Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [139]
BY INVITATION ONLY CONTACT USDOC
Huh. I wondered what this was about. I contacted the Department of Commerce to find out.
“This is a three-day conference in Acapulco to assist American businesses and help them grow,” the woman’s voice from the Department of Commerce on the phone said. “It is only open to business owners and executives, not to the general public or the press.”
“I see. I own a small auto parts company in Michigan,” I said, making it up before I knew what I was doing. “How can I get more information?”
She said she would send me a packet.
I didn’t know what I would do with the packet but it sounded interesting. I had been talking to the people in Ralph Nader’s office about coming to Washington to do some work for them. They had two dozen public interest projects going, including a magazine called the Multinational Monitor that did pretty much what its name implied. I told them about this crazy conference happening in Mexico, that it had to be some sort of joke, because why would our own Commerce Department be helping to eliminate jobs here in the U.S. and move them to Mexico?
“The Reagan administration,” said John Richard, Nader’s chief of staff. “They’ve been on a mission to do this since they took office.”
“Yes, I know—but this seems to really cross a line, doesn’t it?”
I had covered this issue back in Michigan: how GM was using tax breaks to move jobs offshore, but back then I couldn’t get anybody to listen.
“We’ll send you to Acapulco if you want to sneak in there and tell us what they’re planning to do,” Richard said. “Then maybe write something up for Multinational Monitor.”
Wow. An international mission, me in disguise, the intrigue! A paid job! My wife took me to a used clothing store and got me fitted in the appropriate resort apparel. I bought a couple golf shirts, some linen slacks, a Hawaiian shirt, and a cheap yellow seersucker suit. That was one whole week’s unemployment check. She gave me a corporate-looking haircut and some of her hair gel. I purchased a little American flag lapel pin. I put on some man jewelry I bought on a street corner in the Tenderloin. I did not look like me.
I signed up as the CEO of my small manufacturing company (“less than 50 employees”) and headed to Mexico to learn how I could throw them all out of work.
I’d be lying if I didn’t admit how nervous and scared I was when I deplaned in Acapulco in my seersucker suit. I did not want to be discovered. People go missing in Mexico. Bodies aren’t found.
I walked onto the penthouse floor of the Excelaris Resort, high above the beautiful golden beaches of Acapulco. The sign over the door read: WORK MAKES EVERYTHING POSSIBLE (for you German speakers, that’s Albrecht Acht Alles Möglich!).
I overheard two men talking about how the Commerce Department had to be “not so public” in its support of this weekend as apparently some Democratic union-sympathizers in Congress found a clause in some “ridiculous law” stating that it was illegal—illegal!—for U.S. tax dollars to go toward anything that promotes jobs being moved overseas. So Commerce was here, just not officially, leaving it to the Chamber of Commerce and the Mexican firm of Montenegro, Saatchi & Saatchi to be in charge of running the show.
The room was filled with bankers, executives, entrepreneurs, and consultants—all of whom were primed to help those of us who had come to Acapulco to learn how to close up shop in the U.S. and move our operations south of the border. I did my best to blend in, and on the first day no one suspected otherwise when they saw me. I forgot that just being a nicely dressed white male was what the majority of these guys simply call “showing up.”
By late 1986, many American companies had quietly begun making their move to Mexico. Not so much, though, that anyone had taken any real notice. General Motors had only 13,000 Mexican workers (a drop in the bucket to GM’s American workforce, which numbered over a half million); General Electric had 8,000 employees in Mexico. American corporations