (which also fea­ture vary­ing lev­els of inter­na­tion­al sol­i­dar­i­ty) include the his­toric wave of labor protests in the maquilado­ras of Ciu­dad Juarez, the recent Driscoll strikes, and a nar­row­ly defeat­ed union­iza­tion cam­paign among Hon­da work­ers. Mex­i­can work­ers have proven that they are wor­thy allies for U.S. work­ers, and work­ers in both coun­tries would ben­e­fit from increased cooperation.

Build­ing a glob­al labor move­ment is, of course, a long-term project. In the mean­time, it is rea­son­able to want to pro­tect work­ers from job loss­es, as Katz wants to do — for exam­ple, by dis­in­cen­tiviz­ing com­pa­nies from mov­ing pro­duc­tion around with­out regard for the well-being of their work­ers. But any such mea­sures have to be non-nation­al­is­tic, apply­ing equal­ly to the fac­to­ry moved to anoth­er coun­try or just anoth­er city.

We should also fight for improved wel­fare pro­grams for unem­ployed work­ers and pur­sue pro­gres­sive job cre­ation pro­grams. It is a neolib­er­al myth that cor­po­ra­tions like Nabis­co are the only job cre­ators. Cur­rent­ly one of the best pro­gres­sive ways to cre­ate jobs is through the pub­lic sec­tor. Pub­lic sec­tor employ­ment, which is espe­cial­ly impor­tant to women and minori­ties, has been under attack since the 2008 crash, and revers­ing that trend is one of the best things we can do for US work­ers in the short term.

The best tra­di­tions of the Left empha­size work­er sol­i­dar­i­ty regard­less of race, gen­der or creed — or nation­al­i­ty. Today, the future for work­ers in the U.S. (includ­ing the past and present Nabis­co work­ers) lies in a glob­al­ized labor move­ment and renewed gov­ern­ment invest­ment in the pub­lic sec­tor. Pro­gres­sives must deci­sive­ly reject nation­al­is­tic ideas and strate­gies. Oth­er­wise, as the neolib­er­al cri­sis drags on, we may find our­selves drawn into a zero-sum game in which groups of work­ers in dif­fer­ent coun­tries com­pete with each oth­er over increas­ing­ly scarce resources, strug­gling against each oth­er rather than against their shared bosses.

Katz doesn’t have to fret about los­ing her favorite choco­late indul­gence. Rather than boy­cotting Ore­os, we should fig­ure out how work­ers in the U.S. can join with new­ly employed cook­ie work­ers in Mex­i­co to advance an agen­da that will ben­e­fit both.