Toledo’s Plea to Bush, Fox: Don’t Let Trade Cost Jobs

Even as President Bush and Mexican President Vicente Fox prepare to visit this industrial city known for strong unions, ethnic neighborhoods and fierce opposition to free trade, unemployment checks will be going out to workers laid off at the Jeep plant.

Bush plans to come here Thursday to tout his commitment to helping Mexican immigrants pursue the American dream and, the White House says, “again commemorate the very important role that Mexicans and Hispanic Americans play in our American culture.”

With a Mexican American community that dates to the 1930s, not many in Toledo have a problem with that.

They just think that it’s beside the point.

The point--what concerns Toledo’s white majority, its sizable Mexican American population and even many of the undocumented workers who harvest northwestern Ohio’s tomato and cucumber crops each year--is not immigration or culture.

It’s jobs.

To many in this gritty Great Lakes port on the southwest tip of Lake Erie, free trade means the flight of jobs to low-wage places like Mexico. And although the U.S. industrial heartland has prospered in the years since the U.S.-Mexico border was opened through the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, Bush and Fox have chosen a dicey time to come to Toledo: The manufacturing recession that began about a year ago is taking its toll here.

And Ohio is losing jobs as companies move to Mexico for its cheap, nonunion labor--from a Mr. Coffee plant that lost about 320 jobs, to Amana’s kitchen range plant where almost 645 more positions disappeared. Then there is DaimlerChrysler’s Jeep plant, where union workers who thought they had guaranteed jobs are being laid off, even as the company spends $300 million to expand its Toluca, Mexico, plant to meet demand for the popular PT Cruiser.

“It’s not about race or ethnicity,” said Toledo native Marcy Kaptur, a Democrat who has represented the area in Congress for more than two decades. “We’re beyond all that. It’s about economics.”

Toledo officials, who bill their town as “A Renaissance City,” have fought hard to keep jobs, cutting deals to entice new auto industry investment and pushing for a riverfront development zone, which is up for a vote.

Still, economic projections for the state and region show job growth mainly in low-paying service industry jobs. Manufacturing employment, long Toledo’s backbone, has declined. And like other Rust Belt cities, the decline in high-paying manufacturing jobs translates into declining population: The city of Toledo has lost more than 20,000 residents since 1990, according to the most recent census figures.

While many here blame NAFTA, free-trade proponents point to figures that show Ohio’s exports to Mexico have risen from $709 million annually to nearly $2 billion in the years since the pact was concluded.

Even Migrants Are Losing Work to Mexico

At Tony Packo’s Cafe, a Hungarian place on Toledo’s east side that makes its own hot dogs, the regulars say much the same thing.

“There is no doubt in anyone’s mind here that free trade has cost good jobs. No doubt,” says Ken Oehlers, 59, a retired teacher who grew up in the Old North End.

More surprising, perhaps, is that some of the migrant Mexican farm workers who gather tomatoes in the wide, flat field south of town for Heinz tomato paste, or cucumbers for the Vlasic pickle plant, echo that view.

Wages are so low south of the border, pickers say, that tomato-growing operations long based in the United States are shifting to Mexico. So migrant workers who come to the U.S. are losing out to Mexican workers back home.

In Toledo, local pride is important. Tony Packo’s hot dogs, a visitor quickly learns, were the favorites of the cross-dressing Cpl. Klinger of “MASH” fame.

There is similar pride in the city’s historical role in building cars--pride now mingled with a sense of betrayal. Workers think the new economy has not played fair with them, that it has not abided by its own rules.

DaimlerChrysler’s decision to eliminate 1,500 jobs when it stopped manufacturing the Jeep Cherokee caught many local politicians and United Auto Workers leaders by surprise.

A few years before, the city went to great expense to persuade the auto maker to build a plant here to make the Cherokee’s replacement, the Jeep Liberty. The deal came with massive tax breaks and other inducements, and, the people of Toledo believed, the promise to keep 5,000 union jobs in town.

But shortly after the Liberty plant opened, the Cherokee workers were laid off, rather than moved to other lines or given their own line converted for another vehicle.

What particularly galls locals is the fact that those jobs were cut even as the company has had trouble keeping up with demand for its retro-style PT Cruiser. The Cruiser’s transmissions are made in Toledo, but the car is assembled in Mexico.

“We had a line shut down here that put more than 1,000 people out of work,” said Larry Jamra, 58, a business owner who counts himself as one of the relatively few Toledo voters who supported the Republican ticket in the last presidential election. “But that’s NAFTA--it put every business in a position of knowing they could do things for half the price in Mexico, and that’s just good business.”

Jamra grew up with Oehlers, the retired teacher, who says most people in Toledo aren’t mad at Mexicans about what’s happened. They’re furious with the corporations.

“We don’t see the standard of living being raised in Mexico,” Oehlers said. “And wasn’t that part of the point of free trade?”

Juan Perez Quiroz, a 48-year-old Mexican working on Toledo’s rural outskirts, reflects what Oehlers and others see as the problem: Wages remain so low in Mexico, despite free trade, that coming north still pays, even for a low-wage field hand.

What’s worse, even itinerant farm workers like Quiroz apparently are being undercut by desperate workers back home.

Midday in the August heat, Quiroz stands idle in a tomato packing shed.

When the pickers reported for duty at first light, the current crop was judged too small, and most were sent back to the camps for a forced day off; no pay.

Quiroz shrugs it off, having learned in the five years he has been making the trip north from his home in Mexico that this sometimes happens. College-educated, a retired agricultural engineer with a modest government pension, Quiroz still makes more in 12 to 16 grueling hours packing fresh tomatoes than he could back home.

A Question of ‘Disbalance’

In Mexico his children are professionals: a lawyer, a soccer player, a college professor and a plant manager.

Still, when he considered his own economic future, Quiroz and his wife elected to make their way to U.S. farm fields where he can get $10,000 for eight months’ work, more than three times what he could earn in the local tortilla factory in Mexico--the best job he could find there.

Quiroz, who plans to go with other migrant workers to see Fox and Bush speak, said he would tell his president that he can’t live a good life in Mexico for the wages he can get.

“The main problem in Mexico is the disbalance,” Quiroz said. “The price of products is more than the wages paid.”

UAW local President Bruce Baumhower says he is up against that too. “Every one of the companies we’ve gone in to bargain with said, ‘We could move down there and make it [their product] for nothing.’ ” Stories like his distress Rep. Kaptur, whose constituents still recall the time she took President Clinton to task for his position on trade, embarrassing him onstage in 1996 as he stumped for president in her hometown.

Kaptur--who has yet to hear from the White House about the trip to her district--won’t get an opportunity to speak her mind when Bush and Fox visit a community center that serves a largely Latino clientele, and then the University of Toledo, where the presidents plan to speak about education.

Her feelings haven’t changed, though.

“America’s biggest internal conflict was the Civil War, which was fought over the expansion of the slave system into the West. All we’ve done with the trade issue is move the border,” she said.

Many of her concerns are shared by Mexican American leader Baldemar Velasquez, whose Farm Labor Organizing Committee represents about 7,000 migrant workers. Velasquez said his members also believe the post-NAFTA economy has meant fewer decent-paying jobs.

“People try to paint those who are anti-NAFTA as anti-Mexican, and it’s the exact opposite,” Velasquez said. “A lot of these people can’t see the forest through the trees. Without organized labor you lose that necessary tension between people driven to accumulate wealth and the workers who help them do that.

“In Mexico there is no tension--and if we allow that to become the standard then we are just going back in history.”

Many credit Velasquez’s presence with keeping Toledo’s unions focused on economic disparities, not racial differences. Toledo, in fact, has been used as a model for other Midwestern cities grappling with rapidly expanding Latino populations.

Out in one of the cucumber fields, where the late-harvest cucumbers have grown too large to be considered premium--meaning small enough to be pickled whole--Velasquez talked about economic realities.

Under a hard-fought bargaining agreement won by his organization, workers get $28 per 100 pounds of premium cucumbers picked, plus $6.20 an hour minimum wage. In Mexico, the same yield would earn slightly more than $1 per day.

Velasquez agreed to participate in the presidential visit despite having turned down invitations to the Clinton White House out of fear, in his words, of being a prop, a “wooden Indian.”

His reason: the chance to talk about general amnesty for undocumented immigrants.

“They can’t come to town without hearing it from labor,” he said.

“And I don’t think they can talk about education without talking about amnesty and workers’ rights. When parents don’t have jobs or are underpaid or are hiding from immigration, those are all fundamental issues when you are talking about educating a child.”