Once a weakness, low-skilled workers who get paid little have become the Deep South’s strength

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A grim bargain

Once a weakness, low-skilled workers who get paid little have become the Deep South’s strength

Story by Chico Harlan 

Photos by Michael Williamson

Graphics by Darla Cameron, Ted Mellnik

Published on December 1, 2015

In Sunny South, Ala.

People here were so accustomed to the rural quiet, even the distant noises tipped off that something big was coming to the most impoverished corner of Alabama. First they heard chain saws buzzing through the forest, and then they heard trucks jangling along rutted roads, hauling away the timber. Next they heard pavers blazing new asphalt past a cow pasture. And finally they heard the rumblings of a different kind, the first rumors of what was planned for the clearing. ... That’s when James Deshler decided he had to go see it for himself. ... “A blessing,” Deshler remembers saying. “This place is going to be a blessing.”

Two years later, Deshler, 29, looks back on that moment as a time when it was still easy to believe that his life, like his home town,was about to change markedly for the better. He hadn’t yet started working at the copper plant at a wage nearly half of what he was expecting while saving coins so he could buy an engagement ring at Wal-Mart. He hadn’t yet watched his bank account dwindle below $10, falling back on his father for help. And he hadn’t yet started wondering if the Chinese flag towering in the employee parking lot in fact said something about the cost of economic progress not just in this southwest corner of Alabama but across the Deep South, a region that has increasingly enticed foreign companies with the prospect of lavish tax breaks, plentiful land and cheap American labor. ... “I look up at that flag,” Deshler says now, “and, man, I think about shooting a flaming arrow into it.”

Deshler’s frustration reflects the desperate steps being taken in a part of America simply trying to survive economically. In wide swaths of the Deep South, public schools struggle, turning out workers who lack basic skills. Agricultural work has long faded, while job opportunities in once-prosperous industries such as textiles and timber have been lost to cheaper options in Latin America or automation at home. Politicians say they must give freebies to lure companies here, or offer nothing at all and watch the region — which already lags behind the rest of the country on most measures of well-being — fall even further behind.

But in some cases, when opportunity arrives, it highlights a grim bargain: Jobs come at great cost but offer only a slightly better version of a hard life. The region’s weaknesses — a low-skill workforce that doesn’t expect particularly high wages — become its competitive strengths. And suddenly, the only opportunity for somebody such as Deshler becomes a Chinese company looking for a place from which to do more business in the United States.