Mollie\'s Job the Viewpoint Expressed in (B)

Mollie's Job

The viewpoint expressed in (b) is the closest to the way this paper will be presented. Indeed the roles that Wall Street (profit first, workers be damned) and the U.S. government played in this nonfiction book are the main reasons why Mollie's job was moved first to Mississippi and then to Mexico. To be sure, this sad legacy could have ended up with a more positive result for Mollie and a less negative result for the Mexican worker, Balbina Duque.

In fairness, statement (a) also has a ring of truth since the way corporations are moving jobs to cheaper locations (like China, where Apple employs many thousands of workers at low wages to assemble the iPads and other technologies) is good for business. But (a) is "not for the best" when it comes to corporate behaviors creating an inevitability that good people like Mollie and other hard-working employees will be sent into the streets notwithstanding their consistently excellent work ethic and loyalty.

Wall Street, the U.S. Government, and greed are to blame for jobs leaving the U.S.

This book isn't the first book to describe the downside of globalization, especially when it comes to workers being laid off, and jobs sent overseas where cheaper labor assures more profits for corporations. Since author William Adler is a journalist, the book has immediate credibility in the sense that he has clearly done his homework and he is a stickler for details. It should be noted that while Mollie and the other two women that took her job (subsequent to the Universal Manufacturing abandoned Paterson, New Jersey) are protagonists in this story, the real story is about how companies move where they can make more money and where they can avoid if at all possible the specter of unions.

It is clear from Adler's descriptive and well-researched narrative that the destructive removal of jobs is not a product of inevitability at all, but rather it results from the way the rules of the game are written and enforced, and among those rules NAFTA sticks out like a sore thumb. The hostility that companies feel towards unions -- and Republican governors in Wisconsin and Ohio have sided with the corporate attack on unions by authoring legislation that thwarts unions' rights -- is based on the very greedy principle of profits over workers.

Adler spends very little space in his book writing about NAFTA, but he does provide smooth, believable narrative in terms of how Millie James' job went from Paterson New Jersey, to Simpson County, Mississippi, and then to Matamoros, Mexico. The laws and the greed of Wall Street made that move possible. Workers were very limited in what they could do to block the closing of their plants, as capital mobility was the driver and right-to-work laws in the South prevented workers from fighting back. Laws in the South give tax breaks to companies that want to move out of the northern and eastern regions of the country (where unions have some power) and into the South where people are paid less, unions are frowned upon, and companies can run roughshod over their workers -- which they do in certain cases.

The author's journalism is descriptive and colorful. Reflecting on why Mollie and her co-workers were tossed out in the street, Adler notes that Universal was swept up "…in the gale winds of Wall Street's merger mania." Twice in eight months, Universal was sold to companies run by associates of Michael Milken, the junk bond king who was noted for being a high-profile corporate raider before being imprisoned for securities fraud. Adler doesn't mention that Milken has dramatically improved his image from the scoundrel he was to the man known today for raising hundreds of millions of dollars for medical research.

That having been said, Milken's disciples made a killing buying Universal and selling it, finally to MagneTek, which opened a factory in Mexico City. Adler describes the Mexico City plant as a "foreign-owned assembly plant that wed[s] first-world engineering with third-world working conditions." The job that Mollie worked (as the first female union steward in Paterson) and was paid living wages -- "…the job that fostered and valued her loyalty, enabled her to rise above humble beginnings, provide for her family…does not pay Balbina Duque a wage sufficient to live on" (Adler).

Hence over and over again Adler makes the concept of "free trade" sound like it was created deliberately to snuff out unions and take away workers' rights. He rails -- in his intelligent journalistic tone -- against Wall Street so often one wonders if he was one of the thousands of protesters camped in parks across the country in the "Occupy" movement. Readers clearly get the picture that evil has been done in the name of "free trade" and capitalism. Reading about Mollie's job that now has been passed on to Balbina Duque is a lesson in pathos not only in the sense of her tiny wages, but managers "goose stepping" around the Mexican factory bring a chilly whiff of Nazi Germany into the picture.