Dinner parties were quite the thing back in the ‘80s. Women were entering corporate jobs en masse and medical honchos were trumpeting the dubious notion that wine was the new health elixir. Bottoms up! We had lots to talk about and did so, frequently long into the night.
At one such event at my house the issue of trade came up, though nobody called it that back then, opting for the more politically ambiguous “globalization” instead. A former colleague, sitting across the dining room table from me on this particular night, had recently taken a PR job at Levi Strauss. As a history refresher, Levi closed nearly 60 of its U.S. manufacturing plants in the ‘80s, ultimately resulting in one case in a 1990 class-action suit alleging that Levi had closed its San Antonio, Texas, plant and decamped to Costa Rica to avoid paying pension, disability, and other benefits to its workers. This is capitalist America; the case was ultimately dismissed.
At some point during dessert, my former colleague and newly minted Levi employee looked up and declared that Levi had moved its manufacturing plants to Central America to “provide a higher standard of living” to its new Central American employees. Mid-bite into my flan, I looked at her blearily across the empty wine bottles and, suspecting she’d drunk deep of her new company’s Kool-Aid, said, “You can’t honestly believe that horseshit.” Instead of cutting her losses she doubled down with descriptions of worker living conditions pre-Levi plant ─ the dirt floors, the no-electricity, no-clean-water misery of it ─ all wiped out courtesy of Levi’s corporate benevolence: Big Bwana, anyone? There was probably a grain of truth in that last part, but Levi didn’t move its plant to low-wage Central America to improve the lives of its people; the company moved its plant to make more money.
I have never believed in the inevitably of “world trade” as envisioned in the Go-Go Eighties. Maybe it’s my mother’s whispers that the United States doesn’t stand for poverty wages and inferior goods. Maybe it’s the simple reality that if you’re a rich country you have nowhere to go but down and if you’re a poor country you have nowhere to go but up, standard-of-living wise. In the American mission to turn every man, woman, and child on Earth into a bargain-hunting shopping machine, in retrospect not enough attention was paid at the time to what would become of the American manufacturing workers who lost their good-paying manufacturing jobs in the interests of higher corporate profits and abundant consumer goods produced by offshore cheap labor. Economists today bloodlessly describe the American evolution from a manufacturing to a “service” economy as if low wages, no benefits, and no possibility of advancement were all inevitable. A Forbes analysis published last year summarized this shift, based on a U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics periodic report: Despite being a leading driver of employment growth for decades, manufacturing has shed employment over the past 40 years as the U.S. economy has shifted to service-providing industries. In June 1979, manufacturing employment reached an all-time peak of 19.6 million. In June 2019, employment was at 12.8 million, down 6.7 million or 35 percent from the all-time peak.
It’s time to set the record straight. Business doesn’t care about you, and never has. This is not an equal relationship though nobody describes it publicly like that these days, laboring as we do beneath a cloying miasma of non-confrontational public politeness. You may love your local businesses; you may even call their owners your friends. But they will disappear in an eye-blink, just like corporations, if they stop making money ─ because that’s what business is about, even spending a portion of its cherished profits on feel-good TV ads featuring pigeons, deer, and emus to open your wallet. The proliferation of animals in advertising is telling; even the lowly chipmunk has been judged more credible in the marketing arena than a human being, something Trump might learn something from if he were even a marginally thinking human himself.
Our only real protection (short of revolution) from this capitalist tsunami is the law, which our republic’s founders correctly assumed were needed to protect citizens from inevitable capitalist greed, by its nature insatiable. It’s that pressure on our assumed protectors that is perhaps the most troubling element of the Trump monarchy, which recently released statements touting the weakening of the laws that restrain business from its basest instincts, laws that determine the safety of our food and pharmaceuticals, the cleanliness of our water and air, and thousands of other things that collectively determine the quality of our lives. The New York Times recently summarized this very issue, stating that, “A combination of firings, stop-work orders and litigation pauses has hobbled regulators like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, and the Securities and Exchange Commission.” And those are just a handful of the government-created agencies charged with protecting us from greedy, soulless power mongers like Donald Trump.
I was called for jury duty at the height of the 1980s version of what was called “globalization.” We potential jurors crowded into a courtroom for questioning by the judge, a process known as voir dire, presciently from the French for “to tell the truth.” One such potential juror told the judge that he was a corporate supervisor and that global competition made it impossible for him to miss any work. The judge paused a moment, turned a baleful eye to him, and replied, “The interests of justice are never secondary to the interests of commerce.”
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