What Has the Death of American Manufacturing Cost Us?
And could we all work together to rebuild it?
Folks,
Over the last several decades America has lost more than 7 million manufacturing jobs. If you want to know why our country is divided economically, politically and culturally, that’s a pretty good place to start.
The fact that we’ve offshored so much of our manufacturing capability is the subject of the Rachel Slade’s fantastic new book, Making It In America: The Almost Impossible Quest to Manufacture in the U.S.A. (and How It Got That Way).
Rachel — whose first book, Into the Raging Sea, was a New York Times bestseller — basically tells two stories at once: the big-picture tale of what happened to American manufacturing, and the page-turning smaller story of a young couple — Ben Waxman and Whitney Reynolds — and their efforts to build and sustain a hoodie manufacturing company, American Roots, in Maine.
Last week I hopped on Zoom with Rachel — whom I’ve known for more than a decade — and we talked about the roots of America’s manufacturing decline (spoiler alert: we can blame both political parties) and how vulnerable it’s left us as a country. But Rachel also shared why she’s optimistic that, working together, we can actually start making things here again. Read our edited conversation below.
I really love the book. Why were you interested in the topic?
I have been completely obsessed with where things come from ever since I can remember. I was one of those freaks who really, when I was little, was turning things over and looking at the tiny print. “Made in Japan.” “Made in Taiwan.”
For the longest time I have been looking for a company that is absolutely committed to manufacturing in the United States ethically. When I say ethically, I mean workers first. And that’s tough to find. There are companies that will manufacture here for a certain amount of time, but then they get VC money or private equity money, and they’re gone —because the bottom line is so important, and the workers are secondary.
How did you find American Roots?
I have been looking to tell this story for at least a decade. But I didn’t have a company. And in 2020, with the pandemic, everybody in America started to realize how dependent we are on imports. It became this inflection point where we realized that we had exported so much of our capacity abroad, and that put us in a really precarious position when stuff was no longer coming through our ports.
Down East magazine in Maine asked me to go talk to this company that had pivoted from making apparel to making masks and protective clothing. As soon as I got Ben Waxman, the co-founder of American Roots, on the phone – this was July 2020 – I knew I’d found my company.
Ben is a great character. His background is in labor organizing, not manufacturing, and unions are a big part of this story.
Ben was actually with the AFL-CIO for a decade. What’s interesting is that there’s this very destructive narrative in America that unions destroyed manufacturing. And here’s a guy who watched manufacturing go. He was working in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, representing workers as their jobs were being shipped overseas. And not because their companies were not profitable — but because their companies weren’t profitable enough.
How did he end up starting a hoodie company?
[Watching jobs get offshored] was ripping him apart, and he finally walked away from labor organizing. But his takeaway was, “We can do this. This is possible.” Manufacturing. Labor. Commerce. There is a way to make capitalism a force of good in the United States. So he started with a mission, not a product, and not with an ambition to make a tremendous amount of money, but to prove a point.
He and Whitney have run into so many obstacles along the way, from supply chain problems to COVID to finding a workforce.
Building a workforce here in the United States in 2024 is actually quite difficult. A lot of people just don’t even think about manufacturing as a career choice. It’s been so eradicated that we’ve lost our connection to this vital part of modern life.
We’ve been conditioned to believe that the loss of manufacturing in America was inevitable. But you say it was a choice.
It’s a complicated story, but I think it really came from the finance industry and large corporations and mergers and acquisitions — the guilty pleasures of the 1980s.
There was a consolidation of manufacturers, and a consolidation of buyers. So what you have is entire sectors demanding lower prices from manufacturers. In other words, there’s no competition anymore. And as soon as that started, manufacturers said, well, we can’t do it in America anymore.
At the same time there was a shift in America from manufacturing to the service sector, and from pensions to 401ks, basically tying all Americans to Wall Street. It’s like this toxic brew that gets all of us bound to stocks and the health of the market, as opposed to real production, real profit, real pensions.
The culture shifted, too.
You just saw this massive cultural shift toward the glorification of money and profit, and a ruthlessness to destroy companies to gain profit. That was all happening in the ’80s. That fueled the appetite for NAFTA, our first free trade agreement, which was crafted under George H. W. Bush and signed into law under Clinton. This was Republicans and Democrats getting together and saying we no longer care about manufacturing, we no longer care about workers, we care about Wall Street.
And what came next? Well, what came next is this huge political backlash, which resulted in the Tea Party and then the election of Trump.
Right. It seems like we’re waking up to the real cost of what happened.
It’s one thing to talk about the loss of jobs, which was devastating. There’s also the impact on men in America, who were relying on those high-paying union manufacturing jobs.
But I also think now, post-COVID, we’re starting to understand the major political implications of exporting our manufacturing capability. If a country can’t manufacture things for itself, it warps all of the decision-making that happens at the top level. Because we’re now tied into this very problematic global geo-political situation.
We don’t have the capabilities to make what we need, and so we don’t want to alienate authoritarian nations on which our economy now depends. We put ourselves in a pickle!
As you say, both Republicans and Democrats played a role in it.
I really feel like these labels of conservative and liberal are melting away. Because what we need to do now is actually just figure out how to rebuild American industry, and do it in a way that takes care of the people who are doing the work. It that conservative? Is that liberal? I don’t think these labels are useful anymore.
How do we do that?
The rub here is the role of government in all this. The inherent contradiction on the right is there’s been this prevailing narrative of less government is good, less regulation is good. And yet, if tariffs are really important, well, that means government is going to play a major role in the manufacturing recovery.
That’s where Biden’s head is. That’s the definition of what he has done — use every tool in the toolkit to revitalize manufacturing in every possible sector while allowing workers more access to the National Labor Relations Board so that they have a place to go.
We need to shift the way we talk about things. If Republicans start to shift the language, and start to speak to the role of government in the recovery of jobs and industry and manufacturing, we’re off to the races. Suddenly, we have a country that’s really going to work quite well.
Are you optimistic?
Oh, I am off-the-charts optimistic. The more I dig into this, the more I see that people really care. People are now shifting their language from investing in high-tech apps to investing in manufacturing.
Manufacturing has been taken from the culture with offshoring. It’s just not part of our consciousness. But I see it coming back in big ways. I think a lot people are realizing this is the future. We don’t have a choice. We can’t control the world the way we thought we could. But we can control what happens here, and that is to our benefit.
Good interview. I'll have to read Rachel's book.