A Factory in Maine Proves ‘Made in America’ Is Still Possible

[maestrob]

Jan. 5, 2024

By Rachel Slade

Ms. Slade is the author of “Making It In America.”


Growing up, my parents drove my brothers and me around in lumbering Fords and ungainly Oldsmobiles until one fateful day in the summer of 1980, when my dad showed up in a brand new, all-beige VW Rabbit. It was a completely foreign thing, something from the future, a compact — perish the thought — German automobile. Buying a European car was now OK, my dad made a point of telling us, because this one was made in the U.S.A.

I inherited my father’s “made in the U.S.A.” credo, obsessively hunting for labels, flipping over plates and chairs and turning clothes inside out to find a country of origin. Which is how, over the ensuing decades, I became exquisitely aware that much of the stuff I bought was no longer made in the U.S.A. Everything from my Gap sweatshirts in the ’90s to my clunky desktop in the early aughts, and eventually to my refrigerator and dishwasher, was made elsewhere.

What happened to manufacturing in America and the environmental and economic consequences of offshoring — companies sending their manufacturing abroad — is a story we think we know. The demise of American production seems inevitable, the result of the rise of globalization and free trade. But now we are learning that the precipitous decline was the result of a steady, concerted, decades-long effort among power brokers to wrest the economy from a worker-dependent model to one where skilled workers are expendable. Corporate executives sold free trade to policymakers as a way to lower consumer pricing, but the human and political costs of offshoring were high.

By 2020, bringing back manufacturing to America seemed pointless, like investing in rotary phones. But when Covid shut down the country in March of that year, Americans were confronted by empty supermarket shelves. Later, the larger, more chronic impact of the pandemic was deeply felt in industries that relied on expansive, complex international supply chains.

That summer, I met Ben and Whitney Waxman, husband-and-wife co-founders of American Roots, who had been making all-U.S.-sourced clothing like hoodies and quarter-zips in Westbrook, just outside of Portland, Maine, since 2015. When the country hit pause, the Waxmans worried that demand for their wares would dry up. Without revenue to pay the rent on their factory space and their workers’ salaries, they knew that they’d lose their company in a few months.

To avoid that fate, they could make things the country desperately needed: masks and face shields. So the Waxmans asked their workers if they would be willing to return if they did all they could to make the factory safe. It was a big ask — vaccines were still a year away and information about how the virus spread was limited. In spite of the risks, every single employee said yes, energized by the idea that they could make a real difference at a moment of crisis.

The Waxmans shut down their factory to retool it for safe mask production. By that summer, they nearly quintupled their staff from 30 to 140-plus workers who were cranking out tens of thousands of American Roots’ custom-designed face masks for emergency workers and employees across the country.

Ben and Whitney had founded their company with a mission: to prove that capitalism and labor can work together to create community, good jobs and great products. They chose apparel making because it was fairly easy to get into and all components could be sourced domestically. All they needed was a few sewing machines and an army of workers willing to show up day after day. For these reasons, apparel manufacturing was one of the first industries to get offshored when tariffs were dropped following the signing of NAFTA in 1992. As a Maine native, Ben believed he was bringing back that lost industry — the state had once been a textile powerhouse — and through his mother, who had founded a locally sourced blanket and cape business, he had connections to get them started.

I needed to know how the Waxmans made the whole thing work. But first, their company had to survive the pandemic. I followed them through the fall of 2020, as demand for American-made masks dried up when imported masks began flooding in again. That year, they tripled their annual revenue, hitting $3.6 million. I was with them through 2021, as they returned to the hard work of rebuilding their hoodie business. They struggled to find buyers for their apparel in a wildly uncertain time, forced to shrink their labor force to 45 while just clearing $2 million in revenue.

I spent time on the shop floor and in the homes of their dedicated workers, many of whom are new Americans, who, with their families, had fled untenable, dangerous situations in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, Angola and other countries, and had found themselves in Maine, eager to build new lives there.

While I was learning about the ups and downs of the textile and apparel industry, I was also introduced to labor history. Ben Waxman had spent a decade at the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the largest federation of unions in the country, representing 12.5 million workers, working closely with President Richard Trumka. During that time, he witnessed the impact of offshoring with his own eyes, standing shoulder to shoulder with factory men and women as their livelihoods were shipped abroad and their pensions dwindled.

Haunted by what Ben had seen, he and Whitney made sure their employees were unionized from the get-go, that their workers earned a living wage, and received health insurance, vacation time, and sick leave to care for themselves and their families. “Our company’s economic philosophy is ‘Profit over greed,’ ” he told me. “We have to make a profit, but it will never be at the expense of our workers, our values or our products.” In that way, the Waxmans were well positioned to attract and retain a work force in a tight labor market.

Since founding American Roots, Ben and Whitney have helped to lift families out of poverty by offering a pathway to the middle class through manufacturing. And they’re not alone. Small manufacturing shops across the country are doing just that at this very moment.

What I learned, however, is that what the Waxmans are doing is almost impossible. The deck is stacked against them. Every day is a struggle. Sourcing American-made components — cotton fleece, zippers, drawstrings, buttons — is a constant issue, because the apparel industry has shrunk considerably. Finding and training workers requires a huge investment in time and resources. Like many business founders in America, the Waxmans are also constantly searching for the kind of deep-pocketed financing deal that will allow them to build enough inventory to relieve them from the stress of made-to-order manufacturing.

The good news is that there are still people making things in the United States. In fact, American-made goods account for 24 percent of the G.D.P. More than 15 million people worked in domestic manufacturing in 2022, many in small shops across the country, producing everything from zippers to socks to textiles to, well, anything you can imagine.

It has taken us a long time to fully absorb the loss of manufacturing on a cultural level. Fortunately, these days, “made in the U.S.A.,” which for so long felt like an archaic rallying cry, more cynical than a comprehensive movement, offers Americans much more than the return of manufacturing jobs. After years of ceding the actual making of the things we use to other countries, the self-sufficiency and innovation that could come with bringing production home cannot be overstated.

During this presidential election year, there will be a lot of talk about American-made. The administration’s four-year agenda has been geared toward rebuilding our capability to manufacture high-tech products, while Republicans are appealing to their base of disenfranchised voters whose lives were affected when manufacturing went overseas.

But what do manufacturers really need to build a resilient domestic supply chain? Topping their wish list is universal health care, which would unburden small manufacturers of approximately $17,000 per worker with a family per year, allowing American companies to compete with foreign producers, especially the technologically advanced European factories which are attracting high-end brands looking to make quality products closer to home.

But we also need to talk about formulating a new industrial policy, just as Alexander Hamilton and George Washington did at the moment of the country’s founding. A manufacturing-first agenda, one not just focused on green energy production and chip manufacturing, would funnel government resources toward policies that manufacturers need to remain robust. That includes job-training programs, transportation infrastructure, research and development funding, sectorwide coordination and financing support in every industry. The policy would also take a hard look at tariffs and intellectual property laws to protect American innovation, and encompass broad, clear guidelines for collective bargaining and environmental standards.

Shifting this country back to making things requires cleareyed policy that would stimulate all kinds of production that would, in turn, lift up those abandoned by the new tech and service economy. But there are so many additional benefits. Manufacturing jobs pay better than average and require less education for entry than many other industries. Apprentices learn their craft by doing. Manufacturing also offers diverse opportunities for people who aren’t so inclined to sit in front of a computer eight hours a day. We’ll need programmers, machinists, inspectors, thinkers, inventors, tinkerers: people who enjoy building things and working closely with machines that move and learn.

Further, domestic manufacturing would stimulate innovation. Inventive thinking doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It usually comes after much trial and error, with designers and makers working side by side. In other words, proximity promotes innovation. Pharmaceuticals start with bench research in a lab. Polar fleece — a game-changing synthetic fabric designed to be lightweight yet warm, even when wet — was the result of a collaboration between Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard, a Maine native, and a family-owned mill in Massachusetts. The first Apple Macintosh computer, with its user-friendly, intuitive operating system, was built by people experimenting with hardware and software until they arrived at something absolutely revolutionary.

And sometimes you don’t even know what you’re looking for until you’re deep in the process of making. While building equipment to launch Americans into space, NASA engineers contributed to the early development or invention of early LEDs, CAT scans, modern water purification systems, and the computer mouse.

In telling the American Roots story, I found that the most difficult part was finding an ending because manufacturing never ends, unless your company fails. In 2022, American Roots rebranded while the Waxmans hunted for deeper sources of financing that would help them scale up. They hit the $3 million mark in revenue that year and survived the highs and lows of 2023. As we step into 2024, Ben and Whitney Waxman and their team are still manufacturing rock-solid hoodies with heavy metal zippers — made in L.A. — big enough to grab with a pair of welders gloves.

And my dad? He now drives a Subaru Outback, proudly made in Lafayette, Ind.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/05/opin ... thing.html