Sharpton, Trump are populist showmen trying to chip away at established order
Just the other day, the Rev. Al Sharpton marched to Mason Temple in Memphis and chanted: “No justice.” Many in the crowd of 7,000 people carrying “I Am A Man” signs responded: “No peace.”
Sharpton’s searing echo of the 1960s came a few hours after President Donald Trump, having slapped tariffs on China, tweeted: “We are not in a trade war with China.”
Yet it sure looks like one has begun.
What do Trump and trade have to do with Sharpton, a New York activist who observed the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s death?
Activists and thinkers have shamed this city in recent days for the poverty that burdens a third of the region’s 600,000 African-Americans half a century after King’s assassination at the Lorraine Motel.
Clearly, there’s a mood afoot in America to settle old scores, reckon with race and poverty and, as the White House seems to be trying to do, turn back the clock on industrial decline.
Trump, as odd a character as we ever have had in the White House, isn’t responding to the poverty in Memphis. But he does resemble Sharpton. Both populist showmen are trying to chip away at America’s established order.
April 1968
It is lost on many in America today, but the country began to splinter more widely into a society of haves and have nots about the time the old factories started shutting down.
When King was killed in April 1968, Memphis was an industrial city.
From the Schlitz brewery to the Old Spice deodorant plant to the Firestone tire line, factories paid good wages. In 1968, nearly 900 plants employed 60,200 workers and paid $123 per week on average. Back then, $123 would buy what today costs $865.
Memphians will tell you a lot of factories would not employ AfricanAmericans. But a lot did. Factory wages powered the economy here.
These days, about 45,000 people throughout the nine counties of metropolitan Memphis are employed in nearly 800 factories. Assemblers, the most common manufacturing job tracked by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, earn about $600 per week, or 30 percent below the $865 in buying power afforded the typical factory worker on the day MLK died.
What went wrong?
What happened in Memphis happened nationwide.
Inflation soared. Consumer wages failed to keep up. Factories moved abroad for cheap labor. Industrial jobs vanished. Incarceration rates climbed. Urban decline accelerated. Suburbs swelled. Voter participation rates fell.
Poor families felt the burden first. Industrial work that required strong backs disappeared. Memphis labor activists today urge guaranteed wages for restaurant workers of $15 an hour, or $600 a week, just below the starting pay for new teachers in Northern Mississippi graduating college this spring.
There’s a reason activists aim at the fast-food industry.
Tired of school? Too distracted to study? Need a paycheck right now? Restaurants will hire you. They fill the old role of factories since the
strong-back, nimble-hands manufacturing jobs vanished. Factories today employ only 12.5 million people throughout the country, the lowest number since 1939 at the close of the Great Depression.
If you had labored in the old Firestone plant in Memphis, the Chrysler Foundry in Indianapolis or Dodge Main in Detroit, you might remember those who died on the dangerous, dirty jobs. These plants are gone now. You can enjoy the cleaner air over American cities and welcome the easier desk jobs that came in with computers and technology.
Engineers say modern plants turn out more with less labor using automation and the global supply chain. But we’re not talking right now about productivity.
We’re talking about people living in Memphis. For every factory family that found their way to a good desk job, another family didn’t.
62,000 moms
Neighborhoods throughout the city are home to 89,000 households living on food stamps, cash assistance and other forms of poverty relief paid for by U.S. taxpayers.
No, they are not poor simply because 89,000 families lost factory jobs or were displaced from Delta farms by machinery, although the relief system is grounded in what we once were. Set up as temporary aid when the regular boom-and-bust cycles idled workers, it is now a permanent lifeline.
Within Memphis’ city limits, almost 20,000 married couples and nearly 62,000 single women raising children by themselves receive this aid, the U.S. Census Bureau reported in 2016.
Over the past month, thinkers and activists have linked African-American poverty, police shootings of unarmed black men and mass incarceration of black men to a spiteful white power structure.
Smart people have written long books about all this. I’m just a newsman, but looking around this town, it seems to me the key to alleviating misery goes beyond $15 wages at the burger stand.
Memphis needs to find a real path for the kids of the 62,000 moms to get a good life for themselves.
Mass transit
To start with, stretch the mom’s dollars. Women need affordable day care and a reliable network of public buses that can move them long distances swiftly. But they don’t have these services, although many poor families live far from where jobs are found.
In the last decade, about 200 small factories closed within Memphis’ city limits, costing 9,000 jobs, while across the Mississippi state line, DeSoto County harbors 37,000 manufacturing jobs, almost twice as many as in the big city of 653,000 population to its north.
It would make sense for the nine counties of metro Memphis to organize a regional transit system, especially with the efforts aimed at major commercial developments farther east.
The state of Tennessee has tried to attract factories to an empty swath of state-owned land named the Memphis Regional Megasite. The 4,100-acre site can contain a dozen factories.Yet it is located about 50 miles east of the old Memphis neighborhoods nearest the riverfront. Closer in, efforts are afoot to develop woods and farmland on the far east side of Shelby County along the newly extended Tennessee Hwy. 385.
If new jobs crop up, some of the 62,000 poor women might send out resumes. But not all will.
Staying home is an economic choice motivated partly by transportation and day care expenses. For many single mothers, daycare can be unaffordable. So women stay home. It’s one reason the metro-area unemployment rate has fallen to 4.2 percent. Many stay-home moms are not in the official workforce used to calculate the jobless rate.
Trump populism
No important executive in a Wall Street bank or Washington think tank has spoken in favor of the White House trade stand. Trump’s approach is populist.
If it ushers in a flood of $15-an-hour factory jobs, and that’s a pretty big if, the discontent we heard this week in Memphis might be channeled into specific goals — like filling vocational classrooms with people trying to land work in the new factories.
Of course, a trade spat with China could backfire. Memphis layoffs could mount. America’s trade deficit has been good for Memphis. The region’s 55,000employee logistics industry specializes in moving imports across the country.
Few experts give the White House trade initiative much credence. Today, we buy so much from China and from around the world few experts favor any kind of barriers to imports. Many see Trump’s trade approach as simple showmanship.
“Understanding this president and the administration’s approach is hard,” said Nashville attorney John Scannapieco, a trade expert for the Memphisbased law firm Baker Donelson.
Smart money
Just this week, thinkers and activists in Memphis called for social progress. They sounded eloquent, like preachers on a mission. No one I saw, though, marched in the street for affordable daycare or real mass transit.
No one talked about those old backbone industrial jobs, whose disappearance accelerated the splintering of American society.
No one focused on bringing back jobs, except Trump, while the smart money in America, the established order, bets he’ll fall short.
Ted Evanoff, business columnist at The Commercial Appeal, can be reached at evanoff@commercialappeal.com and (901) 529-2292.