By James Parks

When Pillowtex shut its doors in July, Georgia Hairston lost her job of 36 years and her town in Fieldale, Va., teeters on collapse. Hairston’s job was one of 2.5 million U.S. manufacturing jobs lost since 2001, in part because of bad U.S. trade policies and treaties such as the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas. In November, tens of thousands of workers and a coalition of organizations, including unions and their allies, will deliver a message to trade ministers meeting in Miami: Stop FTAA

To the residents of Fieldale, Va., a small town in Henry County on the Virginia–North Carolina border, the Pillowtex Corp. towel plant had been the town’s lifeline. Not only did 1,000 of the county’s 58,000 residents work at Pillowtex, but Pillowtex paid roughly $94,500 a month to the county for wastewater treatment, $1.4 million a year in Henry County taxes, supplied the town’s water and paid for the local police, community center and street lights. All that financial support is gone now.

After Pillowtex, headquartered in Kannapolis, N.C., declared bankruptcy in July, it shut down 16 factories and distribution centers and laid off some 6,450 workers across the country. Pillowtex CEO Michael Gannaway blamed the closures on unfair competition from cheap imports. In fact, since April, the United States has lost nearly 50,000 textile and apparel jobs, according to the American Textile Manufacturers Institute, an industry trade association.

“Pillowtex was the heart of this town, and they just ripped the heart out of it,” says Georgia Hairston. The state eventually gave the county an emergency grant to build a new water line, but the school board announced it will close the elementary school in Fieldale and another in a nearby town next year because of budget problems.

As the latest textile plant to close in the county—Tultex, the county’s largest employer shut down in 2000 and two other plants have closed since 1999—Pillowtex’s shuttering destroyed Henry County’s economy and residents’ primary source of jobs. “I put all my life into that plant, and they just threw me out,” says Hairston, 54, who has not yet found another job.

	Devastated: Each with more than 32 years at Pillowtex, Jerome Spencer, Georgia Hairston and Rick Schuler (above from left to right) fix boxes of food for UNITE members out of work.

Hairston, who has enrolled in nursing school, makes ends meet with her unemployment insurance, from which she has to pay $136 per month for health insurance.

“It feels like the little people don’t matter,” Hairston says.

“The shutdown of manufacturing in our small towns has been devastating,” says Judy Ancel, director of the Institute for Labor Studies at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. “It has eliminated the better-paying jobs people without a college education could get and left them with a long drive to the city or a job at Wal-Mart.”

Maytag, for many a name synonymous with American-made appliances, announced in July it was moving its Galesburg, Ill., refrigerator plant to Mexico, laying off all workers by 2004—the third such move for the company in two years. Hearing the news, Theresa Gerhardt, a 19-year employee at the Galesburg plant, and her husband Brian, a 14-year employee there, put their home up for sale and moved to a rental unit. With no jobs available in the area, the Gerhardts and their four teenagers have no choice but to move “anywhere where there’s work,” says Theresa Gerhardt.

“I’ve never lived anywhere outside of Galesberg,” says Gerhardt, a Machinists Local 2063 member. “All my family is here, but we have no choice.”

	Jobless: After Maytag announced it would close a plant in Illinois, 19-year employee Theresa Gerhardt faces uprooting her family in search of a job.

Jerry Fallos also has seen what a plant closing can do to a community and its workers. When LTV Steel declared bankruptcy in 2001, it closed its taconite (a low-grade iron ore) processing plant in Hoyt Lakes, Minn., putting 1,400 workers out of a job—in a town of 2,500 residents.

“The shutdowns caused turmoil. People lost their homes; a lot of them declared bankruptcy,” says Fallos, who was president of Steelworkers Local 4108 at the time and worked 35 years as a crane operator and maintenance technician for LTV. A few workers, including one of his good friends, committed suicide. “When people have been working all their lives, it’s really hard when you wake up one morning and it’s all gone,” he says.

The LTV plant would still be open if the tariffs on imported steel that President George W. Bush imposed last year had been in place in 2001, Fallos says. At the urging of USWA and industry executives, Bush placed the high tariffs on imported steel to prevent trading partners from illegally dumping cheap subsidized steel on the American market. The tariffs are working, USWA says, and working families are pushing the White House, as it evaluates an International Trade Commission report on whether to continue the tariffs, to keep them in place for the full three-year term.

	Another NAFTA: Trade agreements such as FTAA undermine workers' rights, says IBT President James P. Hoffa.

Although Bush took a step in the right direction with steel tariffs, his overall trade policies are not geared toward job creation, enhancing fair competition or ensuring workers’ rights, including the freedom to join unions, Ancel says. Instead of pursuing policies that would make the global economy fair for all workers, the Bush administration is pushing the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), which would expand to the entire Western Hemisphere (except Cuba) the low wages, lax environmental laws and weak worker protections that flowed from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

“Trade agreements such as FTAA that undermine workers’ rights and obstruct sustainable and democratic economic development must be vigorously opposed,” says Teamsters President James P. Hoffa. Says UNITE President Bruce Raynor: “At a time when over 10 million workers in North America are looking for jobs, these plant closings are yet another indictment of a failed trade policy that is destroying entire industries and communities as companies scour the globe for the cheapest, most vulnerable labor they can find.”

Mobilizing against FTAA

In rallies, town hall meetings and bus tours, working families have mobilized throughout the year to stop the FTAA, which would create the largest free-trade zone in the world. Their actions will culminate in Miami Nov. 18–21, where trade ministers from the Western Hemisphere will meet at the eighth FTAA Ministerial Meeting to discuss the next steps in creating the FTAA.

Backed by a coalition that includes unions and their allies, tens of thousands of workers will travel to Miami to deliver hundreds of thousands of unofficial ballots cast by working families across the nation opposing the FTAA. They will be joined by workers from throughout the Americas who are waging similar campaigns in their own countries.

	Signing up: Thousands of workers in Detroit signed a giant card protesting the FTAA.

If approved, FTAA would remove tariffs from 34 countries with a total population of more than 800 million. It also would grant extensive new rights to multinational corporations but provide no comparable guarantees for workers’ rights or environmental protections.

Working families are pushing to ensure FTAA and all trade agreements include workers’ rights protections, including the freedom to join unions, bans on child labor and slave labor, the right to bargain collectively and the right to work without discrimination. While the trade ministers meet in Miami behind closed doors, workers and activists will take to the streets to raise their voices against FTAA. The USWA will hold a forum on corporate responsibility Nov. 18, followed by a vigil sponsored by the Florida Interfaith Committee for Workers Justice.

The next day during a workers’ forum organized by the AFL-CIO, workers from throughout the hemisphere will discuss the impact of NAFTA on their communities and the dangers of expanding its policies. Working families will then gather for a People’s Gala, where the unofficial ballots will be displayed. On Nov. 20, workers will march and rally in Miami to stop FTAA.

“The message we are all trying to deliver is that working families are going to fight as hard as we can to stop these failed trade policies,” says Fred Frost, president of the South Florida AFL-CIO. “It’s a fight we cannot afford to lose.”

Campaigning to save manufacturing

Leading up to the massive November gathering in Miami, thousands of the more than 60,000 people attending Detroit’s annual LaborFest celebration Sept.13 demonstrated their opposition to the FTAA by signing a 7-by-100-feet postcard urging Congress and the Bush administration to stop the flawed trade deal. The giant card was delivered to Washington, D.C., and presented to Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), who represents the district where the card was signed. It now is on its way to Miami where it will be displayed along with the other signed ballots at working family actions during the Ministerial Meeting.

The LaborFest card signing launched the AFL-CIO Industrial Union Council’s Campaign for American Manufacturing, which spotlights the nation’s manufacturing crisis. As part of the Campaign for American Manufacturing, working families are speaking out in the Cleveland area at town hall meetings with elected officials. In Milwaukee, workers will hold a rally downtown on Nov. 10, and St. Louis activists held a forum Oct. 16 followed by a day of action.

The campaign also includes a March to Miami bus tour, sponsored by the USWA and the Alliance for Sustainable Jobs and the Environment, a coalition of unions and environmental groups. A bus dubbed the Blue-Green Machine, which left Seattle for Miami, is visiting more than 20 cities over seven weeks with displays showing the effects of free trade on the steel industry and local communities.

The loss of manufacturing jobs has an especially devastating effect on minorities and our cities, says AFSCME Secretary-Treasurer William Lucy, president of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, an AFL-CIO constituency group. “When these trading policies wipe out millions of manufacturing jobs,” Lucy says, “they also rip out the primary ladder that folks in minority communities have historically used to climb into the middle class. So for us, NAFTA and FTAA represent a kind of double jeopardy—drastic cuts to public budgets and a devastating loss of opportunities for inner-city residents.”

Cast your vote to Stop FTAA. For sample Stop FTAA newsletter articles, FTAA fact sheets in English and Spanish and more, visit www.aflcio.org/stopftaa. For more information on the March to Miami, visit www.marchtomiami.org. @