Who Wants to Work in a Factory?

NY Times reporter Eduardo Medina went to South Carolina to get some straight talk about manufacturing in America:

In the 1970s, when the Upstate region of South Carolina was known as the textile capital of the world, Adolphus Jones would clock in for grueling summer shifts at one of the many mills in Union, his hometown.

Trains roared around him, transporting materials around the country. Chimney stacks on the red brick mills stretched dozens of feet high, like flag poles. This was textile country, and the cities of Union, Spartanburg and Greenville were at the heart of it.

By the end of the 1990s, automation and cheaper labor overseas took the industry away from the state. Union’s economy cratered, as did most of the region’s. But leaving Sunday church service on a recent afternoon, Mr. Jones, now 71 and retired, scoffed at President Trump’s vision of an American manufacturing revival through tariffs. The mill work had paid little, Mr. Jones recalled, and upward mobility was nonexistent.

“The textile industry is dead,” he said, buttoning his wool suit made in Italy. “Why would you want to bring it back here? Truthfully, why would the younger generation want to work there?”

Many retirees still remember what it was like to work in the textile mills. It had a negative connotation, said Rosemary Rice, 70, with some workers derogatively called “lint heads” because they would come home covered in cotton shreds. Many developed “brown lung disease,” or byssinosis, a respiratory condition caused by ingesting dust particles from fabric materials.

“I wouldn’t want my son working there,” said Ms. Rice, who lives in Union.

Actually, there is one group of Americans who might want tough, badly-paid factory work: recent immigrants. Let's look back to the cat-eating Haitians of Springfield, Ohio, about whom the factory owner said, 

I was I had thirty more. Our Haitian associates come to work every day. They don't have a drug problem. They will stay at their machine. They will achieve their numbers. They are here to work. And so, in general, that's a stark difference from what we're used to in our community.

So, you know, if Trump is serious about bringing back textile and other low-end manufacturing, he should open the borders. I imagine the irony of this would be lost on him.

Not, of course, that manufacturing is disappearing from America. Most of it is kind that doesn't use many workers, like chemicals, but some of it does. Like assembling cars:

Today, companies like BMW and Michelin — from Germany and France — are the economic engines of the region. Since BMW opened its plant in Spartanburg County in the early ’90s, it has invested more than $14.8 billion into its South Carolina operations. The plant has more than 11,000 jobs, its largest single production facility in the world, according to the company. And it is the country’s largest car exporter by value, with $10 billion in shipments last year.

So the local business community was stunned when the White House’s top trade adviser, Peter Navarro, attacked BMW’s manufacturing process in an interview this week. He told CNBC on Monday that “this business model where BMW and Mercedes come into Spartanburg, S.C., and have us assemble German engines and Austrian transmissions — that doesn’t work for America. It’s bad for our economics. It’s bad for our national security.”

“There was widespread bewilderment in our community about that,” said Carlos Phillips, the president and chief executive of the Greenville Chamber of Commerce.

In response to Mr. Navarro’s comments, South Carolina’s governor, Henry McMaster, told reporters this week that ever since BMW arrived in the state with well-paying jobs, other companies had followed suit and “sent the word out around the world that this is a great manufacturing state.”

So the Trump team wants manufacturing, except not the kind that actually takes place in the US.

Speaking of which, Trump has also launched a savage assault on a big category of successful American exporters: defense firms. Spooked by Trump's erratic, pro-Putin stance, European countries have already cancelled billions of dollars worth of orders for US fighter jets and other weapons and launched a major initiative to produce more of their weaponry in Europe.

Which pretty much sums up the problem with MAGA politics: the denial that there is a world out there, full of people and nations with their own agendas who will not simply roll over and do whatever it is that Trump & Co. fantasize they should do. The world is complicated, and all the evidence to date is  that MAGA is too simple-minded a movement to grapple with it successfully.