American Made, Farah Stockman, 2021, 418 pages, ISBN 9781984801166
Puts a human face on the harm done by profit-maximizing trade deals.
A New York Times reporter follows three laid-off workers: a white man, a white woman, and a black man, after their Indianapolis bearing-factory jobs were exported to Mexico in 2016-2017.
So doing, she comes to understand the lives and thinking of working-class people, and why they vote as they do.
Very readable.
One minute, you're living the dream. The next minute, you don't have anything left. p. 76.
FREE TRADE
Our government sold out our jobs. pp. 192, 195, 197, 210-211.
The U.S. lost 2 million to 5 million jobs due to free trade with China, largely in the Rust Belt and the South. Hardest-hit towns have high rates of childhood poverty, single motherhood, deaths of young men from alcohol and drugs, and reliance on public assistance. p. 190.
By 2010, the U.S. had lost 700,000 factory jobs because of NAFTA. --Economic Policy Institute. p. 189.
Unions have had to give up previously-won wages and benefits, against threats of plant closure. p. 191.
NAFTA lets U.S. agribusiness sell government-subsidized corn in Mexico, driving more than a million Mexican farmers out of work. p. 227.
Nearly 9% of Mexican citizens live in the U.S., as of 2021. p. 188.
Job loss is due to "the invisible hand," say CEOs. But when banks fail, they get a visible handout. p. 196.
Somebody's lower wage is somebody else's higher profit. pp. 246-247.
Of the 3 million American workers who were displaced from long-term jobs between January 2015 and 2017, about 2 million found jobs by the following year. But only half of those who'd found employment were earning as much as they'd been making before. p. 341.
About 40% of American workers labor in low-wage jobs with little security. 26 million Americans filed for unemployment in the spring of 2020. pp. 346-347.
MONOPOLY
A Japanese company sold bearings to the U.S. Navy so cheaply that American competitors went out of business. Then the Japanese company jacked up the price. p. 174.
China subsidized steel exports, undercutting American steel. pp. 174, 194.
SPOT THE LESSER EVIL
Working-class people saw clearly that Clinton and his new-Democrat ilk are not on the side of ordinary Americans. They enact trade treaties that incent moving jobs to lowest-wage, lowest-environmental-protection, lowest-corporate-tax, lowest-worker-rights countries. When Donald Trump in 2016 said he'd stop it, they wanted to believe him; many of them voted for him. He was lying (as was Clinton in 1992, "I'm the change agent"), but they voted him in.
ME FIRST
If one person drives another to a bank and forces him to borrow money and hand it over, it's called larceny; if a private equity firm does it, it's called leverage. Shareholders are anonymous and omnipotent. (Meaning their hoarded wealth is.) pp. 219-220.
Whoever has the most money is going to get what they want. p.
132.
When a company demands pay cuts, the union accepts a two-tier pay scale: future hirees will get lower pay for their whole careers. The adversely-affected workers can't vote against the contract: they haven't been hired yet. p. 124.
Although U.S. law banned debtors' prisons in 1833, judges routinely send people to jail for failing to pay doctors, lawyers, and car dealers. p. 142.
Capitalism rewards people who have capital. p. 300.
WOMEN
A rich woman had the resources to leave an abusive man. A poor woman had to bide her time. p. 85.
Women were added to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, a poison pill meant to ruin its chances, but the law passed. p. 97.
About 3 million U.S. women worked in manufacturing in 2016. Yet the urgent needs of blue-collar women for quality childcare, paid medical leave, and more flexible work schedules rarely made it into the national conversation, perhaps because the professional women who set the agenda already enjoyed those benefits at their jobs. p. 98.
Availability of well-paid jobs boosts the incidence of marriage for men. Contrarily, /high-earning/ women prioritize careers over children, and married women stop working to raise kids. Always, the less stable the job prospects, the more fragile the family. We now have so many single mothers who must work, women with children are more likely to work full-time than the overall population. Two paychecks are needed for a middle-class life, if not just to survive. pp. 156-158.
BLACKS
As soon as blacks and women got factory-job opportunities, those jobs started moving, first to the South, then overseas. p. 113.
Nearly 1/3 of young black men were in prison or on probation or parole, as of 2016. Which closes doors to all but menial work. p. 114.
To the union representative, the world wasn't divided between black and white but between capital and labor. p. 153.
VOTE YOUR CLASS
Barack Obama won only 29% of counties with a Cracker Barrel, but 77% of counties with a Whole Foods. pp. 161-163.
The author thinks that masters' and doctoral degrees are largely the /cause/ of financial success. p. 163. In truth, holding such degrees is the /result/ of one's family's financial success.
The class of credentialed professionals feels entitled to rule, though divorced from ordinary people's economic realities. Democrats are into credentialism. Not Republicans. p. 164.
"The world will look more like Downton Abbey, with people having all kinds of servants" --a hedge-fund manager. p. 166.
Trump was a hillbilly in a suit. p. 167.
Hillary Clinton called the working class, "deplorables." p. 185.
MEXICANS
The company could pay 16 Ricardos for the cost of one Shannon. p. 232.
Tadeo concluded that there was something rotten about it all--not just this company but the global financial system. p. 230.
Immigration redistributes wealth from those who compete with immigrants to those who use immigrants. From employee to employer. p. 247.
WHY TRUMP?
The genesis of the book was in the author's assignment to cover what was presumed to be Hillary Clinton's triumph in November 2016. When it went wrong, no one in the coastal elite understood why those yayhoos in flyover country voted for Trump. Her editors sent her to find out.
She listened to some of Trump's 2016 voters. The tens of millions of lost jobs, and many closed businesses, of the 2020 pandemic, torpedoed Trump's reelection. p. 347.
"The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men." --Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1933 inaugural speech. p. 350.