{"id":1309,"date":"2024-12-04T16:37:42","date_gmt":"2024-12-05T00:37:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/savingusmanufacturing.com\/blog\/?p=1309"},"modified":"2024-12-04T16:37:42","modified_gmt":"2024-12-05T00:37:42","slug":"reclaiming-american-manufacturing-take-back-the-middle-class-from-globalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/savingusmanufacturing.com\/blog\/general\/reclaiming-american-manufacturing-take-back-the-middle-class-from-globalism\/","title":{"rendered":"Reclaiming American Manufacturing: Take Back the Middle Class from Globalism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Several years ago, I met Bill Waddell at a Lean Frontiers conference where we were both guest speakers. We kept in touch via LinkedIn and he recently sent me a message about his new book, titled Reclaiming American Manufacturing<\/em>.  His topic was so closely related to the topic of my last book, Rebuild Manufacturing \u2013 the key to American Prosperity that I was anxious to read it to see how he proposed to accomplish our common goal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After reading his book, we had a short conversation via Zoom about how U.S. manufacturing has been devastated in the past 30 years, along with the devastation of the middle class.  His book explains how we got here, and what it will take to set things right again. He draws from his experiences in a long career at the management level of several manufacturers, both domestic and foreign, as well as his experience as a manufacturing transformation consultant in the U.S. and Germany. He started his career in manufacturing in 1978 when he went to \u201cwork for a window and cabinet hardware manufacturer, Amerock, in Rockford, IL \u2013 which had recently been acquired by Anchor Hocking.\u201d He said he loves everything about manufacturing, and I told him, \u201cI do, too,\u201d and I started as an engineering secretary at age 18 for a company that made electronic and electrical components and assemblies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I asked why he wrote the book at this time in his life, and he said, \u201cI had some health problems in the last year so I had the time to do it. For the first time, I wasn\u2019t spending all my time in airports.  Also, rebuilding manufacturing is what both candidates were saying.  I thought it would be timely to put my two cents in from the standpoint of someone who was a manufacturing guy. I don\u2019t know a lot about philosophy or economics, but I thought I could contribute to the discussion from the standpoint of someone who knows a lot about how manufacturing really works and how the decisions are really made about why we are going to build a plant in China rather than the U.S. and why we were not going to move it back.  I thought I had a unique perspective.  It hurts me personally to remember the glory days of manufacturing. I live in the Midwest, and every town around me has empty factories. I know what it could be and what it used to be. I think it is an important issue economically and not only hurts me, but my children and grandchildren. If we are not going to be a manufacturing nation, they will not have the quality of life that I have had.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We shared our experiences with the effects of NAFTA.  Because I read, write, and speak Spanish, I used to sell to the maquiladoras in Baja California prior to NAFTA, but it became too complex and time consuming to continue after NAFTA went fully in effect.  He said he learned the implications of NAFTA when he worked for McCulloch Corporation\u2019s chain saw factory in Tucson, AZ that had a plant in Sonora, Mexico.  He was \u201ctroubled by the openly abusive labor practices\u201d he encountered and \u201cby the poverty of the employees.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He said that when he worked as a consultant at plants owned by American companies in China, \u201cworking conditions were often wretched, and worker safety was often non-existent.\u201d  I said that while I had never been to China, I had described the horrible working conditions in a chapter titled, \u201cWhat Are the Effects of Industrialization on China and India,\u201d in my first book, Saving U.S. Manufacturing<\/em>, based on the research I had done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bill said that he was \u201cvery well acquainted with the people in manufacturing, from American middle managers to Chinese machinists to German engineers to Mexican electrical harness assemblers.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his chapter, \u201cHollowing Out the Middle Class,\u201d he points out that \u201cAccording to the U.S. Census Bureau, manufacturing jobs pay an average of a little over $61,000 a year.  If we look at a weighted average of the Health, Education, Hospitality and Transportation jobs that replaced them, it is only $43,000 and change.  For all practical purposes, 11 million people took an $18,000 a year pay cut \u2013 30% \u2013 and went from the solid middle class to the high end of the lower class.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I agreed with what he wrote in that same chapter about the \u201cbig financial winners in the NAFTA and Ch8ina trade deals have been the big multi-national manufacturers and the banks supporting them [whereas] 95% of American manufacturers are small or medium sized, most with one location, and privately owned \u2013 usually a single owner or a family business.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I resonated with the points he made about NAFTA and the World Trade Organization in his chapter titled \u201cBill Clinton: Globalist in Chief.\u201d He mentions that Clinton had his work cut out to get NAFTA passed by Congress.  While the Democrats controlled both the House and Senate, more Republicans than Democrats supported it.    He \u201cgarnered enough Democrat support to get it passed\u201d with \u201ca pledge to enter into side agreements with Mexico to assure their protection of the environment and human rights to get it done.  They continued to promise that NAFTA\u201d would create as many as a quarter of a million American manufacturing jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bill wrote that this proved to be a lie because \u201cBy the time Clinton left office in 2001, 6 million American manufacturing jobs were gone, and the US trade balance was in a steep dive.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He then describes how President Clinton \u201cset about putting US policy and leadership in line with the World Trade Organization \u2013 WTO \u2013 in 1995\u201d and then in the year 2000, \u201cClinton attained membership for China in the WTO (essentially giving them what used to be known as \u2018most favored nation\u2019 status).\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After defining globalism vs. nationalism in his chapter of the same name, he made a very astute observation: \u201cThe old Democrat Part no longer exists. It would be more accurately called the \u2018Globalist Party. And the old Republican Party no longer exists. It would be more accurately called the \u2018Nationalist Party.\u2019\u201d He states that the globalist ideology that \u201cpeople, goods, and information ought to be able to cross national borders unfettered\u201d to create a new economic order in the world explains everything from free trade agreements to climate change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He then dissects David Ricardo\u2019s Theory of comparative Advantage in his chapter titled \u201cGiving Ivy League Degrees to the Illiterate.\u201d He asserts that \u201cthey all seem to have missed Recardo\u2019s fundamental principle and explains that \u201cthe Theory of Comparative Advantage is not about cheap labor or cheap production \u2013 it is about productivity, as it must be.\u201d He concludes, \u201cIf global trade is based on sending work to the places where workers are the worse paid, the collapse of the economies in the developed national is inevitable.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his chapter \u201cThe Economists New Clothes,\u201d he writes, \u201cThe intellect behind globalism comes from a fairly tightknit group. The Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, Oxford and a handful of other \u2018elite\u2019 schools make up the core of it.\u201d He writes, \u201cThe problem isn\u2019t a lack of intellect. It is lack of any real-world exposure or experience.\u201d  As a result, \u201cthe elite schools have not been in touch with or contributed anything meaningful to manufacturing since the 1980s\u2026\u201d  He asserts, \u201cThe very notion that the Industrial Revolution has ended, or ever will end, is absurd\u2026Manufacturing in this day and age is a very high-tech endeavor not just in a few select highly automated factories \u2013 all of it.\u201d  I told him that this is what I have been asserting in every article I\u2019ve written in the past 20 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his chapter, \u201cIt\u2019s a Matter of Principle as Much as Economics, he describes the oppressive working conditions, human rights abuses, and air and water pollution of the low-cost labor countries like China, Vietnam, Bangladesh, and India.  He comments, \u201cNo one should be surprised that the same countries that have a wretched track record of abusing human rights have atrocious air and water quality, and have their people living in dire poverty, struggling just to eat.\u201d  He concludes that \u201cEvery transaction requires a willing seller and a willing buyer. In globalizing manufacturing, unaccountable leaders were the willing sellers of their countries\u2019 human and natural resources to the willing buyers at the multi-national companies.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His last two chapters provide his solutions for reclaiming American manufacturing, two of which are so unique that I couldn\u2019t do justice to summarizing his explanation of them.\u00a0 I want to make learning about them an incentive to buy and read his whole book.\u00a0 It will be well worth you time and money.\u00a0 You can buy his book from Amazon<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Several years ago, I met Bill Waddell at a Lean Frontiers conference where we were both guest speakers. We kept in touch via LinkedIn and he recently sent me a message about his new book, titled Reclaiming American Manufacturing.  His topic was so closely related to the topic of my last book, Rebuild Manufacturing \u2013 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/savingusmanufacturing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/savingusmanufacturing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/savingusmanufacturing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/savingusmanufacturing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/savingusmanufacturing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1309"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/savingusmanufacturing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1309\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1310,"href":"https:\/\/savingusmanufacturing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1309\/revisions\/1310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/savingusmanufacturing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/savingusmanufacturing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/savingusmanufacturing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}