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.”
