Meet the Press interviews during 2016: on Free Trade

Thomas Perez: TPP learned from past to protect the American worker

PEREZ: Sure. This is what the president tasked me with doing, and I was proud to do it. Which is we want to go to school on the mistakes and the lessons of past trade agreements. We want to build a trade regime that the North Star is the American worker, protecting the American worker. And so we want to make sure that when we negotiate with Mexico and Vietnam and others that we have the strongest protections for workers that we've ever had. And that's what we've set out to do, and that's what I believe we have done. The President and Secretary Clinton have a disagreement on whether TPP has gone that far. You know, this is not the first time in the history of the Democratic Party that there have been differences of opinion.