Between the Lines: Made in China

While eating lunch at my local Cracker Barrel over break, I found myself in the unavoidable situation in which most customers find themselves when they choose to visit a Cracker Barrel just after church time on a Sunday — I was forced into browsing through the trinket end of the “country store” while waiting on the next extended family group of church-goers to be seated. It was during this wait that I picked up some sort of odd-looking glass pig for the purposes of discovering just what, exactly, it was. As I turned the thing over in my hands, I discovered a big, fat “Made in China” sticker. My curiosity begged me to examine other random items whose purposes were likely just as difficult to determine, and what my search quickly led to was the assumption that nearly three quarters of the items in the store were made in East-Asian countries, with a majority being made in China. This country-style restaurant — with its assortment of early 20th-century farming equipment and household artifacts hanging from the ceiling — was having most of the items it sold in its “country store” produced in other countries.

This realization, among others, prompted me to pick up a book by North Dakota Sen. Byron Dorgan called “Take This Job and Ship It: How Corporate Greed and Brain-dead Politics are Selling Out America.” In the opening pages of the book, Dorgan makes the following remark: “We American consumers watch our Japanese television set, wearing our Chinese T-shirts, Taiwanese trousers, Mexican shorts and Italian shoes. We drive a Korean car to the store to pick up our Mexican vegetables, Australian beef and a six-pack of Heineken. And then we wonder what happened to all of the good jobs here at home.”

Dorgan has served six terms in the House of Representatives and is serving his third term as a senator. His book has received praise from the likes of Sen. Lindsey Graham, Tom Daschle and Lou Dobbs. Dorgan has worked for years to advance the interests of the American worker and taxpayer, and he has combated corporate outsourcing and tax evasion attempts time and time again. Insight and leadership such as his are in short supply for our economy and our government in the crucial years ahead.

In his book, Dorgan confronts the growing problem of America’s declining number of manufacturing jobs and increasing trade deficit. Despite the unique consumer economy created in America, Dorgan points out that the wealth of any economy is based more on production than consumption. In an era when private corporations — loyal only to their shareholders and the bottom line — often dominate the global economy and serve as the largest contributors to local and national politicians, the interests of the middle or lower-class worker are often swept aside.

In all fairness, there are many small businesses, and even some large U.S. corporations, that are proud to be American companies and treat their American employees accordingly. But a large number of multinational corporations that are chartered in the United States have increasingly resorted to the outsourcing of jobs to countries with little or no labor law enforcement and an abundance of hungry workers.

Dorgan points out in his book that Huffy, the company making bikes since we were kids, recently replaced 1,800 workers with Chinese workers pulling 12-hour days at 33 cents an hour. To make matters worse, Huffy has since filed for bankruptcy and refuses to pay out its pension plans, a burden the U.S. taxpayer will now have to shoulder.

Senator Dorgan also points out that General Motors, while interrupting every football game this fall with commercials about how their trucks are supposed to be our new American flag, has cut almost 30,000 American jobs between 2000 and 2005, and has plans to cut another 25 percent of the remaining workforce by 2008. And we’re supposed to say with them, “this is our country?”

The main point Dorgan makes is that regardless of what economic factors our nation is facing, we should have to face them together. Working Americans shouldn’t have to compete for jobs with citizens of poor countries that in the absence of any verifiable labor laws allow themselves to be exploited in order to survive. We pay into this system. Our parents and grandparents before us have worked, suffered and struggled to make this nation what it is today while insuring that we can have the same labor protections they worked so hard to gain. Middle-class consumers are the backbone of our economy, and with a savings rate below zero today, it’s about time U.S. corporations realize that if average Americans don’t have money to spend, the wealthiest Americans, spending enough money to keep our economy afloat, is easier said than done.

Dorgan provides a poignant symbol of the path down which our economy is heading. The last job those 1,800 Huffy workers were tasked with — replacing the American flag on each bike with a globe emblem.