Who’s Speaking Up for the American Worker?

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor

Who’s Speaking Up for the American Worker?

By BETH MACYJUNE 25, 2015

Photo

Credit Doug Chayka

ROCKY MOUNT, Va. — A WOMAN came up to the book-signing table at an event at my local library Monday night. She did not have a copy of the newly released paperback of “Factory Man,” my book about what happened when 300,000 American furniture-making jobs were offshored to Asia.

But she waited a half-hour in the signing line anyway, to introduce herself and to tell me she was one of the more than 550 people laid off in 2001 when Furniture Brands International closed its Lane Furniture plant in this former mill town.

She couldn’t afford the $17 book, she whispered, because she was doing housecleaning and other off-the-books, part-time work. (I offered to give her one, but her gainfully employed sister-in-law ended up buying her a copy before I could get to the box of books I keep in my car, for just such occasions.)

In the front row of the auditorium where I spoke sat a retired sales executive from Bassett Furniture Industries. He’d spent his career nearby in the eponymous company town of Bassett, a place that used to teem with seven factories set along the banks of the Smith River. In retirement, he and his wife live comfortably in a sprawling home in the nearby resort community of Smith Mountain Lake.

But they’ve had a hard time renting out property they still own in Bassett, which saw its factories close, one after the other, as the company offshored nearly all of its wood furniture production to China, Vietnam and Indonesia in the wake of trade liberalization and China’s admission into the World Trade Organization.

At the other end of the front row sat another septuagenarian retiree, whose eyes filled with tears, as I showed pictures of and spoke about the people who line up outside the region’s food pantries two hours before the doors open. His story was like that of others in the crowd: His mother was raised in a Bassett-owned home, and his father lost fingers to the company’s saws. He’s also a native of Henry County, which has lost nearly half its jobs in the past two decades — not just factory work but also jobs in the smaller companies that supplied the factories, and in the mom-and-pop stores and diners where factory workers used to spend their cash.

Unfettered free trade has not only put the Henry County region near the top of Virginia’s unemployment rankings for more than a decade, but it has also ushered in an era of soaring food insecurity and Social Security disability claims.

And crime, too. A sheriff’s deputy told me at another book signing that many of his calls are now related to methamphetamine and heroin. An unemployed man accidentally set an abandoned factory on fire while trying to rip out copper electrical wires to sell on the black market; he was riding a bicycle, an unusual sight in this hilly, rural, car-reliant area.

After weeks of Congressional chess over the Asia-Pacific trade accord, with lawmakers finagling new methods to pass or block trade-negotiating authority — depending on the day — the so-called “fast track” is now on President Obama’s desk, a crucial step toward completion of the accord, known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Economists aren’t sure how many factory jobs will be lost as a result, but even T.P.P. proponents have acknowledged probable losses, especially in lower-skilled, labor-intensive manufacturing.

People living in rural America just want someone in Washington to level with them:

Will T.P.P. protect American jobs or hasten their demise? In talks and readings I’m giving across Appalachia’s former furniture belt, that’s always the first question I’m asked.

It’s a complicated question, obscured by dueling political interests, statistics slingers and documents that have been leaked as a public-interest workaround to secret T.P.P. negotiations and a closely guarded draft (though some 600 lobbyists were granted access to the negotiating texts).

I am not in possession of an economic crystal ball. But unlike most of the lawmakers deciding the fate of America’s role in international trade, I have spent much of the past three years talking to dislocated workers still living in former factory towns. Most believe that T.P.P. is simply the North American Free Trade Agreement “on steroids,” a done deal driven by corporate greed-heads and the lobbyists they employ.

When they hear proponents argue that T.P.P. will liberalize trade in high-tech services and agriculture, making it possible to expand America’s exports, they automatically replay President Bill Clinton’s “win-win” prediction from early 2000: China’s entrance into the W.T.O. would not cost Americans their jobs but would instead protect them, Mr. Clinton insisted, because American companies would soon export more goods to China’s growing consumer class.

Eventually.

In theory.

And notwithstanding the fact that many Chinese factories were not above dumping, or illegally underpricing, their products, to capture American market share.

As long as the consumer gets a slightly cheaper price on her bluejeans and bedroom suites, who cares if China or any other country isn’t playing by W.T.O. rules or adhering to labor and environmental standards?

Consumers and journalists alike had failed to connect the dots between escalating crime in dying factory towns and page-three wire stories about Bangladesh textile factory fires. And why would they? The small-town reporter has little license to cover the goings-on of the W.T.O. or the United States International Trade Commission, and the few reporters who do cover international trade rarely venture to towns like Rocky Mount or Bassett.

All of which suits the press-avoiding chief executives just fine. The shareholders matter most.

The globalization of low-skilled manufacturing is already a fait accompli, T.P.P. proponents have argued, and the furniture- and textile-making jobs that once made the Piedmont region of the mid-Atlantic hum are not coming back from China or Mexico.

But what about the other manufacturing jobs we’ve managed to hold onto in the United States? How would the 1,350 workers at New Balance’s Maine and Massachusetts factories fare, if faced with the elimination of tariffs on shoes made by Vietnamese workers who earn an average of $90 to $129 a month?

As imports soared in the decade following 2001, American manufacturing sector jobs dropped by roughly a third. There are now more American workers on disability (8.9 million) than are working on assembly lines (8.6 million). And among the displaced workers in southside Virginia who were retrained via Trade Adjustment Assistance funds — only about a third of trade-displaced workers in Virginia opt for federally funded retraining — most end up with lesser-paying service jobs, many of them part-time.

“I take the global long view,” said an urban planner and T.P.P. supporter who came to a talk I gave last week in Greensboro, N.C., another former furniture-making region. He’s right that globalization has fostered better living conditions in the developing world. But improving the lives of Indonesian peasants willing to work for desperately low wages really has nothing to do with the decisions that closed some 63,300 American factories between 2001 and 2012.

Those decisions were made by the biggest beneficiaries of unfettered free trade, in a story line that seems straight out of a Michael Moore documentary: the C.E.O. who now earns 300 times more than his average worker; the shareholders who expect quarter-after-quarter growth in corporate profits; the lawyers who helped devise the fine print in the T.P.P. document and the lobbyists they hire who, if the leaks are to be believed, think nothing of cutting off the supply of new generic drugs for decades.

Unlike most of the people in my rural, conservative audiences, I’d still like to think President Obama means it when he says the T.P.P. will increase economic growth and expand United States exports.

But I’m stymied by the secrecy, I tell the people who turn up at my book events, and by the influence of corporate money in election campaigns. I’m troubled, too, by the failure to bring about a compromise that would prohibit currency manipulation in countries that are part of the T.P.P. like Japan and Malaysia, which distort their currencies to give their own exports a boost.

I worry that T.P.P. will simply exacerbate income inequality. Then I show them a slide from Bassett, Va., circa 1942. A couple stands in front of a company house, with their little girl, Bettie, in front of them.

The little girl, now in her late 70s, told me she was so poor growing up that, lacking pencils and paper, she learned to write by tracing her letters in the condensation on the windows. But she went to college on her father’s factory wages, and she grew up to become an inner-city social worker with a master’s degree. That was the upward mobility trajectory in America before globalization.

Then I show them another black and white, this one of a ragamuffin girl, circa 1969. When the economy was good, her mother soldered airplane lights at a local factory. When it was bad, her mother picked up under-the-table jobs like waitressing and babysitting for other people’s kids.

That little girl, now 51, was the first in her family to go to college, and she threaded the needle of early trickle-down economics quite by luck: She came of age when it was still possible for a promising poor kid to go to college solely on Pell grants and other need-based financial aid.

That little girl in the picture is me, standing in the driveway of a ramshackle house in Urbana, Ohio. I did not grow up to become an economist spouting theories of creative destruction. But I’ve spent the past several years telling the tale of the people left behind, teetering in globalization’s wake.

I wish I could tell the people in my audiences exactly who will benefit most from T.P.P.

But anything this secretive, and this marked by corporate influence, leaves little room for doubt: It will not be America’s factory workers.

Beth Macy is the author of “Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local — and Helped Save an American Town.”

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A version of this op-ed appears in print on June 25, 2015, on page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: Who’s Speaking Up for the American Worker?. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe