Opening Doors of Opportunity Can Heal the Nation

By Ben Jealous

Ben Jealous

January 1, 1994 is as good a date as any to recognize as the beginning of the end of the U.S. manufacturing sector as we knew it. That is the date the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect. Going back to the 1970s, foreign competition in manufacturing had already led to America’s Steel Belt being dubbed the Rust Belt, but NAFTA and other trade agreements like it greatly accelerated factory closure.

“The passage of NAFTA remains one of the most consequential events in recent American political and economic history,” reads a recent New York Times Magazine. deep dive into the impacts of the trade agreement. “Between 1997 and 2020, more than 90,000 factories closed, partly as a result of NAFTA and similar agreements.”

These closures touched every corner of the country where most Americans live, including virtually every major and mid-size metropolitan area. As a result, today most Americans live at some version of the same address. It is the place where the factory shut down and in its place came downward economic mobility that has devastated many communities.

That downward mobility has led to social isolation and spikes in the diseases of despair – depression, drug addiction. And it has impacted working-class America across demographic groups – Black, white, and every race; urban and rural; Republican and Democrat. Yet instead of unifying us across those lines, this shared experience has been used to divide us. Demagogues and corporate propagandists are nothing if not seasoned at scapegoating and misdirecting people’s blame for their frustrations. There is a clear through line from an example like Reagan-era “welfare queen” propaganda to the vicious attacks we are seeing against immigrant communities today.

And division has increased exponentially over the last 30 years – along the same timeline as the decimation of US manufacturing. How divided we are as a nation is, perhaps ironically, one of the things Americans agree on most. A new Gallup poll released just this week shows a record high 80 percent of Americans now say our country is deeply divided on core values.

When American manufacturing went away, it took away economic opportunity not just for the people who lost jobs in those closed factories but for their children who would have gone on to work in those factories. It also goes for the many people working in construction, health care, education, and the other sectors that serviced the manufacturing sector and its workers in their communities. We are talking about tens of millions of Americans.

The best way to reverse these trends in downward mobility and division is with the rebirth of American manufacturing. And the best way to do that is by going all in on the next economy – the clean energy economy. That means massive investments in renewable energy and green manufacturing, and ensuring supply chains are integrated and housed within the United States. More than 334,000 new clean energy jobs have been created across the country in the two years since passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). And it is estimated that with domestic supply chains there are as many as four indirect or induced jobs in other sectors created for every clean energy job.

As a son of Scranton, Pennsylvania, Joe Biden got the need to reinvigorate manufacturing. Scranton is a city that was devastated by deindustrialization and trade agreements like NAFTA. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, manufacturing employment in the Scranton metropolitan area was reduced by half between 1990 and 2016.

This is part of what has driven the Biden-Harris administration’s “place-based” approach to reinvigorating the US manufacturing sector. The administration’s landmark initiatives like the IRA, Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the CHIPS and Science Act.

As Ben Beachy, special assistant to the President for Climate Policy, Industrial Sector, and Community Investment, notes, “The administration is committed to ensuring that hard-hit communities and workers reap the rewards of this boom, including deindustrialized communities.”

Investments spurred by the IRA and other administration initiatives have flowed heavily into impacted communities in the Midwest, to states like Michigan and Indiana. And Electric Vehicle and battery manufacturing are taking root in states like Michigan, Ohio, and Illinois. E2’s Michael Timberlake says, “I think electric vehicles could soon be the second biggest employer in the US for clean energy jobs.”

We know the climate crisis and the need to save our planet is driving an intense urgency for the shift to a clean energy future. But saving the planet is also the route to establishing US leadership in this next economy, as we race to overcome China’s head start in solar, wind, batteries, transmission cables, and the supply chains that support those and other products. And, maybe even more important, it is the way we bring back economic opportunity to millions of Americans and ease the pain that has helped lead to our division. This is one more way the movement to save the Earth can also heal our nation.

Ben Jealous is the Executive Director of the Sierra Club and a Professor of Practice at the University of Pennsylvania.