The article has a somewhat rose-colored view of free trade agreements - in practice, they tend to include many environment-, worker- and consumer-hostile clauses (which is predictable, since the agreements are negotiated mainly by industry representatives). I can't find the source currently, but I believe one of them (Possibly the TPP?) had a clause where a patent holder could forbid the export of any item covered by their patent (even after it was sold). The direct opposite of free trade.
A brief example of the many horrors contained in the for-now dead TPP: http://infojustice.org/archives/34189
And industry representatives defend such terms by saying that they are 'standard' for trade agreements (that they also mostly wrote!), as if that somehow makes it better, not worse.