Eagle Tribune - Battle Over Trade Reaches New Balance's Factory Floor

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By Niki Tsongas

Congresswoman Niki Tsongas was in the city Friday to rally New Balance workers to her effort to require the Pentagon to shop locally when it buys athletic shoes for recruits.

"The Merrimack Valley changed the way we do manufacturing in this country and across the globe," Tsongas told about 250 New Balance employees -- most of them wearing gray and white "Made in the USA" T-shirts -- referring to the role cities like Lawrence and Lowell played in the Industrial Revolution. "We like to make things. So in Washington, we have to do everything we can to help manufacturing in the United States of America."

Trade has been one of the most contentious issues in the presidential campaign as Republican Donald J. Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton have sparred over free-trade agreements and their impact on American jobs.

Tsongas, a Lowell Democrat running for re-election to Congress, is a leading sponsor of a bill that would undo an exemption in a trade law Congress passed in World War II. The law requires the Department of Defense to buy clothing made in the United States for troops and recruits, but the exemption -- called the Berry Amendment -- allows the Pentagon to shop overseas for athletic shoes because so few were manufactured in the United States at the time.

New Balance is unique among U.S. manufactures of athletic shoes for making a substantial amount of its shoes domestically, which for a while put it at odds with similar manufactures in opposing the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership. The trade deal, which President Obama has called one of the most significant accomplishments of his second term, would ease trade restrictions with 11 other countries, mostly by lifting tariffs. Other U.S. shoe manufacturers support the treaty because so much of their product is made in those countries, led by Vietnam.

New Balance dropped its public opposition to the trade agreement a year or two ago after it said the Obama administration's top trade official promised to ease the impact by helping it get a Defense Department contract to produce up to 225,000 pairs of athletic shoes a year for military recruits. In April, the company reversed itself and renewed its opposition to the trade agreement after alleging that trade ambassador Michael Froman never followed through on his promise.

In the meantime, the House and Senate have included Tsongas' bill to require the Defense Department to buy domestic athletic shoes in its annual defense authorization bill. The bill is in a conference committee, where members of both chambers are working out differences in the versions they passed separately.

The impact Tsongas' bill would have on the domestic athletic shoe industry was evident in a corner of the New Balance factory floor that she toured Friday, where workers were manufacturing a product launched in August that that allows athletes to design customized baseball shoes on their home computers and send the digital designs to the Lawrence factory.

The company is making an average of 36 pairs of the customized shoes a day, which it hopes to grow to 70 a day as the holidays approach, said Joe Husson, the plant manager. He noted that 10 Cleveland Indians and seven Chicago Cubs are wearing customized New Balance baseball shoes at the World Series.

Friday morning, Tsongas and three of her aides toured the maze of stations on the factory floor where the customized shoes are stitched and pressed, where she introduced herself to workers as "Niki," asked questions about their jobs and machines, offered hugs and backslaps and posed for selfies.

After a half-hour on the floor, Husson and Brendan Melly, the company's senior director of manufacturing, walked Tsongas to an auditorium-sized room at another end of the building, where about 250 more workers were waiting for her. The conversation got more serious.

Melly opened the session by noting his military service in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, then told Tsongas that the men and women in the room "are the people who should be making shoes for our servicemen."

"It's clear to me that this is a great place to work," Tsongas responded in remarks that a translator repeated in Spanish. "I appreciate, especially, this company's commitment to making things in the USA."

"She's great," machine operator Maria Martinez said after the session ended as Tsongas posed for another round of selfies, including one with at least 100 workers packed tightly around her. "She's doing a lot of stuff, good things for us and the city."

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