As we neared the end of the twentieth century,
the rich got richer, the poor poorer, and people
everywhere now had a lot less lint, thanks
to the lint rollers made in my hometown.
It was truly the dawn of a new era.
Michael Moore, Roger & Me
“Our hometown of Flint, Michigan,” says Michael Moore at the beginning of his documentary Roger & Me to the sound of an optimistic 1950s tune, “was the birthplace of General Motors, the largest corporation in the in the world. There were more auto factories and auto workers here than any other city on earth. We built Cadillacs, Buicks and Fisher bodies, GM trucks, Chevrolets, and AC spark plugs. We enjoyed a prosperity that working people had never seen. And the city was grateful to the company.” This particular version of the American dream lasted until 1986 when General Motors decided to close eleven of the company’s plants in Detroit, Pontiac and Flint, and lay off thousands of people to move its operations to Mexico where they only paid 70 cents an hour. In fact, this rude awakening was years in the coming: in the period from 1978 to 1992 General Motors reduced its workforce from 80,000 to 50,000 people.1 By 2015, General Motors only employed between 5,000 and 7,500 people in the Flint area, less than 10 percent than in the golden age of the automobile industry. Gone were the days when Flint was grateful to the company and the company could say: “what's good for General Motors is good for the country.”
If we take GM’s policies as the beginning of a new approach to industrial production, it was not only Mexico that was going to bear the brunt of the Free Trade Agreement, the United States and Canada were also going to have to pay a price. The excuse of the captains of industry: productivity and competitiveness. By the late 1970’s, with new offerings coming from Japan and Germany, it was becoming clear that maintaining a robust presence in the global automobile market required cutting operating costs wherever possible. This was a direct result of the Marshall Plan that the United States launched after WWII to help the economic recovery of the war-torn territories. This investment caused the Japanese and German industry to grow during the post-war years, leading to overproduction and a lowering of prices of manufactured goods. By the mid-1960s, says Canadian philosopher Nick Srnicek, “American manufacturing was being undercut in terms of prices by its Japanese and German competitors, which led to a crisis of profitability for domestic firms. The high, fixed costs of the United States were simply no longer able to beat the prices of its competitors.”2 Austerity became an indispensable element of corporate culture.
On the other hand, around the mid-1980s a new management trend took hold of North American business culture, namely “that successful corporations must primarily produce brands, as opposed to products.”3 Thus, as more money was invested in increasingly expensive branding strategies, many companies—like Nike, Tommy Hilfiger, The Gap, Hanes, and Levi’s to name a few—decided to restructure their operation and outsource the manufacturing of their products to factories in Asia that imitated the model of the Mexican maquiladoras. For this new corporate vision manufacture “is not the building block of [a] branded empire, but is instead a tedious, marginal chore”4 to be kept out of the public eye. The marginality of production in conjunction with character of camp of the economic model inherent to the maquiladora industry (8.4), or maquilas as they are known informally, allows us to appreciate that what took place from the sixties was the progressive ghettoization of the manufacturing sector on a global scale.
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