"In May of last year, Marcus Carli,
the plant manager of the Master Lock factory in Milwaukee, Wis., called a
surprise meeting with the board of United Auto Workers Local 469. Several
officers of the union, which represents the workers at the plant, joined Carli
and an executive from Master Lock’s parent company in a tiny conference room.
Carli brought along a security guard. “He’s here for my protection,” Carli told
the union representatives. As the guard sat down, Yolanda Nathan, the local’s
incoming president, noticed his gun. “That’s when I thought, Oh, we’re losing
our jobs,” she says. Carli immediately confirmed her worst fears. “The plant’s
closing,” he announced. “It took my breath away,” Nathan says. “It took all our
breaths away.”
Half an hour later, the plant’s
first-shift workers were called to assemble in the old cafeteria. A row of
tables spanned the room, separating company officials from the workers. “The
plant’s closing,” Carli said again. He refused to take questions. “They just
dropped the bomb on us,” Jeremiah Hayes, who worked in the plant’s
wastewater-treatment facility, says. He particularly resented the makeshift
barrier: “It was insulting. We felt like a bunch of animals.”
Mike Bink, who started at Master
Lock in 1979, was devastated but not surprised. Months earlier, a co-worker
whose job entailed making steel plates that were fed into a machine to make a
lock body told Bink that the plates were now being shipped to Master Lock’s
plant in Nogales, Mexico. That factory was built in the 1990s, not long after
President Bill Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement into law,
and the company eliminated more than 1,000 of nearly 1,300 union positions in
Milwaukee. “People ran for the gate,” Bink, who was then the president of Local
469, says. “They thought the plant was finished.” Bink managed to hang on, but
NAFTA fundamentally changed the balance of power between Master Lock and its
workers. “A shop floor supervisor would say things like, ‘Get to work, or the
company will take all the jobs,’” Bink recalls. “After the downsizing, the
union lost its leverage.”
The closure of its factory in March,
where it made iconic locks for generations, represents the final stage in
Milwaukee’s long unraveling as an industrial powerhouse, part of a larger
phenomenon, fueled by NAFTA, that has taken place across the country,
particularly in the Rust Belt states. NAFTA eliminated tariffs on trade among
the treaty’s signatories — Canada, Mexico and the United States — allowing for
the unfettered movement of capital and foreign investment.
It ushered in an era
of free-trade agreements that brought cheap goods to consumers and generated
great wealth for investors and the financial sector, but it also increased
income inequality, weakened labor unions and accelerated the hollowing out of
America’s industrial base.
Milwaukee was once known as the
“machine shop of the world.” In the 1950s, nearly 60 percent of the city’s
adult population worked in manufacturing, a vast majority of whom held
well-paying union jobs. In 1969, Milwaukee had the second-highest median income
in the country. By 2021, Milwaukee had lost more than 80 percent of its
manufacturing jobs (barely 5 percent of those that remained were unionized),
and it had the second-highest poverty rate of any large American city, just one
example of NAFTA’s profound impact on American industry and labor.
Deindustrialization has diminished
the wealth, power and health of working-class Americans arguably more than any
other single culprit. While deindustrialization has many causes — in a
recessionary four-year period that ended in the early 1980s, a quarter of
Milwaukee’s manufacturing jobs were wiped out — a central driver has been
free-trade agreements with developing countries, of which NAFTA was the first.
According to a study by the Economic Policy Institute, Americans without
college degrees have lost nearly $2,000 a year in wages owing to trade with
low-wage countries, even after accounting for cheaper consumer goods.
The
economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case have documented how the loss of jobs has
led to falling life expectancy for working-class people: College-educated
Americans can now expect to live eight years longer than those without a
college degree. “I would put that down to deindustrialization combined with the
lack of any political voice,” Deaton told me.
The passage of NAFTA remains one of
the most consequential events in recent American political and economic
history. Between 1997 and 2020, more than 90,000 factories closed, partly as a
result of NAFTA and similar agreements.
The coming presidential election, like
the previous two, is likely to be determined by three of the “blue wall” states
— Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — which have all been ravaged by
deindustrialization. In 2016, Donald Trump won those states, and the
presidency, in part by railing against NAFTA (“the worst trade deal ever,” he
called it). Exit polls showed that Trump won nearly two-thirds of voters who
believe that free trade takes away American jobs. Ohio, meanwhile, which twice
voted for Barack Obama, has increasingly become a Republican stronghold.
Trump’s right-wing populism — an
economic-nationalist blend of opposition to free trade, support for programs
like Social Security, at least rhetorically, and anti-immigrant sentiment
(“virtually 100 percent of the net job creation in the last year has gone to migrants,”
he falsely asserted) — helped pave the way for a new generation of
self-proclaimed “pro-worker” Republicans, including Trump’s vice-presidential
pick, Senator JD Vance of Ohio. Both Vance and Trump denounced NAFTA in their
speeches at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in July. “When I
was in the fourth grade,” Vance said, “a career politician by the name of Joe
Biden supported NAFTA, a bad trade deal that sent countless good jobs to
Mexico.”
Biden has since changed his stance
on such free-trade policy. He defeated Trump in 2020 by narrowly winning back
the three pivotal blue-wall states with a campaign centered on his jobs-focused
Build Back Better plan, which proposed investments in clean energy, social
welfare programs and manufacturing. Though the plan was ultimately defeated in
the Senate, elements of it were incorporated into Biden’s core domestic
legislation, including the Inflation Reduction Act. This May, the Biden-Harris
administration announced that it would extend Trump-administration tariffs on
certain Chinese products and significantly increase duties on others, such as
electric vehicles, to protect American workers and industries. Vice President
Kamala Harris, as the Democratic nominee, has also come out in favor of targeted
tariffs to support American workers.
In July, Biden told the executive
council of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. that he had delivered on his promise to be the
“most pro-union president in history.” Whether that is true — private-sector
union membership is at an all-time low — he has appointed several policymakers
who prioritize labor to powerful positions, including Katherine Tai, the United
States trade representative, a cabinet-level position.
“Master Lock’s story is one that we
know only too well from the last several decades,” Tai told me. “It fits a
pattern of deindustrialization that we’ve been trying to figure out how to
remedy.” Tai has been advocating a “worker-centered” approach to trade to give
labor representatives more input in shaping policy. She points to the 2020
United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement — which renegotiated NAFTA in part to
discourage the outsourcing of jobs to Mexico — as an improvement. The agreement
was passed under Trump, and Tai served as the lead negotiator for congressional
Democrats. She secured several labor-friendly provisions, like expanding
protections for Mexican workers who wish to form a union and engage in
collective bargaining, with fines for companies that violate these rights. But
there is little evidence that these reforms are sufficient to stop the outward
flow of jobs and capital. Stellantis moved production of the Jeep Cherokee from
a plant in Illinois to Toluca, Mexico, in 2023, and CNH, an agricultural
machinery manufacturer, is laying off hundreds of workers in Wisconsin and
moving operations to Mexico.
In his speech accepting the
Republican nomination, Trump boasted that the U.S.M.C.A. was “the best trade
deal ever made.” But to Hayes, the wastewater-treatment worker, it is merely an
extension of the long shadow of NAFTA, which ultimately cost him and hundreds
of other Master Lock workers their jobs. “NAFTA was the beginning of the end,”
Hayes says. “The position of most working-class people now is disenfranchised
and cynical. They saw in real time the results, the way it stuffed them to the
wayside, stripping them of the potential they believed in.”
NAFTA has roots in a long-running battle between two visions of trade
policy: one that emphasizes the unfettered movement of capital and goods, often
at the expense of jobs and wages; another that prioritizes labor and
environmental concerns over growth and profits. After World War II,
policymakers from around the world, including the United States, proposed
creating the International Trade Organization to promote and regulate trade.
Its charter was never ratified, however, in no small part because Senator
Robert Taft of Ohio, the Republican chairman of the committee on labor and
pensions, did not approve of its labor standards and antimonopoly provisions.
Instead, in 1947, the United States signed on to another international
agreement: the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which eliminated many
trade restrictions but included no enforceable labor standards. This vision of
free trade became a cornerstone of neoliberal economics. In 1962, Milton
Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, wrote that free trade abroad was a
means of “linking the nations of the world together, peacefully and
democratically.” It was a “fallacy,” he added, to believe that it would undermine
domestic wages.
By the 1960s, the maquiladora,
or factory, system of U.S.-owned plants’ employing Mexican workers was being
established in a largely tariff-free strip along the U.S.-Mexico border. “NAFTA
legitimized, institutionalized and encouraged what was already taking place,”
Michael Rosen, an emeritus professor of economics at Milwaukee Area Technical
College, says. “It put the government’s seal of approval on it.”
NAFTA, which was heavily influenced
by hundreds of corporate lobbyists, was negotiated and signed by George H.W.
Bush, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney of Canada and President Carlos Salinas of
Mexico in 1992. It needed to be approved by Congress, however. The issue
dominated the 1992 presidential campaign, during which Bill Clinton took a position
between President Bush and the independent candidate Ross Perot, whose
opposition to NAFTA was the centerpiece of his campaign. (In a debate, Perot
predicted a “giant sucking sound” of American jobs going to Mexico if NAFTA
passed; he won 19 percent of the vote, the highest share by a third-party
candidate since 1912.) Clinton said he would support NAFTA only if it included
separate agreements protecting labor rights and the environment. (The
agreements Clinton secured were widely considered hollow; no country has ever
been fined for violating them.) Organized labor and a majority of congressional
Democrats were opposed to NAFTA. Polling showed nearly two-thirds of the
American public were, too.
Clinton said he believed the
agreement would foster an export boom and create a million jobs in the first
five years. The legislation received strong support in the media. “It wasn’t
whether NAFTA was good or bad for the economy,” Rahm Emanuel, a
Clinton-administration lobbyist for NAFTA, says in John R. MacArthur’s “The
Selling of ‘Free Trade,’” published in 2000. “The media were very clear about
what they thought of NAFTA: NAFTA was good; it produced jobs; it’s the future.”
In December 1993, Clinton signed NAFTA into law, after a bitterly contentious
vote in the House of Representatives. (The Senate approved the agreement
handily.) A kind of triumphalist inevitability took hold. “We cannot stop
global change,” Clinton said at the signing. “We cannot repeal the
international economic competition that is everywhere. We can only harness the
energy to our benefit.”
Mickey Kantor, the U.S. trade
representative under Clinton, told MacArthur: “George Bush could have never
passed NAFTA. No Republican President could have because he couldn’t have
brought enough Democrats.”
But the agreement quickly began to cost the
Democratic Party. In the 1994 midterm elections, it lost 54 seats and control
of the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years. While many
factors contributed, NAFTA was clearly one of them. A 2021 study published in
The American Economic Review found that counties dependent on the industries
most affected by NAFTA experienced decreases in total employment of about 6
percent compared with those with little exposure. By 2000, the same study
found, those counties had shifted significantly from Democratic to Republican.
The passage of NAFTA — along with
other Clinton-era measures like the repeal of Glass-Steagall, a Depression-era
law that regulated banks, and the granting of permanent most-favored-nation
status for China, which allowed China to enter the World Trade Organization and
ultimately cost the United States nearly four million jobs — signaled the
Democratic Party’s move away from its working-class, New Deal roots. This
decoupling was worsened by the damage to unions from NAFTA. In 1996, Kate
Bronfenbrenner, the director of labor education research at Cornell University,
conducted a study for the North American Commission for Labor Cooperation,
which found that after the passage of NAFTA, nearly 50 percent of unionization
drives were met with threats to relocate abroad, and that the rate at which
factories shut down after a union was successfully certified tripled.
“The greatest impact of NAFTA is the
threat of moving,” Bronfenbrenner says. “The threat effect is even greater than
the actual moves. It keeps workers from demanding a fair wage; it pushes local
governments to waive zoning laws and environmental regulations to get companies
to stay.” After NAFTA, more than 70 percent of industries that were able to
move their operations threatened to close. Companies sometimes circulated
fliers showing locked gates or maps with arrows to Mexico.
“The penalty from
the National Labor Relations Board was a posting saying, Don’t do that again,”
she says. “Of course that didn’t stop them. It kept escalating.”
Since the passage of NAFTA, the
percentage of private-sector workers who belong to a union has fallen by nearly
50 percent, to 6 percent today. Recent studies have shown that union members
are more likely to vote and less prone to racial resentment. Yet some members
of the Democratic establishment came to embrace the party’s realignment. “For
every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two
moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia,” Senator Chuck Schumer,
the majority leader, said before the 2016 election. “And you can repeat that in
Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”
In July, the day before the start of the Republican National Convention
in downtown Milwaukee, I met Mike Bink outside the desolate plant, whose facade
was adorned with a giant padlock. A machinist, Bink is missing a finger on his
left hand, a legacy of 44 years as a factory worker. Now 64, he started at
Master Lock soon after graduating from high school, 20 years after his father,
a foreman, did.
The company was founded in 1921 by a
Russian immigrant, Harry Soref, who built his plant 18 years later and was
known for generosity toward his workers. Soref died in 1957; his family sold
the plant 13 years later. By the time Bink joined Master Lock, relations
between management and the union had become fraught. In June 1980, the workers
went out on a strike that lasted for 13 weeks. The company brought in
replacements, and picket lines were tense, marked by periodic arrests. The
strike, which ended with wage increases and better benefits, prompted Bink to
get more involved in the union.
In 1981, he traveled on a U.A.W. bus
caravan to Washington to protest President Ronald Reagan’s firing of 11,000
striking air traffic controllers, which effectively broke their union. In
retrospect, he sees the demonstration as too tepid. “We should have been
tipping over monuments,” Bink said. “We didn’t, in today’s words, occupy the
Senate and House office buildings and close ’em down. I’m not saying we should
have done anything violent. Just insisted they address this.”
Labor relations got better at Master
Lock after the strike, with the appointment of a new, sympathetic chief
executive and a plant manager who had worked his way up from the floor. They
gave the union an office at the plant, and the union, in turn, made concessions
to improve productivity and efficiency. “It was as if you flipped a switch,”
Bink said. “Their attitude was more, ‘How would this be different if we worked with
the union?’” Master Lock was always on the lower end of the pay scale for
unionized industrial jobs. “But those years we had our best contracts because
of the cooperation and the working environment.”
By the early 1990s, the plant was
employing some 1,300 union workers; the company’s share of the market had
reached 70 percent. But Master Lock was already beginning to outsource some of
its work to China. After NAFTA was signed, Bink traveled to a U.A.W. conference
in Washington, which was headlined by President Clinton. “There was a lot of
anger about NAFTA in that room,” he recalled. “How could any Democrat who
relies on labor to get elected sign anything that looked like that?”
Then came the big downsizing. “They
lied to us,” Bink told me. “First, they said we’re going to keep 700 people.
Then 400 people. It just got fewer and fewer.” By the end, roughly 200 workers
remained. Moving production to China, meanwhile, had sometimes disastrous
results. In 2000, Master Lock was forced to recall approximately 750,000 gun
locks made in China because the two halves of the locks could be easily
separated without a key.
In the years that followed, the
company, citing rising labor costs in China, brought production of a few parts
back. Slowly, the number of workers at the plant crept back up to 325, though
the pay, particularly for unskilled workers, did not even keep pace with
inflation. In 2012, during the presidential campaign, President Barack Obama
came to Master Lock to celebrate this “insourcing”; he had highlighted the
company in his State of the Union address as running at full capacity for the
first time in 15 years, even though the plant had lost 1,000 workers. Obama’s
re-election campaign centered on reviving American manufacturing, saving the
auto industry from bankruptcy and attacking Mitt Romney for his tenure as chief
executive of Bain Capital, a private equity firm that had bought and closed
plants across the Midwest. “Milwaukee, we are not going back to an economy
that’s weakened by outsourcing and bad debt and phony financial profits,” Obama
told a crowd of a thousand. Bink showed Obama around the cylinder machines,
which could cut to a ten-thousandth of an inch and were built by Master Lock
workers. I asked Bink what the outcome of the visit was. “Nothing,” he said.
“No additional jobs came back.”
At the same time, the union’s
contracts kept getting worse. “Our leverage was our work — until they could do
the work somewhere else,” Bink said. In 2015, the Wisconsin State Legislature
was debating a so-called right-to-work law, which prohibits unions from
requiring workers to pay dues, undermining the union’s finances and bargaining
power. Bink went to a committee hearing hoping to testify, but the hearing was
abruptly cut short by a Republican legislator. A week later, Gov. Scott Walker
signed the law. Bink recalls a foreman saying, “I hope this place does crash —
we can do this work in Mexico.”
As we spoke, Bink hobbled over to
the fence of the shuttered plant. He has had a knee replacement and will get
his other knee replaced soon. “The old guys used to spend their last two years
at work getting repaired,” he said. He pointed to a spot a few feet from the
factory door. “There was a tavern there when I started — a Milwaukee
tradition,” he said, smiling. “These were decent, good jobs. A good place to
work.
We can’t — and should not have to — compete with people making two
dollars an hour.”
Bink is volunteering for the
Democrats in this presidential election, as he has in every presidential
election since 1984. “If my knees are up to it, I’ll knock on doors,” he said.
He hopes that the next Democratic president focuses on helping labor grow.
“President Clinton — he ruled the world,” Bink said. “He had all three branches
of government. He wanted social change. NAFTA was not the social change we
needed. President Obama — he had all three branches of government. He wanted
social change. They relied on us, on labor, to get elected, and they wouldn’t
pull the trigger to make it easy for us to organize.”
Bink stared into the empty parking
lot. He noted that roughly 70 percent of the population now supports labor
unions, the highest figure since the 1960s. “When did social change happen?
When labor was strong,” he said. “Maybe this is arrogant, but if any president
truly wants social change, then hand power back to us.”
Since her first term in Congress, in the late 1990s, Senator Tammy Baldwin
of Wisconsin has been one of the more consistent opponents of free-trade deals,
often battling other Democrats. She was not in Congress during the vote on
NAFTA, but her view of it shaped her vote against granting China permanent
most-favored-nation status. “I thought NAFTA represented a race to the bottom,”
she told me. In 2016, she was one of 12 senators to urge President Obama to
stop pursuing the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a proposed free-trade deal among
12 countries that together accounted for 40 percent of the global economy.
(Trump formally withdrew from the deal on his first day in office.) Under both
the Trump and Biden administrations, Baldwin has successfully pushed to require
certain federally funded infrastructure projects to use American-made products.
“I represent a state that makes things, whether that’s cheese, beer and brats
or motorcycles and locks,” she says. Like other Democratic Rust Belt
politicians who are outspoken critics of free trade — Senator Sherrod Brown of
Ohio and Representative Marcy Kaptur, whose district includes Toledo — Baldwin
has outperformed the Democratic Party in elections.
Last spring, as Local 469 fought to
save the Master Lock plant, the union’s president, Yolanda Nathan, reached out
to Baldwin and other elected officials. Baldwin sent a letter to Attorney
General Merrick Garland and Commissioner Lina Khan of the Federal Trade
Commission, urging them to look at potential antitrust issues arising from
Master Lock’s recent acquisition of a competitor. She met with David Youn, then
the president of Master Lock’s parent company, Fortune Brands, asking him to
reconsider. “I don’t think I got straight answers on why they felt the
necessity to do this,” she told me. “I certainly wasn’t able to change his
mind.” (A spokeswoman for Fortune Brands called the closing “a difficult decision”
that was “in the best interests of our broader business” and said jobs would go
both to factories within the United States and to its “North American
manufacturing operations.”)
Several days after the closing was
announced, Local 469 held a protest at the plant. More than 100 workers and
their supporters, including Mayor Cavalier Johnson of Milwaukee, picketed.
Members highlighted that Fink earned $10 million in 2022. Nathan stood in the
bed of a red pickup truck, next to Johnson. “I’m sorry this is happening to
us,” Nathan said through a bullhorn. “It’s not fair to be told that your hard
work isn’t good enough anymore.” Nathan told me that around this time she heard
a fellow worker sitting in his car crying. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,”
he told her. “I’m the sole breadwinner of my family. My wife doesn’t work. I
have two kids.”
For the plant’s Black employees, who
made up more than 80 percent of the work force, the closing of the factory
followed a particularly painful pattern. Milwaukee has been either the first-
or second-most racially segregated large metropolitan area in the country for
decades — but it was also once a place of working-class Black prosperity. In
1970, the city’s Black median income was the second-highest in the country, behind
Detroit’s; its Black poverty rate was 22 percent lower than the national
average. Nearly 85 percent of Black men between 25 and 54 were employed. Now it
has the lowest Black median household income, the highest Black poverty rate
and the widest racial disparities in prime working-age male employment of the
country’s 50 largest metro areas, according to a recent study by Marc Levine,
an emeritus professor of urban studies at the University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Nathan, who is 44 and wears her hair
in dreadlocks tied back in a ponytail, lives with her wife, a real estate
agent, and has two children. She moved to Milwaukee from Lambert, Miss., when
she was 22 and soon got a job at Master Lock through a temp agency. At the
time, with the weakening of the union, wages at Master Lock had declined
significantly. Nathan started at $9 an hour. “Some people working in fast food
were making more than we were,” she said. “But I loved the job. It was like
family.”
Like most workers, Nathan began in
unskilled production. She moved to different assignments, which came with
raises of seven cents an hour. Eventually, a union officer helped her get into
an apprenticeship program, where she learned to be a screw machine operator.
When the plant’s closing was announced, she was earning $33.46 an hour.
Nathan got a job at the Miller
brewery, now owned by Molson Coors and one of only two large union plants in
Milwaukee. She loads boxes onto a machine that fills them with cases of beer.
She makes $22 an hour. In the mornings, she takes classes at the University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she is studying to be a cardiovascular technician.
“I’m putting myself through school so that I can leave manufacturing,” she
said. “I don’t have hope in it anymore.”
Other former employees, like Chancie
Adams, who had a skilled production job at Master Lock, have become bitter
about politics. Adams is now working at a nonunion metal fabrication plant,
making $10 an hour less than he used to. “You can vote for whoever and be
having all these beliefs, but look at what happened,” he told me outside the
plant. “Look what’s happening. I was here 14 years, and I’m 44 years
old, and I’m starting over.” In 2012, he went door to door gathering signatures
to recall Governor Walker, who had virtually eliminated collective bargaining
rights for public employees, but the plant’s closing has left him skeptical
about political involvement. “I heard the mayor was out here at the protest and
gave a statement about how disgusted he was,” he said. “Well, I ain’t never
heard nothing else from him. It was just to show face. There was no fight for
us.” Though Adams usually votes, this year he won’t. “What for?”
Three miles away, at the Republican National Convention, a double-perimeter
security zone patrolled by heavily armed officers left the nearby streets
almost empty. Jeremiah Hayes met me at a park nearby. Hayes is one of three
former Master Lock employees still working at the plant. A month after it closed,
he was hired by a company that got a contract to decommission Master Lock’s
wastewater facility, which is filled with hazardous materials. “It’s surreal
being back there,” Hayes told me. “It’s so quiet.” We found a small restaurant
across the street from the highest-security zone and went inside to watch
Trump’s speech.
Trump returned to a long-running
theme: the terrifying specter of deindustrialization. “Right now, as we speak,
large factories just started, are being built across the border in Mexico.”
Trump blamed the U.A.W. for “allowing this to happen” and said the union’s
president, Shawn Fain, who endorsed Biden and Kamala Harris, “should be fired
immediately.” He concluded by saying: “To all of the forgotten men and women
who have been neglected, abandoned and left behind, you will be forgotten no
longer.”
Hayes, who typically votes
Democratic, said: “They’re using things like NAFTA as leverage. But they’ve
always done that.”
Oren Cass, the head of American
Compass, a conservative think tank, who is also a former adviser to Mitt
Romney, is the intellectual leader of the “pro-worker” faction in the
Republican Party, which includes JD Vance. He recently wrote a mea culpa in The
Times for ignoring working-class suffering and denounced the long stagnation of
American wages. Yet Cass contributed to the chapter on labor in the Project
2025 initiative, a set of conservative policy proposals for the next Republican
administration. It encourages Congress to consider banning public-employee
unions, roll back child-labor protections and restrict overtime pay. Trump and
Vance each oppose the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which has
languished in Congress and would make it easier to form a union. The Trump
administration threatened to veto the bill and said it would “kill jobs and
destroy the gig economy.”
While Trump has made gestures toward
labor — the convention gave a prime-time slot to Sean O’Brien, president of the
Teamsters, who denounced “greedy employers” and praised Trump for listening to
critical voices, though he didn’t endorse him — his record as president tells
another story. In 2017, at a rally in Youngstown, Ohio, which lost some 50,000
well-paying steelworker jobs over the previous 40 years, Trump promised that
all the empty factories would be “coming back.” Two years later, the last large
plant in the area, a G.M. factory that had recently employed nearly 5,000
people, closed. During Trump’s presidency, the trade deficit grew to its
highest level since 2008, and his 2017 tax cuts incentivized corporations to
offshore jobs by lowering the tax rates on foreign profits. According to Public
Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, more than 300,000 jobs were lost to offshoring
and trade during his presidency.
Perhaps nothing is more symbolic of
Trump’s failed promise to bring back manufacturing jobs than the deal he made
in 2018 with Foxconn, a Taiwanese manufacturer of iPhones and other Apple
products, to build a campus near Milwaukee. Trump said the factory would be the
“eighth wonder of the world,” and he broke ground for its construction using a
gold-plated shovel alongside Representative Paul Ryan, the speaker of the
House, and Scott Walker. The deal was predicated on $4.5 billion in taxpayer
subsidies. Foxconn, which promised to create 13,000 jobs, has so far created
only 1,000.
The day after I watched Trump’s
speech with Hayes, I drove out to see the Foxconn campus. The centerpiece of
the development, a futuristic 100-foot-high glass-and-steel globe, was
surrounded by vast, empty fields. In May, President Biden, who has created
765,000 manufacturing jobs during his presidency, traveled to the area to
highlight a $3.3 billion investment by Microsoft to build A.I. infrastructure
there.
At the Master Lock plant, about 20
miles away, a U.A.W. flag was still flying, but it was at half-mast and badly
frayed. The abandoned factory now looked as foreboding as the surrounding area,
known as the 30th Street Industrial Corridor. It once held more than 20,000
well-paying jobs. Scattered throughout were signs marking infrastructure
projects funded by the Biden administration. In the midst of half a century’s
worth of deindustrialization, these efforts seemed small.
Bink was philosophical. "NAFTA?” he said. “What’s it done? The
movement of wealth from the middle class to the already wealthy hasn’t done
anything for our society.” He thinks a future president might learn something
from what happened at Master Lock. “The people that have been elected — and
I’ll say that generically — haven’t taken care of the working people in the
country.”" [1]
