Papers presented by Jennifer Delton since 2019
2020 Charlotte, North Carolina
"Fighting the New Protectionism: NAM’s Global Trade Campaigns in the 1970s-80s"
Jennifer Delton, Skidmore College
Abstract:
As the two previous papers on this panel show, U.S. business and labor organizations had supported the U.S. government’s efforts to integrate the non-communist world economy in the first decades of the Cold War. This meant supporting lowering tariffs, removing other trade restrictions, sharing managerial techniques and technology, and encouraging foreign direct investment. These efforts paid off as the once devastated European and Japanese economies came roaring back by the mid-1960s, which, not coincidentally, is when U.S. industry started a long contraction that would lead to plant-closings and deindustrialization during the 1970s and eighties. Organized labor reacted swiftly to the new situation, helping to craft the Democrat-sponsored Burke-Hartke Act in 1971, which proposed to put quotas on imports, repeal tax credits for corporations operating abroad, and allow the president to regulate transnational capital transactions. The bill never passed (dues in part to NAM’s efforts), but by the 1980s, this revived protectionism fed widespread “Buy-American” campaigns, tinged with particular hostility towards Japanese imports. While labor dropped its support for globalization, organized manufacturing, i.e. the NAM, took its support up a notch, in part to counter this new protectionism. This paper examines NAM’s numerous campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s to promote exports and international trade, validate the role of multinational corporations, and, ironically, to open trade with the Soviet Union. The paper raises questions about the limits of the collective action of capitalists, given how globalization devastated small and medium-sized manufacturing, which made up the majority of NAM membership. This paper should be the third paper on the panel, Adventures in Free Trade, submission #14, co-chaired by Jennifer Delton and Janick Schaufelbuehl