[Choose Ye This Day]

the decline textile MANUFACTURING in the US began YEARS before NAFTA.

Thought so. Thanks for the eyewitness, first-hand account.

Why do you think it has been in such decline for so long?

[Moby Grape]

The first thing we need to all understand about textiles going off-shore is that the cause cannot be placed into a single bucket:

1. The consumer helped drive them away. How? Once any ONE company began importing and offering the SAME quality at a fraction of the price, the buying public BOUGHT and BOUGHT...so what was the competition to do? Import, or go out of bossiness.

2. EPA, TAXES, OSHA (created under Nixon), and just general government red tape drove many off-shore.

3. Corporate greed. The above-mentioned governmental pressures helped fuel thought of moving off-shore, but there can be little doubt that for some companies, a higher profit margin, regardless of the other factors, was a component in the decisions.

4. UNIONS....need I say more.

If you, depending on your age, will recall, the first textile industry to suffer great loss of USA based manufacturing jobs was the apparel industry. It was easy to pack thousands of pants and shirts into overseas shipping containers, and the virtual extinction of state side apparel manufacturing occured YEARS before NAFTA.

It is fair to say that NAFTA has in some ways made it perhaps easier, or more advantageous for some industries to move outside our borders, but it is nonsense to claim that NAFTA is the cause of the loss of textile jobs in the Carolinas. At the turn of the century the textile jobs were in the northeast...Unions drove the south, not NAFTA. And the textile jobs began leaving the states long before NAFTA.