Urban Restructuring and the Decline of U.S. Manufacturing

The Exploitation of American Labor

A recurrent theme in the study of America's economic history is the decline of its labor force — a workforce that, for a century following the Industrial Revolution, had become a lynchpin of the nation's economy as a whole. Through successive cycles of prosperity and recession, those who engaged in difficult production labor, factory work, and plant operation to power the economy have also most often been the very individuals who first bore the brunt of sagging financial times. Research on this subject delivers with exhaustive consistency the revelation that America's economic system uses, exploits, and abandons its laborers with remarkable inhumane recklessness. Stark and consistent evidence confirms that myriad geo-economic motives are causing manufacturers and corporations to disregard the efforts of their workers. With forces such as globalization, free trade, technological advancement, and the related downward shift in production costs, many companies feel intense pressure to abandon American labor in favor of more cost-competitive alternatives.

Nonetheless, there is a clear pattern by which America's great industrialists have grown wealthy on the backs of laborers whom they will soon dismiss in favor of more profitable alternatives. Were it simply the ethical and human costs that were so deeply apparent, one might find it difficult to demand that manufacturers remain loyal to American laborers — especially given the pressures incumbent upon so many producers stemming from the cheap labor and lower consumer prices that less ethically inclined competitors offer. Yet the problem extends far beyond ethics alone.

The Human Cost of Plant Closures

A useful illustration comes from the story of a knitting mill closure that impacted hundreds of lifetime employees. The pattern of this closing very much follows that which defined economic conditions toward the end of the 1980s, and it mirrors conditions that persist today. After the seemingly spontaneous — from the laborers' perspective — closure of the plant, employees responded with a combined sense of outrage and fear. As the text describes, "as the reality of pink slips and 'last day' bore down on workers, their pain and panic was translated into anger at the company. And as they began the job search in the start of summer 1989, they suddenly realized that the job situation outside the plant was not very good. The county's major manufacturing employer, located in the county seat, was definitely not hiring." (Ch. 5, 3)

If this were simply an ethical issue, there would be little recourse against those who had acknowledged the need to remain cost-competitive within their respective production fields. The experience of the workers who lost their jobs is nonetheless indicative of the deeply unfair dispensability attributed to unskilled laborers — a dispensability that translates into both the capacity to lose a job and the incapacity to locate or obtain a new one.

Corporate Greed vs. Economic Loyalty

It is this latter point that reveals the problem as something far more serious than its ethical implications suggest. The pattern demonstrated in the plant closure described above — an increasingly prevalent feature of what is today recognized as a recession economy — is demonstrative of behavior that is dismantling America's economy as a whole. By simultaneously eliminating its force and value as a production and manufacturing economy, and by eliminating countless jobs that would never return to the American market, the manufacturers that had helped grow the economy for so many generations have now left it without foundation.

As the course readings note, interest in cheaper labor opening up in Mexico drove all manner of manufacturing operations out of the country and into a desperately cheaper labor context. Thus, both then and today, economic recession is being stimulated by the closing and relocation of perfectly healthy and flourishing manufacturing operations. In the cases noted, the resentment and fear felt by workers was grounded in a firm awareness that plant closings during this period of urban restructuring were motivated not by need but by greed. For individual corporations, no such patriotism exists, nor does any rational assumption about the dependencies of such companies on the economic fortitude of the American buying public.