The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy by Pietra Rivoli

Author:Pietra Rivoli [Rivoli, Pietra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2010-05-10T23:00:00+00:00

Auggie Goes to Washington

Auggie had thought little about politics and even less about trade policy as he neared his college graduation from Clemson University in 1980. He didn’t know what his next step would be, and it was a fluke and a stroke of luck that led to a job as an assistant in Senator Strom Thurmond’s office. Auggie left for the big city, having no idea what to expect. If he had opinions about politics, he doesn’t remember them. Whatever illusions he might have had, however, were shattered at the ripe old age of 21, when he saw how Washington really worked. Auggie likens his Washington awakening to the day he discovered that Santa Claus was a fake. Santa Claus was President Ronald Reagan.

Strom Thurmond had figured critically in Reagan’s 1980 election. Though the U.S. textile industry had a variety of trade protections in place at the time, Asian imports were gushing through new holes in the dike by the day. Between 1976 and 1979, textile and apparel imports into the United States had increased by nearly 50 percent.4 In exchange for Thurmond’s support, Reagan promised, if elected, to put a stop to it. In a letter to Strom Thurmond several months before the election, Reagan promised to limit the growth in textile and apparel imports to the growth in the domestic market.5

Thurmond kept his end of the deal and delivered a large Southern vote to Ronald Reagan. Reagan, however, shuffled his feet as Asian imports continued to soar. Auggie was just a note-taker and a gopher, but he remembers Thurmond’s outrage as he raced around Washington meeting with Edwin Meese, George Shultz, and James Baker. He pounded the table, shoved the letter under their noses, as mill after mill closed and imports surged. “You’ve got to do something about this. You promised.”

Several people who had been involved with the negotiations in Washington told me that the infamous Reagan textile promise would have been impossible to keep, even with the best of intentions. It would have been a foreign policy disaster to renege on the deals already in place, which allowed imports under quota to grow at a rate of 6 percent, rather than the approximately 1 percent growth in the domestic market. It also would have required the United States to bring under quota many countries that had never been subject to export restraints, as well as to limit imports of many types of textiles and apparel that had also been without quota.

But to Auggie, Strom Thurmond, and the still millions of textile and apparel workers, a deal had been a deal. So, Auggie Tantillo’s introduction to Washington was the broken Reagan textile promise. It was Auggie’s first experience in the value of textile promises as currency, but it was not the last. Strom Thurmond, who died in 2003 at the age of 100, had played this game before and he would play it again. In fact, every post-World War II president has made his own version of

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