Empty Mills by Minchin Timothy J.;

Author:Minchin, Timothy J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

“Textile workers from across the country mobilizing in support of the Crafted With Pride in the USA campaign, ca. mid-1980s.” (Photo courtesy of the South Carolina Political Collections, University of South Carolina)

Significantly, considerable financial support for the Council came from Wal-Mart, and this helped the program to get off the ground. At the ACTWU’s General Executive Board meeting on July 29, 1985, President Murray Finley read out a letter of support for the “Buy American Campaign” from Sam Walton, Wal-Mart’s founder. In it, Walton declared that “products ‘Crafted with Pride in the USA’ can be competitive with products anywhere in the world.” Praising manufacturers as “the entrepreneurs that fuel our economy,” Walton saw the campaign as a way of reducing the trade deficit. Overall, the powerful CEO pledged that “our entire management and merchandising staff is committed to this ‘Buy American’ program.”[27] Backing up his words, in 1985 Walton cut imports by 20 percent and purchased $197.3 million of merchandise from domestic suppliers. At a retailing convention, he even “waved a flannel shirt in the air like an evangelist pounding his Bible at a tent revival meeting” as he sought converts to the Buy American initiative.[28]

Understandably pleased, Council supporters held up Walton as a role model. In September 1985, the American Association of Apparel Manufacturers and the Council sponsored a dinner in honor of the Arkansan. At the gathering, Walton was praised for his efforts to replace items “that once had been imported” with American-made goods. In 1985, Burlington Industries gave Wal-Mart its “Golden Scissors Award” in recognition of its “outstanding merchandising efforts” on behalf of American mills, while the leaders of the Georgia Textile Manufacturers Association also wrote Walton to express their “very deep gratitude” for his support.[29]

Wal-Mart used the publicity to cement its image as a patriotic retailer who cared about American workers. In 1988, for example, Wal-Mart vice president Nick White told a gathering of textile executives that 75 percent of the goods stocked by his company were American made. Pitching his firm as a role model, White declared that Wal-Mart would source all of its products domestically if they were competitive in price and quality. It was a big “if,” and it was clear that Wal-Mart was actually supporting the campaign on its terms. This meant that if domestic products were more expensive than imports, they would not be purchased. White himself explained that 119 American textile companies had recently bid for Wal-Mart contracts, but seventy had been ruled out on price grounds. Ingeniously, however, White insisted that it was mill owners who were not “receptive to the Buy America campaign.” In the early 1990s, the huge retailer got even tougher and started to demand annual price cuts from suppliers if they wanted to keep their contracts. Consumers, however, still saw Wal-Mart as patriotic. In one national survey in 1992, 60 percent of respondents declared that they were aware of Wal-Mart’s dedication to domestic sourcing, while 71 percent reported that they consequently shopped more often in the company’s stores.

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