What The Hell America!

Shawn Fain

It’s completely decimated the manufacturing base in this country, and it’s a big reason why we have the situation politically we have right now. When I grew up in Kokomo, Indiana, General Motors was a major employer there. As a child growing up, most of my family worked there — two of my grandparents, aunts and uncles. There were 15–17,000 jobs in GM, just in my small town at that time.

When NAFTA was put in place in 1994, you started to see those jobs disappear. And not just there, but all over the Midwest, all over this country. Since NAFTA’s inception, over 90,000 manufacturing plants have disappeared in this country. When you talk about auto in particular . . . the Economic Policy Institute did a study years ago. For every 100 automotive jobs, there are 700 secondary jobs born out of them. So when those 100 auto jobs disappear, 700 other jobs disappear.

You multiply that times millions, it’s not hard to see why we’re in the situation we’re in. Look at Flint, Michigan. Look at Ohio. Look at Wisconsin; look at Pennsylvania. Look all over the Midwest and really all over the country: all those industries have just vanished, and not because it’s better for working people. The argument for NAFTA back then was all these Nobel laureate economists and former presidents saying, “It’s gonna be great. It’s gonna create 400,000 jobs in America in the first year. It’s gonna raise the standard of living for Mexican workers and American workers.” Everything that played out is exactly the opposite.

It’s what Ross Perot said in the debate between Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, and Perot back in 1992, when he said, “We’re going to hear a giant sucking sound of all of our jobs going south.” It’s exactly what happened. We’ve seen that the standard of living for Mexican workers has been cut in half since NAFTA went into effect, and also the standard of living for American workers has been reduced.

In this past election, we talked about the swing states; the core of the swing states that were going to deliver the election was Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio. You look at how all those states went, and there’s a reason why. In my first twenty-eight years as a UAW member, working at Chrysler, all I saw was plants closed year after year, and I feel a rage to this day about how we’ve been cheated. So when you see a person like Donald Trump come along and start talking about tariffs and trade, and people still are [being threatened with] their plants being closed, that spoke to people.