My Turn: Beware claims of 'free trade'

By Michael C. Tuggle

“Free Trade” agreements create jobs. Our area witnessed a vivid illustration of this in November 2005, when the brick walls of the massive Pillowtex Plant No. 1 in Kannapolis crumbled to the ground. Four thousand pounds of dynamite in shaped cartridges detonated to create a series of controlled explosions that shattered critical supports throughout the structure, and gravity did the rest. Spectators gasped and yelled in response to the succession of booms, and at the huge crumbling sections that slammed to earth with so much force, they blew dust even higher than the towering smokestacks that stood untouched nearby. But all then gazed in silence at the eerie precision of the collapsing structure, which dropped exactly as the engineers of the D.H. Griffin Wrecking Company planned.

It was Griffin’s second-largest demolition job in the company’s history. Its largest was the World Trade Center cleanup. Nine months later, it took down the twin smokestacks.

When Fieldcrest executives first announced the closing in 2003, workers gathered at the plant for weeks afterward during lunch breaks and days off to hold prayer vigils. When the plant closed, 4,300 workers lost their jobs, the largest single layoff in North Carolina history. The Kannapolis area still has not recovered. While the state unemployment rate just increased to 9.7 percent, Kannapolis struggles with a rate of 12.3 percent.

Even supporters of the North American Free Trade Act, which had eliminated tariffs between the US, Canada, and Mexico, admitted Washington’s free trade policies were to blame. Economist Michael L. Walden, in an article entitled, “Pillowtex: Don’t forget the benefits of freer trade,” identified “lower-cost foreign labor” as the reason so many American textile and apparel jobs had vanished overseas. From 1997 to 2002, North Carolina lost 100,000 textile and 70,000 apparel jobs.

Now a similar trade agreement threatens even more jobs. If Congress approves it, President Obama’s U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement (KFTA) will extend the principles of NAFTA to South Korea. Supporters in academia and think tanks claim its passage will boost economic growth by opening markets and reducing trade restrictions — the same assurances President Bill Clinton gave American workers and small business owners about his NAFTA treaty.

Perhaps this time Americans should consider the actual, as opposed to the theoretical, effects of this type of trade arrangement. Fortunately, many seemed to have learned from NAFTA, and are taking action. An unusual coalition opposes this agreement, including Ford Motor Co. and the Chrysler Group. Chrysler announced its concerns by first noting that it has “supported every free trade agreement negotiated by the U.S. government,” but cannot support a trade agreement that is unfairly tilted toward Korea. Workers feel similar concerns. The AFL-CIO calls the KFTA the “last thing working people need.”

Because the agreement does not adequately open US exports to Korean markets, businesses and workers in the Carolinas face even more direct losses from this proposed trade agreement. North and South Carolina are still home to 42.4 percent of the nation’s textile workers, and textiles are South Korea’s second-largest export. Just as troubling is the aggressive growth of South Korea’s automobile industry, which is now the fifth-largest in the world. South Carolina alone has more than 30,000 people in automotive-related manufacturing.

As bad as this agreement is for American workers, things could get even worse. With North-South reunification a growing possibility, another 21 million desperately poor people from North Korea could provide a vast supply of cheap labor, all eager to work for far less than American workers.

So the next time we hear a tenured economist paint a rosy picture of what free trade agreements can do for the economy, let’s remember the effect shaped cartridges of dynamite have on factories. And let’s also bend some ears in Congress so our representatives hear from workers and business owners as well as the “experts” who gave us NAFTA.

Michael C. Tuggle is a political writer living in Charlotte.

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