Reality check

I got my hair cut during the holidays.  It really made me think.

I frequent a haircutting place in St Catharines, a smallish city just down the road from us. It's a proudly blue-collar place with a strong trade union tradition, built on manufacturing.  Historically its foundations were family, faith, the factory and hockey, though not necessarily in that order.  Like other towns in this area, and like many similar regions across the northern tier of the United States, it's fallen on harder times in recent years.  My hairdresser's story is a microcosm of what happened to the place.

A couple of decades ago, she worked in a food processing plant operated by a major multinational company.  The union was strong, wages were good -- would still be good by today's standards, in fact -- and there was a full benefits package. There were thousands like her all across the city: at its peak, General Motors alone employed more than 15,000 workers in St Catharines, in two vast factories.

Then along came the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement. The soft fruit that the processing plant handled could still be grown here, but it could be grown cheaper further south, so the multinational shuttered the place and headed for a "right to work" jurisdiction south of the border.  That put the soft fruit farms out of business: if you try to buy table grapes in this area today, you'll find they come from Mexico or Chile.  My hairdresser and all her colleagues had to retrain, at their own expense, for less secure and much lower paying jobs, like cutting hair.

Today St Catharines has only one GM plant still operating, with a payroll of about 2,000. The principal source of new jobs in the area is call centres.  In the prosperous little town where I live, just about every person who serves me at a restaurant, or the grocery store, or the bank, drives the 15 or so kilometres from St Catharines every day.  Most of them seem to be holding down two jobs just to make ends meet.

The soft fruit farms have been replaced, either by new housing -- the land my own home is on was an orchard ten years ago -- or by vineyards.  Those provide employment, of course, but a lot of it is seasonal work and it's done by workers flown in from Jamaica or Mexico to work 12-hour days in the fields at minimum wage.

So I was wondering.  When the economists in the big bank towers in Toronto -- which you can see across the lake from St Catharines on a clear day -- publish reports on free trade, and talk about comparative advantage and such things, do they ever think of the human aspects of it?  When the politicians and bureaucrats up in Ottawa -- the most white-collar town in the world -- conjure up new free trade deals with Japan and Korea and China and anyone else who'll sign up, do they ever think about what it may mean for what's left of the economy in St Catharines and a host of other similar places?  I wonder if they think about that, because I know that when I was working in those bigger cities, I never did.