How NAFTA Broke American Politics
Since its passage in 1993, the trade agreement has played an outsize role in presidential elections — which now often hinge on the three Rust Belt states it helped to hollow out.
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Dan Kaufman is the author of “The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics.” For this article, he conducted more than 40 interviews.
In May of last year, Marcus Carli, the plant manager of the Master Lock factory in Milwaukee, Wis., called a surprise meeting with the board of United Auto Workers Local 469. Several officers of the union, which represents the workers at the plant, joined Carli and an executive from Master Lock’s parent company in a tiny conference room. Carli brought along a security guard. “He’s here for my protection,” Carli told the union representatives. As the guard sat down, Yolanda Nathan, the local’s incoming president, noticed his gun. “That’s when I thought, Oh, we’re losing our jobs,” she says. Carli immediately confirmed her worst fears. “The plant’s closing,” he announced. “It took my breath away,” Nathan says. “It took all our breaths away.”
Half an hour later, the plant’s first-shift workers were called to assemble in the old cafeteria. A row of tables spanned the room, separating company officials from the workers. “The plant’s closing,” Carli said again. He refused to take questions. “They just dropped the bomb on us,” Jeremiah Hayes, who worked in the plant’s wastewater-treatment facility, says. He particularly resented the makeshift barrier: “It was insulting. We felt like a bunch of animals.”
Mike Bink, who started at Master Lock in 1979, was devastated but not surprised. Months earlier, a co-worker whose job entailed making steel plates that were fed into a machine to make a lock body told Bink that the plates were now being shipped to Master Lock’s plant in Nogales, Mexico. That factory was built in the 1990s, not long after President Bill Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement into law, and the company eliminated more than 1,000 of nearly 1,300 union positions in Milwaukee. “People ran for the gate,” Bink, who was then the president of Local 469, says. “They thought the plant was finished.” Bink managed to hang on, but NAFTA fundamentally changed the balance of power between Master Lock and its workers. “A shop floor supervisor would say things like, ‘Get to work, or the company will take all the jobs,’” Bink recalls. “After the downsizing, the union lost its leverage.”
The closure of its factory in March, where it made iconic locks for generations, represents the final stage in Milwaukee’s long unraveling as an industrial powerhouse, part of a larger phenomenon, fueled by NAFTA, that has taken place across the country, particularly in the Rust Belt states. NAFTA eliminated tariffs on trade among the treaty’s signatories — Canada, Mexico and the United States — allowing for the unfettered movement of capital and foreign investment. It ushered in an era of free-trade agreements that brought cheap goods to consumers and generated great wealth for investors and the financial sector, but it also increased income inequality, weakened labor unions and accelerated the hollowing out of America’s industrial base.
Milwaukee was once known as the “machine shop of the world.” In the 1950s, nearly 60 percent of the city’s adult population worked in manufacturing, a vast majority of whom held well-paying union jobs. In 1969, Milwaukee had the second-highest median income in the country. By 2021, Milwaukee had lost more than 80 percent of its manufacturing jobs (barely 5 percent of those that remained were unionized), and it had the second-highest poverty rate of any large American city, just one example of NAFTA’s profound impact on American industry and labor.
Deindustrialization has diminished the wealth, power and health of working-class Americans arguably more than any other single culprit. While deindustrialization has many causes — in a recessionary four-year period that ended in the early 1980s, a quarter of Milwaukee’s manufacturing jobs were wiped out — a central driver has been free-trade agreements with developing countries, of which NAFTA was the first. According to a study by the Economic Policy Institute, Americans without college degrees have lost nearly $2,000 a year in wages owing to trade with low-wage countries, even after accounting for cheaper consumer goods. The economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case have documented how the loss of jobs has led to falling life expectancy for working-class people: College-educated Americans can now expect to live eight years longer than those without a college degree. “I would put that down to deindustrialization combined with the lack of any political voice,” Deaton told me.
The passage of NAFTA remains one of the most consequential events in recent American political and economic history. Between 1997 and 2020, more than 90,000 factories closed, partly as a result of NAFTA and similar agreements. The coming presidential election, like the previous two, is likely to be determined by three of the “blue wall” states — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — which have all been ravaged by deindustrialization. In 2016, Donald Trump won those states, and the presidency, in part by railing against NAFTA (“the worst trade deal ever,” he called it). Exit polls showed that Trump won nearly two-thirds of voters who believe that free trade takes away American jobs. Ohio, meanwhile, which twice voted for Barack Obama, has increasingly become a Republican stronghold.
Trump’s right-wing populism — an economic-nationalist blend of opposition to free trade, support for programs like Social Security, at least rhetorically, and anti-immigrant sentiment (“virtually 100 percent of the net job creation in the last year has gone to migrants,” he falsely asserted) — helped pave the way for a new generation of self-proclaimed “pro-worker” Republicans, including Trump’s vice-presidential pick, Senator JD Vance of Ohio. Both Vance and Trump denounced NAFTA in their speeches at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in July. “When I was in the fourth grade,” Vance said, “a career politician by the name of Joe Biden supported NAFTA, a bad trade deal that sent countless good jobs to Mexico.”
Biden has since changed his stance on such free-trade policy. He defeated Trump in 2020 by narrowly winning back the three pivotal blue-wall states with a campaign centered on his jobs-focused Build Back Better plan, which proposed investments in clean energy, social welfare programs and manufacturing. Though the plan was ultimately defeated in the Senate, elements of it were incorporated into Biden’s core domestic legislation, including the Inflation Reduction Act. This May, the Biden-Harris administration announced that it would extend Trump-administration tariffs on certain Chinese products and significantly increase duties on others, such as electric vehicles, to protect American workers and industries. Vice President Kamala Harris, as the Democratic nominee, has also come out in favor of targeted tariffs to support American workers.
In July, Biden told the executive council of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. that he had delivered on his promise to be the “most pro-union president in history.” Whether that is true — private-sector union membership is at an all-time low — he has appointed several policymakers who prioritize labor to powerful positions, including Katherine Tai, the United States trade representative, a cabinet-level position.
“Master Lock’s story is one that we know only too well from the last several decades,” Tai told me. “It fits a pattern of deindustrialization that we’ve been trying to figure out how to remedy.” Tai has been advocating a “worker-centered” approach to trade to give labor representatives more input in shaping policy. She points to the 2020 United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement — which renegotiated NAFTA in part to discourage the outsourcing of jobs to Mexico — as an improvement. The agreement was passed under Trump, and Tai served as the lead negotiator for congressional Democrats. She secured several labor-friendly provisions, like expanding protections for Mexican workers who wish to form a union and engage in collective bargaining, with fines for companies that violate these rights. But there is little evidence that these reforms are sufficient to stop the outward flow of jobs and capital. Stellantis moved production of the Jeep Cherokee from a plant in Illinois to Toluca, Mexico, in 2023, and CNH, an agricultural machinery manufacturer, is laying off hundreds of workers in Wisconsin and moving operations to Mexico.
In his speech accepting the Republican nomination, Trump boasted that the U.S.M.C.A. was “the best trade deal ever made.” But to Hayes, the wastewater-treatment worker, it is merely an extension of the long shadow of NAFTA, which ultimately cost him and hundreds of other Master Lock workers their jobs. “NAFTA was the beginning of the end,” Hayes says. “The position of most working-class people now is disenfranchised and cynical. They saw in real time the results, the way it stuffed them to the wayside, stripping them of the potential they believed in.”
NAFTA has roots in a long-running battle between two visions of trade policy: one that emphasizes the unfettered movement of capital and goods, often at the expense of jobs and wages; another that prioritizes labor and environmental concerns over growth and profits. After World War II, policymakers from around the world, including the United States, proposed creating the International Trade Organization to promote and regulate trade. Its charter was never ratified, however, in no small part because Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, the Republican chairman of the committee on labor and pensions, did not approve of its labor standards and antimonopoly provisions. Instead, in 1947, the United States signed on to another international agreement: the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which eliminated many trade restrictions but included no enforceable labor standards. This vision of free trade became a cornerstone of neoliberal economics. In 1962, Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, wrote that free trade abroad was a means of “linking the nations of the world together, peacefully and democratically.” It was a “fallacy,” he added, to believe that it would undermine domestic wages.
By the 1960s, the maquiladora, or factory, system of U.S.-owned plants’ employing Mexican workers was being established in a largely tariff-free strip along the U.S.-Mexico border. “NAFTA legitimized, institutionalized and encouraged what was already taking place,” Michael Rosen, an emeritus professor of economics at Milwaukee Area Technical College, says. “It put the government’s seal of approval on it.”
NAFTA, which was heavily influenced by hundreds of corporate lobbyists, was negotiated and signed by George H.W. Bush, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney of Canada and President Carlos Salinas of Mexico in 1992. It needed to be approved by Congress, however. The issue dominated the 1992 presidential campaign, during which Bill Clinton took a position between President Bush and the independent candidate Ross Perot, whose opposition to NAFTA was the centerpiece of his campaign. (In a debate, Perot predicted a “giant sucking sound” of American jobs going to Mexico if NAFTA passed; he won 19 percent of the vote, the highest share by a third-party candidate since 1912.) Clinton said he would support NAFTA only if it included separate agreements protecting labor rights and the environment. (The agreements Clinton secured were widely considered hollow; no country has ever been fined for violating them.) Organized labor and a majority of congressional Democrats were opposed to NAFTA. Polling showed nearly two-thirds of the American public were, too.
Clinton said he believed the agreement would foster an export boom and create a million jobs in the first five years. The legislation received strong support in the media. “It wasn’t whether NAFTA was good or bad for the economy,” Rahm Emanuel, a Clinton-administration lobbyist for NAFTA, says in John R. MacArthur’s “The Selling of ‘Free Trade,’” published in 2000. “The media were very clear about what they thought of NAFTA: NAFTA was good; it produced jobs; it’s the future.” In December 1993, Clinton signed NAFTA into law, after a bitterly contentious vote in the House of Representatives. (The Senate approved the agreement handily.) A kind of triumphalist inevitability took hold. “We cannot stop global change,” Clinton said at the signing. “We cannot repeal the international economic competition that is everywhere. We can only harness the energy to our benefit.”
Mickey Kantor, the U.S. trade representative under Clinton, told MacArthur: “George Bush could have never passed NAFTA. No Republican President could have because he couldn’t have brought enough Democrats.” But the agreement quickly began to cost the Democratic Party. In the 1994 midterm elections, it lost 54 seats and control of the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years. While many factors contributed, NAFTA was clearly one of them. A 2021 study published in The American Economic Review found that counties dependent on the industries most affected by NAFTA experienced decreases in total employment of about 6 percent compared with those with little exposure. By 2000, the same study found, those counties had shifted significantly from Democratic to Republican.
The passage of NAFTA — along with other Clinton-era measures like the repeal of Glass-Steagall, a Depression-era law that regulated banks, and the granting of permanent most-favored-nation status for China, which allowed China to enter the World Trade Organization and ultimately cost the United States nearly four million jobs — signaled the Democratic Party’s move away from its working-class, New Deal roots. This decoupling was worsened by the damage to unions from NAFTA. In 1996, Kate Bronfenbrenner, the director of labor education research at Cornell University, conducted a study for the North American Commission for Labor Cooperation, which found that after the passage of NAFTA, nearly 50 percent of unionization drives were met with threats to relocate abroad, and that the rate at which factories shut down after a union was successfully certified tripled.
“The greatest impact of NAFTA is the threat of moving,” Bronfenbrenner says. “The threat effect is even greater than the actual moves. It keeps workers from demanding a fair wage; it pushes local governments to waive zoning laws and environmental regulations to get companies to stay.” After NAFTA, more than 70 percent of industries that were able to move their operations threatened to close. Companies sometimes circulated fliers showing locked gates or maps with arrows to Mexico. “The penalty from the National Labor Relations Board was a posting saying, Don’t do that again,” she says. “Of course that didn’t stop them. It kept escalating.”
Since the passage of NAFTA, the percentage of private-sector workers who belong to a union has fallen by nearly 50 percent, to 6 percent today. Recent studies have shown that union members are more likely to vote and less prone to racial resentment. Yet some members of the Democratic establishment came to embrace the party’s realignment. “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia,” Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, said before the 2016 election. “And you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”
In July, the day before the start of the Republican National Convention in downtown Milwaukee, I met Mike Bink outside the desolate plant, whose facade was adorned with a giant padlock. A machinist, Bink is missing a finger on his left hand, a legacy of 44 years as a factory worker. Now 64, he started at Master Lock soon after graduating from high school, 20 years after his father, a foreman, did.
The company was founded in 1921 by a Russian immigrant, Harry Soref, who built his plant 18 years later and was known for generosity toward his workers. Soref died in 1957; his family sold the plant 13 years later. By the time Bink joined Master Lock, relations between management and the union had become fraught. In June 1980, the workers went out on a strike that lasted for 13 weeks. The company brought in replacements, and picket lines were tense, marked by periodic arrests. The strike, which ended with wage increases and better benefits, prompted Bink to get more involved in the union.
In 1981, he traveled on a U.A.W. bus caravan to Washington to protest President Ronald Reagan’s firing of 11,000 striking air traffic controllers, which effectively broke their union. In retrospect, he sees the demonstration as too tepid. “We should have been tipping over monuments,” Bink said. “We didn’t, in today’s words, occupy the Senate and House office buildings and close ’em down. I’m not saying we should have done anything violent. Just insisted they address this.”
Labor relations got better at Master Lock after the strike, with the appointment of a new, sympathetic chief executive and a plant manager who had worked his way up from the floor. They gave the union an office at the plant, and the union, in turn, made concessions to improve productivity and efficiency. “It was as if you flipped a switch,” Bink said. “Their attitude was more, ‘How would this be different if we worked with the union?’” Master Lock was always on the lower end of the pay scale for unionized industrial jobs. “But those years we had our best contracts because of the cooperation and the working environment.”
By the early 1990s, the plant was employing some 1,300 union workers; the company’s share of the market had reached 70 percent. But Master Lock was already beginning to outsource some of its work to China. After NAFTA was signed, Bink traveled to a U.A.W. conference in Washington, which was headlined by President Clinton. “There was a lot of anger about NAFTA in that room,” he recalled. “How could any Democrat who relies on labor to get elected sign anything that looked like that?”
Then came the big downsizing. “They lied to us,” Bink told me. “First, they said we’re going to keep 700 people. Then 400 people. It just got fewer and fewer.” By the end, roughly 200 workers remained. Moving production to China, meanwhile, had sometimes disastrous results. In 2000, Master Lock was forced to recall approximately 750,000 gun locks made in China because the two halves of the locks could be easily separated without a key.
In the years that followed, the company, citing rising labor costs in China, brought production of a few parts back. Slowly, the number of workers at the plant crept back up to 325, though the pay, particularly for unskilled workers, did not even keep pace with inflation. In 2012, during the presidential campaign, President Barack Obama came to Master Lock to celebrate this “insourcing”; he had highlighted the company in his State of the Union address as running at full capacity for the first time in 15 years, even though the plant had lost 1,000 workers. Obama’s re-election campaign centered on reviving American manufacturing, saving the auto industry from bankruptcy and attacking Mitt Romney for his tenure as chief executive of Bain Capital, a private equity firm that had bought and closed plants across the Midwest. “Milwaukee, we are not going back to an economy that’s weakened by outsourcing and bad debt and phony financial profits,” Obama told a crowd of a thousand. Bink showed Obama around the cylinder machines, which could cut to a ten-thousandth of an inch and were built by Master Lock workers. I asked Bink what the outcome of the visit was. “Nothing,” he said. “No additional jobs came back.”
At the same time, the union’s contracts kept getting worse. “Our leverage was our work — until they could do the work somewhere else,” Bink said. In 2015, the Wisconsin State Legislature was debating a so-called right-to-work law, which prohibits unions from requiring workers to pay dues, undermining the union’s finances and bargaining power. Bink went to a committee hearing hoping to testify, but the hearing was abruptly cut short by a Republican legislator. A week later, Gov. Scott Walker signed the law. Bink recalls a foreman saying, “I hope this place does crash — we can do this work in Mexico.”
As we spoke, Bink hobbled over to the fence of the shuttered plant. He has had a knee replacement and will get his other knee replaced soon. “The old guys used to spend their last two years at work getting repaired,” he said. He pointed to a spot a few feet from the factory door. “There was a tavern there when I started — a Milwaukee tradition,” he said, smiling. “These were decent, good jobs. A good place to work. We can’t — and should not have to — compete with people making two dollars an hour.”
Bink is volunteering for the Democrats in this presidential election, as he has in every presidential election since 1984. “If my knees are up to it, I’ll knock on doors,” he said. He hopes that the next Democratic president focuses on helping labor grow. “President Clinton — he ruled the world,” Bink said. “He had all three branches of government. He wanted social change. NAFTA was not the social change we needed. President Obama — he had all three branches of government. He wanted social change. They relied on us, on labor, to get elected, and they wouldn’t pull the trigger to make it easy for us to organize.”
Bink stared into the empty parking lot. He noted that roughly 70 percent of the population now supports labor unions, the highest figure since the 1960s. “When did social change happen? When labor was strong,” he said. “Maybe this is arrogant, but if any president truly wants social change, then hand power back to us.”
Since her first term in Congress, in the late 1990s, Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin has been one of the more consistent opponents of free-trade deals, often battling other Democrats. She was not in Congress during the vote on NAFTA, but her view of it shaped her vote against granting China permanent most-favored-nation status. “I thought NAFTA represented a race to the bottom,” she told me. In 2016, she was one of 12 senators to urge President Obama to stop pursuing the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a proposed free-trade deal among 12 countries that together accounted for 40 percent of the global economy. (Trump formally withdrew from the deal on his first day in office.) Under both the Trump and Biden administrations, Baldwin has successfully pushed to require certain federally funded infrastructure projects to use American-made products. “I represent a state that makes things, whether that’s cheese, beer and brats or motorcycles and locks,” she says. Like other Democratic Rust Belt politicians who are outspoken critics of free trade — Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Representative Marcy Kaptur, whose district includes Toledo — Baldwin has outperformed the Democratic Party in elections.
Last spring, as Local 469 fought to save the Master Lock plant, the union’s president, Yolanda Nathan, reached out to Baldwin and other elected officials. Baldwin sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland and Commissioner Lina Khan of the Federal Trade Commission, urging them to look at potential antitrust issues arising from Master Lock’s recent acquisition of a competitor. She met with David Youn, then the president of Master Lock’s parent company, Fortune Brands, asking him to reconsider. “I don’t think I got straight answers on why they felt the necessity to do this,” she told me. “I certainly wasn’t able to change his mind.” (A spokeswoman for Fortune Brands called the closing “a difficult decision” that was “in the best interests of our broader business” and said jobs would go both to factories within the United States and to its “North American manufacturing operations.”)
Several days after the closing was announced, Local 469 held a protest at the plant. More than 100 workers and their supporters, including Mayor Cavalier Johnson of Milwaukee, picketed. Members highlighted that Fink earned $10 million in 2022. Nathan stood in the bed of a red pickup truck, next to Johnson. “I’m sorry this is happening to us,” Nathan said through a bullhorn. “It’s not fair to be told that your hard work isn’t good enough anymore.” Nathan told me that around this time she heard a fellow worker sitting in his car crying. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he told her. “I’m the sole breadwinner of my family. My wife doesn’t work. I have two kids.”
For the plant’s Black employees, who made up more than 80 percent of the work force, the closing of the factory followed a particularly painful pattern. Milwaukee has been either the first- or second-most racially segregated large metropolitan area in the country for decades — but it was also once a place of working-class Black prosperity. In 1970, the city’s Black median income was the second-highest in the country, behind Detroit’s; its Black poverty rate was 22 percent lower than the national average. Nearly 85 percent of Black men between 25 and 54 were employed. Now it has the lowest Black median household income, the highest Black poverty rate and the widest racial disparities in prime working-age male employment of the country’s 50 largest metro areas, according to a recent study by Marc Levine, an emeritus professor of urban studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Nathan, who is 44 and wears her hair in dreadlocks tied back in a ponytail, lives with her wife, a real estate agent, and has two children. She moved to Milwaukee from Lambert, Miss., when she was 22 and soon got a job at Master Lock through a temp agency. At the time, with the weakening of the union, wages at Master Lock had declined significantly. Nathan started at $9 an hour. “Some people working in fast food were making more than we were,” she said. “But I loved the job. It was like family.”
Like most workers, Nathan began in unskilled production. She moved to different assignments, which came with raises of seven cents an hour. Eventually, a union officer helped her get into an apprenticeship program, where she learned to be a screw machine operator. When the plant’s closing was announced, she was earning $33.46 an hour.
Nathan got a job at the Miller brewery, now owned by Molson Coors and one of only two large union plants in Milwaukee. She loads boxes onto a machine that fills them with cases of beer. She makes $22 an hour. In the mornings, she takes classes at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she is studying to be a cardiovascular technician. “I’m putting myself through school so that I can leave manufacturing,” she said. “I don’t have hope in it anymore.”
Before becoming president of Local 469, Nathan worked on the union’s political education committee, where she registered roughly half the membership to vote. Recently, she started her own voter-registration effort at Miller. “I do it so that they can see that there is a dire need to vote,” she said. Though she has voted Republican in the past, she is passionate about defeating Trump. “Trump doesn’t understand working-class people,” she said. “He can’t relate to us, because he never had to work a day in his life. He never had to wake up looking for his next meal.”
Other former employees, like Chancie Adams, who had a skilled production job at Master Lock, have become bitter about politics. Adams is now working at a nonunion metal fabrication plant, making $10 an hour less than he used to. “You can vote for whoever and be having all these beliefs, but look at what happened,” he told me outside the plant. “Look what’s happening. I was here 14 years, and I’m 44 years old, and I’m starting over.” In 2012, he went door to door gathering signatures to recall Governor Walker, who had virtually eliminated collective bargaining rights for public employees, but the plant’s closing has left him skeptical about political involvement. “I heard the mayor was out here at the protest and gave a statement about how disgusted he was,” he said. “Well, I ain’t never heard nothing else from him. It was just to show face. There was no fight for us.” Though Adams usually votes, this year he won’t. “What for?”
Three miles away, at the Republican National Convention, a double-perimeter security zone patrolled by heavily armed officers left the nearby streets almost empty. Jeremiah Hayes met me at a park nearby. Hayes is one of three former Master Lock employees still working at the plant. A month after it closed, he was hired by a company that got a contract to decommission Master Lock’s wastewater facility, which is filled with hazardous materials. “It’s surreal being back there,” Hayes told me. “It’s so quiet.” We found a small restaurant across the street from the highest-security zone and went inside to watch Trump’s speech.
Trump returned to a long-running theme: the terrifying specter of deindustrialization. “Right now, as we speak, large factories just started, are being built across the border in Mexico.” Trump blamed the U.A.W. for “allowing this to happen” and said the union’s president, Shawn Fain, who endorsed Biden and Kamala Harris, “should be fired immediately.” He concluded by saying: “To all of the forgotten men and women who have been neglected, abandoned and left behind, you will be forgotten no longer.”
Hayes, who typically votes Democratic, said: “They’re using things like NAFTA as leverage. But they’ve always done that.”
Oren Cass, the head of American Compass, a conservative think tank, who is also a former adviser to Mitt Romney, is the intellectual leader of the “pro-worker” faction in the Republican Party, which includes JD Vance. He recently wrote a mea culpa in The Times for ignoring working-class suffering and denounced the long stagnation of American wages. Yet Cass contributed to the chapter on labor in the Project 2025 initiative, a set of conservative policy proposals for the next Republican administration. It encourages Congress to consider banning public-employee unions, roll back child-labor protections and restrict overtime pay. Trump and Vance each oppose the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which has languished in Congress and would make it easier to form a union. The Trump administration threatened to veto the bill and said it would “kill jobs and destroy the gig economy.”
While Trump has made gestures toward labor — the convention gave a prime-time slot to Sean O’Brien, president of the Teamsters, who denounced “greedy employers” and praised Trump for listening to critical voices, though he didn’t endorse him — his record as president tells another story. In 2017, at a rally in Youngstown, Ohio, which lost some 50,000 well-paying steelworker jobs over the previous 40 years, Trump promised that all the empty factories would be “coming back.” Two years later, the last large plant in the area, a G.M. factory that had recently employed nearly 5,000 people, closed. During Trump’s presidency, the trade deficit grew to its highest level since 2008, and his 2017 tax cuts incentivized corporations to offshore jobs by lowering the tax rates on foreign profits. According to Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, more than 300,000 jobs were lost to offshoring and trade during his presidency.
Perhaps nothing is more symbolic of Trump’s failed promise to bring back manufacturing jobs than the deal he made in 2018 with Foxconn, a Taiwanese manufacturer of iPhones and other Apple products, to build a campus near Milwaukee. Trump said the factory would be the “eighth wonder of the world,” and he broke ground for its construction using a gold-plated shovel alongside Representative Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, and Scott Walker. The deal was predicated on $4.5 billion in taxpayer subsidies. Foxconn, which promised to create 13,000 jobs, has so far created only 1,000.
The day after I watched Trump’s speech with Hayes, I drove out to see the Foxconn campus. The centerpiece of the development, a futuristic 100-foot-high glass-and-steel globe, was surrounded by vast, empty fields. In May, President Biden, who has created 765,000 manufacturing jobs during his presidency, traveled to the area to highlight a $3.3 billion investment by Microsoft to build A.I. infrastructure there.
At the Master Lock plant, about 20 miles away, a U.A.W. flag was still flying, but it was at half-mast and badly frayed. The abandoned factory now looked as foreboding as the surrounding area, known as the 30th Street Industrial Corridor. It once held more than 20,000 well-paying jobs. Scattered throughout were signs marking infrastructure projects funded by the Biden administration. In the midst of half a century’s worth of deindustrialization, these efforts seemed small.
In 2019, during her presidential campaign, Kamala Harris, then a senator, said she would have opposed NAFTA. The following year, Harris was one of 10 senators to vote against the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. When her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, was in Congress, he voted against giving President Obama fast-track authority for the Trans-Pacific Partnership. In August, Harris and Walz received an enthusiastic endorsement from the U.A.W. president, Shawn Fain. At a U.A.W. local event in Michigan, Harris spoke passionately about the importance of unions — “Even if you’re not a member of a union, you better thank unions for that five-day workweek” — and by late last month, she held a slender lead in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
I reached Bink during the Democratic National Convention, which he had been watching intently, with one notable exception. “This is rude of me,” he said, “but when Bill Clinton spoke, I stopped watching.” He still felt betrayed by NAFTA. Bink was thrilled by Harris’s U.A.W. event and hopes that she continues in the union-friendly direction Biden established. “I think about three-quarters of the country would like to hear her speak out against NAFTA,” he said. “What’s it done? The movement of wealth from the middle class to the already wealthy hasn’t done anything for our society.” He thinks a future president might learn something from what happened at Master Lock. “The people that have been elected — and I’ll say that generically — haven’t taken care of the working people in the country.”
Lyndon French is a photographer based in Chicago. Rooted in documentary, his work focuses on Americana with subjects that include American industry and people with unique obsessions to obscure conventions.
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