[This new book is a history of the struggle over trade policy, and
the impact of trade policy on U.S. society, from 1974 to the present.
] [[link removed]]


PORTSIDE CULTURE

FRAYING FABRIC: HOW TRADE POLICY AND INDUSTRIAL DECLINE TRANSFORMED
AMERICA  
[[link removed]]


 

Robert D. Parmet
December 28, 2022
The New York Labor History Association
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ This new book is a history of the struggle over trade policy, and
the impact of trade policy on U.S. society, from 1974 to the present.
_

,

 

_Fraying Fabric
How Trade Policy and Industrial Decline Transformed America_
James C. Benton
University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 978-0-252-08672-4

A native North Carolinian who is now director of the Race and Economic
Empowerment Project at Georgetown University, James C. Benton
witnessed the decline of the apparel and textile industry where he was
born.  In this book he examines the trade and protection policies of
government and labor that contributed to the plight of such
manufacturing across the United States.  An industrial disaster
befell the nation in the late twentieth century, and he attempts to
explain it.

Benton opens by discussing 1974 to the present, when international
agreements facilitated increased global trade and precipitated a
populist revolt.  What occurred was a devastating drop in United
States manufacturing that in part eventually helped Donald Trump
ascend to the presidency in 2016. Beginning with the 1930s, the author
discovers Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal neglecting workers’
rights through policies that lowered trade barriers.  FDR was
influenced by Cordell Hull, his Wilsonian free trade secretary of
state.  Lest organized labor object to the loss of job protection
from imports, its hand was weakened by a failure to gain clout by
organizing the South and a schism that cost the American Federation of
Labor nearly a dozen industrial unions that created a rival
federation, the CIO.

With the end of the Second World War came additional forces that
weakened worker protection.  The nation dominated trade, became
preoccupied with global economic recovery, sponsored international
cooperation, and limited unions through the Taft-Hartley Act.  In
addition, another disaster, Operation Dixie represented another failed
attempt to organize southern workers, notably Blacks.  Meanwhile, the
Cold War with the Soviet Union produced a “Red Scare” at home and
competition abroad for the allegiance of the world’s developing
areas. Demonstrating his own belief in the international economy, in
1962 President John F. Kennedy could hail the passage of the Trade
Expansion Act of 1962 as a legislative achievement

The 1960s also brought major upheavals, including assassination, urban
and campus unrest, and a costly and divisive war in Vietnam. As
turmoil raged, imports and prices surged, and workers sought
protection. Benton observes a growing uneasiness over the growing
level of imports that undermined Kennedy’s and then Lyndon
Johnson’s aim “to use trade as an instrument of Cold War
policy.”  American garment and textile unions, such as the United
Textile Workers of America (UTWA), International Ladies’ Garment
Workers Union (ILGWU) and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America
(ACWA), convinced that their and the nation’s prosperity were under
attack, bitterly fought imports. Nevertheless, hesitant to antagonize
manufacturers who feared trade disruption and foreign retaliation, the
Johnson Administration opposed quota legislation.  Meanwhile, the
onset of globalization became apparent.

Benton brilliantly traces the politics and mistakes that marked the
1970s. In particular, he cites the Multifiber Arrangement (MFA) of
1974, aimed at textile job protection, but loaded with
“loopholes.”  Designed to place a ceiling of 6 percent on
incoming textiles, it suffered from omission of textile-producing
sources and “evasion.”  United States textile importation
advanced as industry declined.  “International competition, new
technologies, new production methods, and marketing methods all posed
steep challenges to the domestic textile industry.”  Recognizing
immediately that the MFA was flawed, the 117 nations that had
subscribed to it substituted the World Trade Organization Agreement on
Textiles and Clothing (ATC) to phase out all textile tariffs by
2005.  As the duties ended, the number of apparel and textile workers
in the United States declined by nearly ninety percent by 2022.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), negotiated in 1993,
established a free trade zone between the United States, Canada and
Mexico.  It exacerbated the job losses and increased the level of
protest that had been building for several years.  Meanwhile, the
strength of organized labor continued to plummet, having suffered a
devastating blow in 1981 when President Ronald Reagan dismissed 11,000
striking air traffic controllers.  The workers’ world seemed to
shrink as Congress deregulated the airline and trucking industries,
manufacturing plants closed, and lower trade barriers remained
attractive to “the elite within the Democratic Party,” which
“signaled” that it was “continuing its retreat from organized
labor and its embrace of neoliberal economic policies.”

In sum Benton’s account relates a tale of despair and frustration. 
Without heroes or villains, and based on impressive archival research,
it is a model of scholarship.  Moreover, it is a work that must be
read to understand the fall of the economic order by the “new era of
globalization” and the political consequences that accompanied it.

Robert D. Parmet is Professor of History, York College, The City
University of New York.

* International trade
[[link removed]]
* Trade Policy
[[link removed]]
* organized labor
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit portside.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 



########################################################################

[link removed]

To unsubscribe from the xxxxxx list, click the following link:
[link removed]