Moving to Mexico - 4 September 1992

After reading a shocking item in the paper the other morning, I made a sentimental journey to what Americans call a closet and an Englishman used to call a cupboard, though a closet is a little room, a storage room built into the ground plan of the house or flat. Having got the domestic picture straight, let me tell you the shocking item and where it led me.

What made the newspaper piece so poignant was the photograph inset in the middle of a full page story; it was of a middle-aged working woman standing against a ladder, a despondent woman saying, "At 50 I'm not really looking forward to starting all over again". She'd been in her job for 30 years or so but she's about to be laid off along with nearly 900 others in a factory that employs 1,300. Of course, we read every day and see every night stories about lay-offs in every sort of manufacture in almost all the states, we note them, we deplore them, we wish there was any positive sign of the lift from the long recession. Only when it comes close to home does it begin to hurt.

Now, I can't even pretend I'm closer to all of this case or to the small town in upstate New York, Cortland, where this forlorn woman works and soon will work no more, it's what she works at that grabbed me and made me patter off in disbelief to that closet in a bedroom.

There in a corner, a little black box with a film of dust was the object of my pity, I haven't opened the box for maybe 20 years more. It contains my first typewriter given to me by my parents on my 19th birthday. From then on, my university essays were typed, a fact that gave me a boost and no doubt a mark-up from any tutor or supervisor who had to read them. Men who in those days spent about a quarter of their spare time deciphering the mostly hideous scrolls which passed for calligraphy among the young once the schools had stopped teaching copperplate. This little typewriter was a true portable, the bank of keys folded over and the compact little package could have been carried by a baby. Need I say what brand it was? I need and, what's more, I can Ð by which I mean that for many many years it was forbidden ever to mention a brand or a trade name over these wholly BBC airwaves.

I remember in the long ago being told I'd have to find some other characterisation for an old Ford and Vaseline was positive banned, you had to say petroleum jelly. Well in the liberated age we live in, I can come right out and tell you that my first and precious typewriter was a Smith Corona, though it began to wobble years ago, I've always kept it. I won't say that one's first typewriter is as memorable as one's first girl or goal Ð as drastically far as my old guru Mr H R Mencken who once wrote with a dropping tear "a man never forgets his first girl, after that he bunches them" Ð but I'd hate to part with that 1928 model, which beat out, I dare to think, so much deftless prose.

But I hear you all patience gone at last, the story, the story, I'm sorry the story about Cortland New York is that its most famous factory is the Smith Corona factory and it is closing down and moving to Mexico. No more Smith Corona typewriters of any kind will be made in the United States and there's more cataclysmic news for people who like to compose sentences as distinct from juggling them, no more manual typewriters will ever again be manufactured in the United States.

Smith Corona will join or move alongside close to 2,000 other factories, other American firms, which in the past few years have closed down their domestic plants and started up in northern Mexico. In that part of the country alone, half a million Mexicans make goods for American's that used to be made here. The point, the point is brutally sharp and simple: in this country the Smith Corona people paid their workers $11 an hour, another $7 for various fringe benefits. The company calculated it paid out $18 an hour or $37,000 a year per worker, say £18,000. And in Mexico, the company can get by handsomely it figures on $4 an hour or something over £4,000 a year instead of £18,000. It sounds mean but it's far more than they'd ever earned by stoop labour on their own barren soil.

Under an old agreement with Mexico, which will be reinforced by the new free trade agreement, Mexico will pay no tariffs for shipping all these goods to the United States and, of course, American's will pay much less for them and, of course, Americans will pay much less for them they did when they were made here. That is the carrot, the administration holds out to the American consumer to take his mind off the stick of the closed down domestic factories.

Smith Corona evidently didn't decide liberally on this move as with so many other products, there's was having to weather fierce competition from typewriters made by real wage slaves in South East Asia. And as you'd guess the firm complains as hundreds of others do that the Bush administration has failed to protect them from cheap imports from that part of the world, but it's one of the most remarkable shifts in American politics in the past decade or two.

The Republicans are now officially the free trade party and the Democrats, while not saying it out loud, have turned into the protectionist party, it used to be the other way round for most of this century, for the first half anyway. The Democrats, when the party was controlled by the southerners, were ardent free traders, they wanted low tariffs here so as to not to invite stiff retaliation against the huge American exports of cotton and tobacco and later on southern textiles.

The Smith Corona solution is only one of the various efforts American manufacturers are making to meet what they admit is their constant adversary, excellent foreign goods from Europe but mainly from Japan and South East Asia that are at least as attractive and efficient as their American counterparts but much cheaper.

How can we compete is the national cry and there are other attempted solutions, some of them equally harsh on the domestic worker. General Motors, for example Ð 30,000 workers are on strike at seven plants to protest the company's declared intention of reducing its workforce by over 70,000 during the next two years. General Motors lost $7 billion last year and brought over from Europe a man who was head of their European purchasing department, he is a Spaniard, name of Ignacio L—pez de Arriortœa and because of the desperate cure he has prescribed for General Motors' sickness, he's informally known as the grand inquisitor. What prompted the strike of those 30,000 and no doubt many more to follow was his conclusion that most of the losses were coming from the divisions of the company that make the parts for General Motors cars Ð 70% are made by GM's own plants. No more, says Mr L—pez. Steering wheels, roller bearings, brakes, rear-wheel-drive vans, boiler dye making, the lot. From now on, contracts will be opened from bids by outsiders on every part that goes into an assembly line.

In the prosperous heyday of the American automobile industry, such a diktat from the employer would have brought stunning retaliation from the most powerful of the industrial unions, the United Automobile workers their there today and leading the strike, but its one thing to strike when the company's a little short of profits and another thing to try and redeem $7 billion.

A man who's an expert analyst of the automobile industry says the trouble, the expensive luxury of making all your own parts, is one that General Motors has been evading since the Second World War. At the moment, the United Auto workers have no published plan or alternative remedy Ð or they plead for, like every other worker laid off or about to be laid off, is job security. And what do the presidential candidates say about this national problem, what can be done for workers who clearly have to be sacrificed if the company is going or gone broke are to survive Ð leaner and meaner, as they say.

Well both Mr Bush and Governor Clinton and all the guys running for either party talk incessantly about jobs, getting jobs, making jobs, but what the best either candidate can do for such as the abandoned typewriter workers or the GM assembly plant workers is to promise large federal funds for job retraining.

I suspect that the whole problem of cheap labour goes back in this country far beyond the Second War to the turn of the century and the first great tidal wave of European immigration. That town of Cortland, the typewriter town, before the First World War had a steel company that brought Ð and paying the going wages to local workers Ð it brought in hoards of new immigrants from Italy and the Ukraine who'd gladly worked at half the price. It's still better than anything they could earn in the old country Ð and that has been a pattern in all the basic industries. Germans, say, pour in, are glad to work for a pittance, they grow up, they organise, they protest they want benefits, they strike. So the company brought in the latest batch, Hungarians, Romanians whoever, they too are willing ox-like labourers for a while, till they learn American ways, American comforts what their neighbours expected from a job and they went through the same cycle from dumb gratitude to active resentment.

Henry Frick, Carnegie's partner commented truthfully on this cycle. The immigrant, he said "however ignorant, however illiterate always learns too soon."

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