Industrial Collapse: America Forced to Import Bullets

Since the advent of free trade agreements such as NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement), the United States has lost hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs to countries that pay little more than lip service to worker protection and environmental standards. For the most part, Corporate America has responded with yawning indifference, arguing that American workers need to "adapt and evolve" to a changing global marketplace and retrain themselves for higher skilled jobs. The result has been the hollowing out of many communities throughout Northern California and across the country as jobs move offshore and tax bases dissipate.

These days, there seems to be no winning, for even where American workers have honed the most advanced technological skills anywhere in the world, our government still seems poised to kick them in the teeth.

Once considered the "arsenal of democracy," America's manufacturing base has shrunk so dramatically in the last 40 years that in 2003 we even faced a shortage of the most basic defense materiel - ammunition - forcing us to resort to foreign suppliers in Israel, Taiwan and Britain. This kind of blind outsourcing of critical defense items gives foreign suppliers the equivalent of a veto power on U.S. national security matters.

To a divided Washington bureaucracy, it seems impossible to reconcile free trade with competitive contracting. However, just as American workers have retrained themselves for higher skilled jobs, bureaucrats must retrain themselves as well. Competition may be the fuel of excellence, but if one team is on steroids, then the cause of competition is hopelessly distorted.

*The above article has been excerpted from Rich Michalski’s article “Refueling tanker contract pits trade policies, jobs,” featured in San Francisco Chronicle. Rich Michalski is a vice present of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. Read the entire article at: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/10/24/EDEDCHSUPEN.DTL.