More Jobs Shipped Out Of The Country: Ford Moves All Small Car Production To Mexico

What is going to happen when America finally doesn’t have any manufacturing jobs left at all?  On Wednesday, we learned that Ford Motor Company is shifting all small car production to Mexico.  Of course the primary goal for this move is to save a little bit of money.  This hits me personally, because my grandfather once worked for Ford.  He was loyal to Ford all his life, and he always criticized other members of the family when they bought a vehicle that was not American-made.  When I was young I didn’t understand why making vehicles in America is so important, but I sure do now.  By shipping jobs overseas, we are destroying jobs, we are destroying small businesses and we are destroying our tax base.  If we want to be a wealthy nation, we have got to make things here, and hopefully we can get the American people to start to understand this.

In 1914, Henry Ford decided to start paying his workers $5.00 a day, which was more than double the average wage for auto workers at the time.

One of the reasons why he did this was because he felt that his workers should be able to afford to buy the vehicles that they were making.  This is what he wrote in 1926…

“The owner, the employees, and the buying public are all one and the same, and unless an industry can so manage itself as to keep wages high and prices low it destroys itself, for otherwise it limits the number of its customers. One’s own employees ought to be one’s own best customers.”

These days Ford is going in the complete opposite direction.  Pretty soon, Ford won’t be making any more small vehicles in the United States at all…

Ford is shifting all North American small-car production from the U.S. to Mexico, CEO Mark Fields told investors today in Dearborn, even though its plans to invest in Mexico have become a lightning rod for controversy in this year’s presidential election.

“Over the next two to three years, we will have migrated all of our small-car production to Mexico and out of the United States,” Fields said.

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Could This Lawsuit Be the Straw That Breaks the TPP’s Back?

Throw into this mix the current U.S. presidential race. So too could strong statements by U.S. presidential contenders have an influence.  Bernie Sanders, the independent Senator from Vermont, has been opposed to NAFTA from the start and is a harsh and outspoken critic of the TPP and its investment chapter.  Sanders has made this one of his campaign issues and Hillary Clinton, under heavy pressure from the more populist Sanders, said in the fall of 2015 that she would not support the TPP in its current form.  Not surprisingly, given her past support of trade agreements, she has largely avoided the issue on the campaign trail. But the Democratic party base deeply opposes the agreement, and a broad coalition of citizen groups under the Citizens Trade Campaign is rallying people against it.  On the Republican side, all the remaining candidates support the TPP save the frontrunner and likely Republican nominee, Donald Trump.  Trump has attacked the TPP, charging that it will accelerate the shift of good U.S. jobs to Asia.

In the context of this fluid debate, it is crucial for academics, activists, politicians, and citizens in the United States and around the globe to speak out against this outrageous assault on democracy enshrined in the TPP.  In the longer-run, we need a truly democratic set of rules to replace the current investor provisions in trade agreements, a new set of rules that do not give global corporations unfair advantage over people and the environment.  This is not pie in the sky; promising alternatives have been raised in the trans-Atlantic trade negotiations that are going on right now.

In the short term, however, the current TPP strengthens these undemocratic rules.  The TransCanada case offers new chilling evidence as to why these agreements are a danger to the environment, to workers, and to democracy, and why the TPP must be stopped.

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