Despite Attacks on ‘Fast Track,’ Global Economy Has Its Backers

To any outsider, this onetime rubber-tire capital seems to be a place where “free trade” should be a cuss word.

The Goodyears and Goodriches, which once made Akron synonymous with tire-making in America, moved their factories out in the 1970s and ‘80s, many of them to production facilities overseas. Labor unions, traditionally a visible political power here, have drummed home the complaint that foreign competition has drained jobs from the region.

But interviews with political leaders, pollsters and voters suggest that, to a surprising degree, Akronites have adjusted to the emergence of a global economy and are convinced that the United States must compete aggressively, rather than try to shut out foreign competition, if it is to maintain its current prosperity.

“You can’t cut out that foreign competition; it’s something that’s going to be around forever,” said Albert Arnost, a 46-year-old welder-fabicator, in a view heard frequently these days both here and elsewhere in the country. Trade, Arnost asserts, “has been great for our economy.” If America didn’t accept imports, he says, it could not export anywhere else.

Attitudes such as Arnost’s, echoed in polls and interviews in other cities and regions, could prove a plus for President Clinton as he tries to get Congress to approve new “fast track” trade legislation designed to renew his previous authority in trade-liberalization talks with other countries. Under the legislation, trade pacts that the president sends to Congress could not be amended before they are put to a straight up-or-down vote.

Analysts suggest that one of the major factors in the change has been the tremendous shift that the United States has undergone over the past 15 years from what was essentially a manufacturing economy to a new--and decidedly more dynamic--economy that now depends more upon service industries and high-technology firms.

After a painful period of adjustment in the 1980s, the United States has emerged as the world’s economic powerhouse. While Japan and Europe are mired in stagnation, the U.S. economy is humming. Unemployment is at its lowest in 24 years, inflation no longer is a problem and America is more competitive than it has been in years.

Until relatively recently, polls suggested that Americans believed that the recent good times were fragile. Today, however, the old spark is coming back. Clinton’s high job-approval ratings are one sign. Consumer surveys show Americans are more optimistic about the economy than they have been in years.

That does not always translate into voter enthusiasm for free-trade accords. A recent poll by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal shows that respondents oppose giving Clinton “fast-track” powers by 56% to 37%. And by 55% to 33%, they say imports are bad because they take away American jobs and hurt American workers.

But Edward Sarpolous, whose Lansing, Mich., opinion research group, EPIC/MRA, has conducted extensive surveys on trade over the years, warns that responses on trade issues vary widely according to how the questions are phrased. Americans are taught so little about trade, he says, that their answers are often contradictory.

For example, Sarpolous says, 26% of respondents in one of his own polls earlier this year said they believed that cheaper labor abroad had been a major cause of job losses in the United States, while 61% said international trade had had a positive effect on America. At the same time, 60% said trade had had very little effect on their jobs and lives.

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Charles Cook, a Washington pollster, says Americans “are very cross-pressured” on the trade issue. “When you’re looking at polls on trade, you have to ask whether people have really thought about the issue,” he said. “If not, they aren’t worth very much.”

Akron’s recovery from the exodus of the rubber industry is evident in the city today. While tire manufacturing has all but disappeared, the region has diversified to become a services-and-high-technology center that is increasingly into exporting. The unemployment rate has plunged to 4.1%. Employers say skilled workers are in short supply.

As a result, says Robert Dykes, a Cleveland pollster, “there is an increasing number of people who understand that we live in a world economy and that we have to survive.” Akron “went through the worst of it” years ago, Dykes said. “There’s a sense of resilience here.”

That contrasts sharply with the dispute over Clinton’s fast-track bill, which has been facing serious opposition in Congress. Labor and environmental leaders are campaigning vigorously to defeat it, and a few weeks ago the AFL-CIO launched a $1-million campaign targeting 13 lawmakers around the nation thought to favor the legislation.

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Akron’s congressman, Democrat Thomas C. Sawyer, is one of those singled out by the AFL-CIO. Although he has received more than 400 phone calls urging him to oppose the fast-track bill, he is still planning to support it--on the notion that Akron has shed its protectionist past.

The view expressed by the callers “is representative of one side of this argument,” Sawyer maintains. But, he says, Clinton needs the fast-track authority before other nations will bother to negotiate with the United States.

Harald B. Malmgren, a former U.S. trade negotiator, says the fight in Washington reflects the clashing agendas of some of the capital’s major political players, which may be stirring the debate more than popular sentiment would suggest.

Many analysts believe that the AFL-CIO’s big push, for example, comes partly from the reality that labor, whose fortunes have been in decline recently, desperately needs an issue that it can exploit politically.

Similarly, House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), the main congressional opponent of fast-track authority, is thought to be trying to separate himself from Vice President Al Gore in his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2000.

At the same time, conservative Republicans see the fast-track issue as an opportunity to pummel the Clinton administration, which delayed sending the bill to Capitol Hill until months after it was promised.

Indeed, many analysts fault Clinton for having mishandled the trade issue generally. The president at first disparaged the fast-track procedure and later passed up an opportunity to renew the authority without controversy.

Finally, opponents of the North American Free Trade Agreement have come to view the fast-track debate as a chance to unravel--or at least damage--part of the NAFTA accord as well.

Although there is little hard evidence that NAFTA has had a big effect on U.S. job losses to Mexico, both proponents and opponents of the pact have made extravagant claims about its effect, which only heightens the controversy.

That, in turn, has created a black cloud over fast-track, which opponents contend is likely to result in the negotiation of similar agreements with other Latin American countries.

Malmgren points out that U.S. trade policy has historically been influenced most by the few who have been hurt by free trade. The beneficiaries--consumers and exporting industries, in particular--are usually silent.

Most analysts believe that, like the NAFTA bill in 1994, fast-track is likely to squeak through in the end.

“Even though the polls show most people oppose fast-track,” said I.M. Destler, a trade expert at the Institute for International Economics, “I don’t see the sort of public consciousness that developed across the country in 1993 on the NAFTA bill.”

In Akron, trade tensions are not nearly as intense as in Washington. The city is too busy looking ahead. Says Richard L. Erickson, president of the Akron Regional Development Board: “We’re just a microcosm here of the kind of thing that’s going on in the country at large.”