How NAFTA Broke American Politics

Mike Bink, who started at Master Lock in 1979, was devastated but not surprised. Months earlier, a co-worker whose job entailed making steel plates that were fed into a machine to make a lock body told Bink that the plates were now being shipped to Master Lock’s plant in Nogales, Mexico. That factory was built in the 1990s, not long after President Bill Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement into law, and the company eliminated more than 1,000 of nearly 1,300 union positions in Milwaukee. “People ran for the gate,” Bink, who was then the president of Local 469, says. “They thought the plant was finished.” Bink managed to hang on, but NAFTA fundamentally changed the balance of power between Master Lock and its workers. “A shop floor supervisor would say things like, ‘Get to work, or the company will take all the jobs,’” Bink recalls. “After the downsizing, the union lost its leverage.”