Throughout the 2000s, unions progressively gave up wages and benefits that they’d previously won. It was a dramatic reversal from the days of Henry Ford, who had paid his workers a high daily wage in order to reduce turnover and the need to train new workers. Fordism, as it came to be called, created a virtuous cycle in which workers earned enough to save up and buy a car, increasing the demand for the company’s products. Free trade with China produced the opposite effect: a Walmart economy in which workers are paid so little that they can’t afford to shop anywhere else.
