Making It in America: The Almost Impossible Quest to Manufacture in the U.S.A. (And How It Got That Way)

by Rachel Slade

To be independant [sic] for the comforts of life, we must fabricate them ourselves…. He therefore who is now against domestic manufacture must be for reducing us either to dependance [sic] on that foreign nation, or to be clothed in skins…. Experience has taught me that manufactures are now as necessary to our independance [sic]as to our comfort. —Thomas Jefferson, during the War of 1812

By the 1960s, roughly one third of the American workforce was unionized, and Americans made nearly everything they wore.

The Friedmans repackaged Smith’s so-called invisible hand, a divine force that led humans to act selfishly, which paradoxically would lead them down the most beneficial path. In fact, Smith mentions the invisible hand only three times. Most importantly, he uses it only to refer to domestic industries, not international trade. Smith argued that when entrepreneurs are bound to place, they keep their money in their community.

Adam Smith would have scoffed at the Friedmans’ oversimplification of his precepts, especially the childlike belief that unchecked globalization—multinational corporations financed by free-floating capital—would lead to a harmonious future.

Another alarming new feature baked into NAFTA: the agreement gave foreign investors the right to sue a nation for implementing environmental, labor, and health regulations that the investors believed undermined their profits. As such, it was a grand free trade experiment that created a radically new model, one that privileged corporate power over government sovereignty and organized labor.

As a result, the first victims of this iteration of free trade in the U.S. were the highly trained women, mostly people of color living in rural communities, who once made America’s shirts, pants, jeans, underwear, and sweatshirts.

Since NAFTA’s implementation, more than 60,000 American manufacturers permanently shut their doors. Five million American manufacturing jobs vanished between 1994 and 2013. In textiles alone, more than a million manufacturing jobs evaporated between 1990 and 2019.

Americans who had worked good-paying manufacturing jobs were forced to take new low-paying, low-skill service sector jobs. From 2001 to 2003, the average manufacturing worker’s income plummeted from $40,154 to $32,123 when that person was reemployed in the service industry, a 20 percent drop in earnings. In general, U.S. workers without college degrees (more than 65 percent of the workforce) lost about 12.2 percent of their wages under NAFTA-style trade, even after adjusting for the benefits of cheaper goods. That means any worker, not just in manufacturing, who earned $27,000 before NAFTA is now earning the equivalent of $23,700. With recent inflation, that spending power is further diminished.

Whenever we buy stuff made abroad, we leave a lot of questions unanswered. Was someone exploited to make that thing? Did they earn a living wage? Did they have the freedom to leave the factory when they needed to? Did they have access to protections in the factory, like masks or helmets? Did they have a safe place to report sexual harassment? Did they get regular breaks? Were they expected to work reasonable hours? What happened when they got sick or their children fell ill? Was the factory building even safe?

Buying foreign-made goods allows us to ignore the environmental impact of our choices as well. Textile manufacturing is the second-most-polluting industry in the world. While American factories are highly regulated, developing countries lack the political will, resources, or international permission to monitor everything that goes on. (The WTO, for example, is forever on the watch for environmental or labor laws that could be said to impede free trade.) Fabric dyes, which can be quite toxic, might be dumped into the closest river, turning a region’s water supply lethal. It’s precisely that lack of regulation in developing countries which contributes to making some foreign goods so cheap to produce.

Two days after Robert Kennedy announced his presidential candidacy in 1968, he gave a speech at the University of Kansas which included this remarkable passage: “Even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task. It is to confront the poverty of satisfaction, purpose, and dignity, that afflicts us all. Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things.

Yet the Gross National Product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.”

The age-old strife between laborers and employers had been escalating for decades in the United States, but up to that point American law focused on protecting property rights and taxation, certainly not on the rights of working people. They were essentially an unprotected class. The Constitution had been written by men in a preindustrialized society where one in five people were enslaved and the majority of paid workers had been trained through an apprentice system that could be considered a form of indentured servitude. That’s why in early America, the concept of workers’ rights was unknown. Sailors who tried to desert their ships were hanged. Servants were beaten. Young apprentices might be underfed and abused.

By 2018, the U.S.’s annual trade deficit to China was $419 billion. It’s critical to recognize that what happened to American manufacturing over the past two decades was not the organic by-product of free market policy. The Chinese government, in particular, eager to get a foothold in the lucrative American market, subsidized every step of the way so that its producers could sell their exports for less than they cost to make, a process called “dumping.” Foreign goods were cheaply transported to the U.S. on government-subsidized ships that sailed from government-subsidized ports. That China ruthlessly flaunts international rules to dominate global manufacturing is now common knowledge. In November 2022, the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) released a report encouraging American policymakers to revive Depression-era tariffs to save domestic industry from “China’s unfair trade practices.”

The last time Americans had been so chronically dependent on imports was when they were a colony of the British Empire.

In the early twentieth century, Oklahoma had a large Black and Native American population, many of them farmers, many of whom were socialists. When oil was discovered on the Osage reservation, tribe members became very wealthy, an affront to the white people who had come to Tulsa looking for work in the oil boom town. After much lobbying, the state government decreed that the Osage weren’t sophisticated enough to handle that kind of money and assigned white “handlers” to assist tribe members with their affairs. Dozens of tribe members would be murdered in the early 1920s by contract killers, leaving their land and oil rights to their white caretakers.

Trumka saying on the plane home from Evansville, “Greed is a real thing. It doesn’t care about people.”

Ben didn’t know what was next, but he felt an insatiable drive to create the world he knew was possible, a world based on making. “There’s no difference between the women and men who walk into this country with nothing more than the shirt on their back and my ancestors who came through Ellis Island,” he says. “The American dream got lost and we need it now, more than ever. America’s just got to look in the mirror and say, Okay, we can do this. We can make paper here. We can make steel. We can make cotton. We can do those things.”

The subprime lending fiasco that Springsteen wrote about had been the result of deregulation. About a decade earlier, financial institutions lobbied Congress to repeal what remained of the Glass-Steagall Act, Depression-era legislation that prevented commercial banks from making risky investments with depositors’ money. Once Congress cut the brake line, big banks began finding increasingly creative ways to juice their profits. Some started bundling good mortgages with risky ones and selling them as AAA mortgage-backed bonds to pension funds, hedge funds, and mutual funds, the main investment vehicle for 401(k)s. Rating agencies looked the other way.

In the wild days of unregulated industrialization, disaster sometimes struck. In January 1860, the Pemberton Mill, a five-story brick and iron building, collapsed under the weight of new industrial machinery the owners had piled onto the second floor in search of greater profits, killing at least eighty-eight people in what would be deemed one of the worst industrial accidents in American history. The twisted iron, piles of broken bricks, and massive machinery trapped more than six hundred women and children in a scene of horror. As evening approached, rescuers built bonfires to aid their search, revealing “faces crushed beyond recognition, open wounds in which the bones showed through a paste of dried blood, brick dust, and shredded clothing,” recorded an observer. The year before the accident, the millworkers earned their shareholders the equivalent of $42 million.

Polartec was the high-tech textile branch of Malden Mills that made PolarFleece. Since the documentary about Feuerstein came out, things had changed dramatically. China began dominating textile manufacturing and the banks called in Malden’s loans. Mired in debt, Aaron lost control of his company to a private equity firm, which promptly ousted him. Once the company’s founder was out of the way, the firm announced that it was shutting down the Lawrence factory and relocating some PolarFleece manufacturing to nonunion Tennessee to maintain its government contracts,[*2] sending the rest to Asia. Aaron was ninety years old at the time. He told The Boston Globe that Polartec’s move to the South was a “disgrace.” He added, “I considered workers stakeholders in the business. These people are only interested in making profit…. [Private equity has] no interest in the welfare of workers.”

With 88 percent of Indian farmers hooked on the GM seeds, Monsanto now collects more than $200 million from them for seeds and pesticides each year. When advocates for India’s farmers claimed that Monsanto’s seed patents violated Indian law, the company went straight to the WTO, which ruled in favor of the multinational. Over a few generations, the GM seeds in India lost their resistance to pink bollworm, which led to poor yields and higher pesticide use. Some advocates claim that the seeds may also have caused widespread livestock death. Countless Indians incurred astronomical debt and loss of livelihood, which, as of 2019, has been linked to an estimated 300,000 farmer suicides in the country. Farmer suicides in the U.S. have also gone up 40 percent in less than two decades, a phenomenon linked to mounting debt, social isolation, and climate change.

Historically, the United Steelworkers owed a lot to the needleworkers. While Andrew Carnegie was hiring the notorious Pinkerton private detective and security company to crush steelworkers’ attempts to organize, a group of young men and women, many of them immigrants from Eastern Europe, were establishing one of America’s first unions, the ILGWU. Before they unionized, America’s needleworkers spent long hours in packed, poorly ventilated spaces (tuberculosis was a constant scourge) and sometimes had to pay for their own machines, thread, and needles. If they missed a shift due to illness or a sick child, they could lose their job or, at the very least, their week’s pay. Adding insult to injury, they were often cheated—bosses would skim their pay for tiny infractions. Sometimes at the end of the week, bosses would refuse to pay stitchers altogether, claiming poor workmanship or failure to meet impossible quotas set by the company.

The most powerful thing the ILGWU did was build the idea of “American” into the labor movement. Founding members grew the movement by making the case that strengthening workers’ rights strengthened the nation as a whole by broadening the concept of freedom to include freedom from exploitation, freedom from physical danger, freedom to work with dignity, and freedom to earn a living wage to support your family and community.

No strike would shape the labor movement in the following decades more than the one following the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, which took the lives of 146 young women and men. The ten-story building was around the corner from Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. Unable to escape the intense heat of the fast-moving conflagration, the stitchers and machinists died on the shop floor, piled up against blocked exits, in the elevator, and some on the concrete below when they leapt from windows eight to ten stories above to avoid the flames. An investigation later revealed that the factory doors had been illegally locked to prevent people from coming in and going out (possibly to prevent union organizers from talking to workers). It was also found that the fire escapes were underbuilt, the New York City fire truck ladders were too short to service most of the city’s buildings, and no one had bothered to train staff about fire safety.

Once alcohol was legal again, the underworld had to find other revenue streams. Gangsters worked their way into the apparel industry via trucking—and eventually took over union leadership using ill-gotten gains to buy off politicians, the police, and DAs. At one point, some labor unions were completely run by organized crime. The ILGWU, along with other major unions, continued to grow in membership and influence. But as they expanded, union-busting became a big, dirty business in which the mob was playing both sides. To fend off organizing efforts, some apparel manufacturers paid the mob for protection from union infiltration. Mob muscle was used to rough up labor reps to keep them away from nonunion shops. Union organizers cried foul but were forced to make unholy alliances with mobsters to protect themselves and their members when they realized that the government and law enforcement were in the pocket of the mob. Officials summarily dismissed workers’ reports of violence and coercion, leaving them without recourse. In the 1940s, fully 30 percent of all Americans carried union cards. The Great Depression, Roosevelt’s pro-worker agenda, and Prohibition had combined to simultaneously buoy unions and the underworld. In other words, these two forces in America grew up side by side—brother and sister—problematic but close crib mates.

In 1987, when Justin turned twelve, the FCC abolished the Fairness Doctrine, a forty-year-old law that required news media to present opposing views and treat positions with a degree of neutrality. The purpose of the Fairness Doctrine was to ensure that the American voting public was well informed and exposed to diverse perspectives on issues in a truly fair and balanced way.

Limbaugh was using coded language to churn up racial resentment, dropping gems like: “Let the unskilled jobs that take absolutely no knowledge whatsoever to do—let stupid and unskilled Mexicans do that work.” Limbaugh’s success spawned a spate of copycats eager to build their own “conservative talk radio” market, and plenty of people in Maine were listening. Many Americans started saying the quiet parts out loud.

Three years later, the weaponization of words by the right became standard operating procedure when House minority whip Newt Gingrich released a widely distributed memo, “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,” so that his fellow Republicans could copy Gingrich’s belligerent rhetorical style. The memo listed “words to memorize,” calibrated to sanctify Republicans while dehumanizing Democrats. Make these words stick to your opponents—decay, sick, unionized bureaucracy, greed, corruption, radical, permissive, bizarre—the memo recommended, and watch them lose.

Mother Jones—a dressmaker who became an indomitable labor organizer after losing her husband and four children in the yellow fever epidemic in 1867. Mother Jones famously led the “Children’s Crusade” of child workers, many of whom had been maimed while working in coal mines and mills. Chanting “We want to go to school and not the mines,” the children marched from Philadelphia to the doorstep of President Theodore Roosevelt’s estate in Oyster Bay, New York. Mother Jones’s ceaseless activism caused one West Virginian DA to call her “the most dangerous woman in America.”

Patti believed in Ben and Whitney’s mission with every fiber of her being, and she used the money to invest in American Roots. “I put money on the fucking table,” Patti says. “The United States is a pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps type of country. There’s this idea that you’ll succeed because of your own hard work and drive. But that’s a myth.” Patti had high hopes that the business would grow because “more and more people—young people in particular, the next generation, the Z’s—they very much care about what’s happening and where their stuff is coming from, and that’s a great opportunity. They’re tired of the cheap-ass shit that ends up in landfills. How much suffering has gone into getting you a cheap shirt?”

World War I laid bare the pitiful state of America’s infrastructure. When war broke out in 1914, American farmers could grow enough food to supply the European nations that could no longer feed themselves, and eventually supply the millions of American troops who were sent to France. But efforts to move those crops across states and the Atlantic Ocean were stymied by the country’s lack of a national road system.

Taylorism was first proposed by Frederick Winslow Taylor, an upper-middle-class, well-connected Philadelphian who was one of the first nineteenth-century industrialists to analyze how actual humans were working from an efficiency standpoint. He’s probably best remembered for hovering over workers with a stopwatch, timing their movements to the hundredth of a minute to determine the ideal time for any operation. His first paper, presented in June 1895, was titled “A Piece Rate System.” Taylor’s “scientific management” system codified how workers should do their jobs. He reduced complex tasks to a series of simple operations that could be assigned to individuals on an assembly line. One person, one task. Taylor wasn’t concerned about the dehumanization of factory workers; he regarded people who worked with their hands—laborers—as machines. He maintained that to get human machines working faster, you simply had to incentivize them with money. Take away their base pay, and make them work for every penny. Taylor’s observations became the foundation of a first-year course at Harvard Business School in 1906. His system influenced Henry Ford, and was admired by Lenin and Stalin—who both strove to transform Russia from an agrarian economy to an industrial one. Taylorism and its ilk also spawned a body of futuristic dystopian literature in the twentieth century, including Brave New World and 1984—books in which workers are closely surveilled by faceless managers in an authoritarian ...

It was obvious to anyone earning less than $24 million a year that no manager was worth that much. The AFL-CIO even has a webpage dedicated to tracking the most egregious offenders. Topping the CEO-to-worker pay ratio list in 2021 was Fran Horowitz, CEO of made-everywhere-else-but-America clothing line Abercrombie & Fitch. Fitch sells sweaters and jeans indistinguishable from other sweaters and jeans, manufactured in more than a hundred factories located in Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, and Vietnam. Fitch offers a “Soft AF” (short for “soft as fuck”) zip-up hoodie for $59.[*1] Horowitz earned 6,565 times her employees’ median pay in 2021.

The new monopolists’ goal wasn’t to control prices by creating value, rather it was to “pit supplier against supplier, and worker against worker, and community against community,” writes Barry C. Lynn in Cornered: The New Monopoly of Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction. “Unlike a generation ago,” he writes, “the purpose of these first is no longer mainly to make things, nor to plan how to keep making things, nor even to understand how things are made. The purpose is to engineer rivalry among the actual people who make things in a way that results in a more rapid generation of cash in the accounts of the rich.”

By the mid-1990s, there were only a few major underwear buyers left in America, and the biggest was Walmart, which had just about finished off Kmart. Once Kmart was vanquished (the company shuttered 110 stores in 1994), Walmart set out to shut down every other lower-market retailer in America. How? By using the same tactics it had employed to crush Kmart: sell impossibly cheap goods. Offer staple merchandise at prices so low, consumers can’t resist and other retailers can’t compete. In one of the most vicious maneuvers in American history, Walmart spread like a fungus across America, draining every dollar out of Main Street. The new monopolists had argued that America’s antitrust laws should focus on consumer pricing instead of company size to determine whether or not to break up a monopoly or block an acquisition. But the price of a good is just one economic metric. Monopolists can pledge to keep prices low to avert an antitrust case. But who pays the collateral? In the case of Walmart, the manufacturers. Who, by the way, employed millions of Americans. Consumers were saving money, so according to an extremely narrow reading of antitrust law, Walmart was left alone to do its thing. By 2010, Walmart had a de facto “complete monopoly” over retail in smaller cities, and delivered at least 30 percent, and sometimes more than 50 percent, of the entire U.S. consumption of products. As of 2022, Walmart is the largest company on earth, with nearly 20 percent more revenue than Ama...

In sum, Walmart dictates how much it will pay manufacturers for their goods, instead of the other way around. Even the biggest makers, nay, especially the biggest makers, need Walmart contracts to survive. And that approach, repeated through countless mergers and acquisitions, eventually put out of work hundreds of thousands of the same Americans who lost good jobs in exchange for cheap socks while enriching stockholders and executives.

America’s biggest apparel company, Nike, for example, entirely abandoned manufacturing in the 1990s, opting to contract all its manufacturing in Asia instead of tying up capital in machines and skilled laborers. Less than a decade later, Boeing, once the pride of America, went the same way. Under CEO James McNerney, Boeing offshored most of the production of its 737 MAX to hundreds of small companies around the globe. The results were disastrous. Parts and pieces didn’t quite work together as planned, costing the company inordinate time and money to fix issues. The plane also had a fatal flaw in its design—a flight control system that would override pilots’ commands, plunging the plane’s nose down during takeoff. After two commercial flights crashed in 2018 and 2019, killing 346 passengers and crew, Boeing finally grounded the 737 MAX. The company paid $2.5 billion to settle the Department of Justice’s conspiracy and fraud case, but McNerney’s wealth was safe. After collecting nearly $100 million in salary and bonuses from the company, he retired from Boeing in 2015.

Kaizen is the act of service to the next operation.”

Amazon’s business model—make nothing, sell everything—landed at the perfect time to inject Chinese-made goods, many of which violate intellectual property and copyright laws, directly into American homes.

Amazon has access to vast consumer and product data that it has used to replicate goods under its own mark and push in front of consumers. In 2021, the company got busted selling its own knockoffs of popular products in India while manipulating the Amazon search function to boost its wares. According to the lawsuit, Amazon employees even planned to contract production with the same companies making the original product to ensure perfect replication.

Every foreign-made hoodie bought online injects almost nothing into the economy, save the tiny fraction of the purchase price that goes to local shipping. American consumers spend billions of dollars every year on overseas shipping, packaging, and importation fees. That’s billions of American dollars in taxes lost to foreign workers and middlemen—money that could go to improving domestic infrastructure, schools, health care, and the environment.

the U.S. is now the third largest oil exporter, next to Saudi Arabia and Russia. This is a brand-new, twenty-first-century trend. Back in 2000, petroleum exports accounted for only about 1 percent of the U.S.’s export economy. The bulk of American refined and crude petroleum oil and gas is sent to Canada, Mexico, and China. These products now comprise a whopping 11 percent of America’s total exports.

it’s easy to dream, but execution is impossible without the makers.

Located far away from regulators, many of these pharmaceutical factories lack proper oversight, writes Katherine Eban in Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom. Eban’s investigation revealed multiple examples of forged paperwork that concealed manufacturing shortcuts and sanitary violations, resulting in contaminated or ineffective drugs.