I made an attempt to google some info on these figures and in doing so ran into several articles throughout the past 10 years that reflected closures of some sort or another. A few examples follow:
Furniture plant closings hit Virginia region hard
By Thomas Russell -- Furniture Today, May 24, 2010
According to the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, 41 furniture plants have closed in Virginia since 2000, eliminating 7,237 jobs.
full article: http://www.furnituretoday.com/article/5 ... n_hard.php
An article on Swingline Staplers in NY _ originally published in 2000
Swingline's decision to leave should have come as no surprise to the people who worked there. Indeed, many had been regulars at union protests against the North American Free Trade Agreement, the treaty that ultimately convinced the company to move. Negotiated in 1994, NAFTA reduced tariffs and made it easier for factories to leave the U.S. for Mexico or Canada. It delivered as promised. Between 1994 and 1998, more than 440,000 U.S. factory jobs were lost, mostly from companies lured by NAFTA's promise of lower wages and higher profits. In New York City, 70-year-old Swingline was the largest and most visible casualty.
full article: http://www.citylimits.org/news/articles ... he-factory
There's a potload of info on the subject out there one can peruse, but I was lead into this by the initial article and it's report of losses since 2001... the ominous year that the majority voted into office George W. Bush. The public's memory is short but there was a great deal of downturn for the majority of folks in the country, incremental steps that has left us in the horrible financial condition we are in today, high unemployment being the number 1 culprit which seems to have no end in sight.From a USDA article from 2006:
As textile and apparel trade liberalized over the last few years, production shifted to countries with lower wages, and apparel imports increased in the United States. As a result, many U.S. textile and apparel plants closed; some firms went out of business and others relocated production overseas. The United States lost more than 900,000 textile and apparel jobs over 1994-2005.
full article: http://www.ers.usda.gov/briefing/cotton ... pparel.htm
William Jefferson Clinton's Presidency ran from 1993 thru 2001 before Bush entered the office. NAFTA was signed into law shortly after Bill became President, September 1993. This was highly touted as being the right thing for not only the U.S. but for the countries we trade with. If they could only foresee the results today.
No manufacturing jobs to call our own, America is not only dependent on oil, the largest reserves in the Mid East, but virtually everything I notice in stores, both inexpensive and expensive merchandise is clearly labeled with that singular word, China, as being the manufacturer... with the occasional Cambodia or Viet Nam as much lesser manufacturers.
The initial reason for moving our factories to foreign countries served only one purpose - greater profits for not only the companies involved but greater profits for their shareholders.
This attitude accelerated into high speed with the Bush Administration... profit was the mantra at any cost as long as profit was made, even if the people of the country found it more and more difficult to make ends meet due to loss of what once was decent paying jobs in factory work that used to proudly serve not only our Nation but Nations throughout the world.
Factories began shutting their doors. From furniture to textiles, steel production (which once was the envy of the world) to Ship building... the list is long as it was nearly every product in the world this Nation made. But look around us and what does the majority of us see - foreign goods, mostly Chinese, which now controls the purse strings of the world economy, while the U.S. increasingly finds itself a poorer and poorer country with homes vacant throughout the lands, more and more of our citizens without health care much less a decent paying job.
The Presidency's of Clinton and Bush aided in the swift change of face for our country. NAFTA legalized joblessness in favor of factories ability to move out of our country leaving it's people jobless. Sure, this didn't happen overnight. It was gradual until Bush stepped in the people's office. Slashing taxes for the rich, encouraging the wealthy to operate without oversight in order to increase profit margins, in and of itself, most would agree is a good thing. After all that's why anyone goes into business - to make money.
It is this money making ability that fueled much of the economy during the Clinton/Bush years, even though many lost their once good paying jobs living on less and in many cases, living without health care.
Today's people who have decent jobs (and there are far fewer now than several years ago), certainly do not want to lose their jobs or their personal wealth. Who among us do?
But don't the majority of us, we American citizens, want to live in a society that treats us all fairly, honestly and worthy of our tasks. If there is only a limited amount of work for a large workforce seeking work, there will follow unrest. The gap between the haves and the have-not's is an unstable situation that can only be endured for a limited time before things blow up. If unemployment paychecks stop and the work is not available for those unemployed, do any of us think this is a healthy situation?
These difficult times we're facing right now can be overcome, and we don't necessarily need to be overly optimistic. We need to be positive that there is a need for action... alleviating unemployment and to do the many jobs that need to be done to go into the future before us. The days that we had with Clinton and even Bush that seemingly brought on great wealth and false prosperity should not be ideals that we long for but rather a future that is responsible to not only our citizens, but to our environment and our health. We also need to reduce drastically our need for a petroleum based economy which is a monopoly under the control of far too few corporations that are so far separated from the public that we are strangers to them as they are to us.
Have the money lenders in our country tightened their purse strings because the future is not of their liking? Is their attitude towards our President a way to keep our economy from attaining the absolute need for change rather than staying on the same tired course we have been on far too long?
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