Saying goodbye to manufacturing and factories is a hard thing to do too

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Previously, I described all the factories I worked at while going to college full-time or was associated with over the years. None of them have survived. I also told you that if these jobs were still available today, thousands would be standing in line trying to get them. It is a sad commentary of our times.

Perhaps 1970 represents the turning point in our history. For the most part our factories were still here and many corporations worldwide headquarters in our city were still here too. The computer industry had been launched and those major manufacturers had thousands of workers in branches dotted across our cities throughout the USA. I worked at more than one where there were about a hundred workers just in our branch alone. Here are some of the major players who no longer exist - Honeywell/GE Univac, NCR, Burroughs, Control Data, RCA, Data General, Friden Singer, ( IBM cut about 150,000 workers in 1992 ), Prime, Tandem, Wang Xerox Data -computer group and this is only a fraction of the computer manufacturers who have ceased to exist. I have a list of more at http://tapsearch.com/tapartnews totalling more than a 100 major manufacturers and thousands of smaller ones. More than a million workers lost their jobs in the computer industry alone since then. Most of these jobs went overseas.

Here is the main point. In 1970, a first class stamp cost 8 cents. You could buy a beautiful brand new midsize car like a Mercury Montego for only $3,800 and a decent home that sells for about $160,000 today for only $25,000. $10,000 dollar a year jobs were plentiful. The production workers made that much too. Comparing this with today, there should now be plenty of $60,000 single jobs for workers but obviously, they do not exist. If we go back a bit further into the 1950s and 1960s, the comparisons would even be more disenhearting.

Here is another rub. Most of the old line manufacturers had 50 to 100 year histories. Many of the small enterprises and family business that were located for miles down the main streets of our cities also existed for the same length of time. What happened. They tell us that all these local value added economies were no longer competitive. It happened in a stirred up rapid fashion. Who stirred up this pot of grand betrayal. Do companies and businesses that lasted for 50 to 100 years, all of sudden do not know how to operate businesses or was there an eternal force that forced the surge of free trade and globalization. Who said we had to compete in a global economic arena based on the cheapest labor possible?

In 1992, I found an answer. In reviewing a high tech publication, I found an article about the maquiladora factory program in Mexico and it told how you can move a factory to Mexico and even had a choice where you had to move nothing but contract a factory there to do it all for just one price. The maquiladora factory contractor would provide the workers, the building and the equipment. A company could fire everyone at home except for the main executives.

And then the big part of the story hit me. It noted that the U.S. Federal Government itself sponsored the moving of factories outside of the USA starting in 1956. It was a temporary program that was set to test a way to help out the Mexican and Central American econmies while getting cheaper goods for the American consumers. It was supposed to be a temporary program but it never ended. I have challenged anyone I could to prove this was not the case, but still all our political leaders ignore it with the possible exception of Congressman Dennis Kucinich. For the first few years only a few factories were moved. Then about twenty years later, the program took off. By 1992, more than 2,000 U.S. factories were moved to Mexico alone prior to the passing of the NAFTA free trade agreement. After President Clinton pushed the passage of NAFTA, the program was turned on as warp speed. The number of factories moved to Mexico quickly doubled to 4,000 and the scam of the century and the betrayal of American workers was solidly in place. In 1999, I did this artwork which is now part of more than 3 million search results on Yahoo and Google: