Perot exclaimed “It’s pretty simple: If you’re paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor,...have no health care—that’s the most expensive single element in making a car— have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don’t care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south.” At one point he held 19 percent of decided voters, people were listening but they did not respond with the votes. It was Perot’s independence fromWashington, a belief trade deals were killing US jobs, and a moderate approach to social issues that made him popular within many states that were tired of socialist politics. Perot’s addressed that deals like NAFTA are designed to raise the Mexican standard of living, lower the US and Canadian standards, and have all three equal in the end resonated with this public. No to the politics of today, Challenging Ford’s out migration of manufacturing job would help Trump tap into the protec- tionist attitudes across all party lines but his team just cannot get the message right, instead he talks about walls rather than the facts and the companies that are shipping these jobs out. The Clinton campaign response is weak fill only threats to boardroom directors and investors that they need to pay their far share of taxes and reciting soft job growth
$1800 laptop, but they sure want you buying them. Their mantra has become “let the other guy pay high wages” so we have customers with disposable income while we hire workers in third world countries at a fraction of the cost. Many feel the origins of this are rooted in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which was a topic of conversation in the last debate. Regardless of your political alignments and with Trump or Clinton is victorious, this problem is only going to worsen until real measures are taken. During his run for the Democratic nomination Bernie Sanders gained incredible support by pointing out NAFTA has not been a good arrangement for U.S. workers. Sanders stated that “according to the Economic Policy Institute, NAFTA has led to the loss of more than 680,000 U.S. jobs” and these are not minimumwage jobs, these are high paying manufacturing jobs. His comment resonated with the 1992 U.S. election campaign of Texan business mogul Ross Perot who did surprisingly well running as an independent against Bill Clinton and George Bush. He warned everyone who would listen about NAFTA.
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SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS • OCTOBER 2016
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