Bless her heart for trying, but Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Michelle Nunn has made quite a blunder by attacking her Republican opponent in the Georgia race, David Perdue, in an ad for supposedly outsourcing jobs. It turns out the ad features a businessman who has outsourced jobs.
The ad, titled “When I hear,” features Roy Richards Jr., chairman of power-cable manufacturer Southwire, disparaging Perdue’s supposed approval of outsourcing.
“When I hear David Perdue say he’s proud to have outsourced jobs to other parts of the world, I have to wonder,” Richards says in the ad. “Every time we invest in Georgia workers, they can compete with anyone in the world, so I don’t know how you can be proud to have sent American jobs overseas.”
Richards is referring to a recently surfaced deposition from 2005 where Perdue answered a question about his “experience” with outsourcing by saying: “Yeah, I spent most of my career doing that.”
Perdue was not referring to outsourcing as most understand it – that is, the process of firing American workers in favor of cheap labor overseas — but rather a business plan for his former company, Pillowtex, to save some American jobs, as Politifact noted.
“There is nothing to suggest he was narrowly moving jobs overseas just to increase profits or give himself a bonus,” said Rob Bliss, a finance professor at Wake Forest University in an interview with Politifact. “Moving jobs overseas would have been an effort to make the company more competitive. It’s a perfectly legitimate thing to do.”
Politifact also noted other companies where Perdue worked that did outsource jobs, but said those companies were “in industries where jobs were being lost to both cheaper foreign production — outsourcing — and also to technology and global business trends far outside his scope of control.”
Even with that information, Nunn’s ad is backfiring on her. Richards, who was featured in Nunn’s ad, leads a company that has also done some significant outsourcing.
In 2008, Southwire announced it would cut half its workforce at the company’s Watkinsville, Georgia plant, which it had purchased in 2001. In 2010, the company cut 18 of the 38 remaining jobs.
Southwire has also laid off workers in Arizona, when the company closed its Kingman plant and laid off 70-plus workers in 2010. It also closed its Coffeyville, Kansas plant in 2014, laying off 200 people.
Southwire also cut dozens of jobs in Illinois and New York.
Southwire still employs 3,000 people in Georgia, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and was praised by Republican Gov. Nathan Deal last year.
But as Southwire was laying off workers in the U.S., it was beefing up its presence overseas.
Former employees of Southwire applied for and received Trade Adjustment Assistance six times since 2000 – two of which came from former employees in Georgia. TAA is compensation from the federal government given to workers who lost their jobs due to outsourcing. One such application noted that “production has been shifted to Mexico” from Southwire’s Long Beach, Calif., facility.
In 1998, Southwire opened a plant in Monterrey, Mexico. The company opened a second facility in Tecate, Mexico in 2005.
Southwire also expanded into China in recent years, with the purchase of Coleman Cable Inc., which has an “engineering and sourcing office in Zhenzhen, China.” Southwire also partnered with Siemens VAI Metals Technologies in 2011 to build a mill in Yixing, China.
In 2014, Southwire helped build a new mill in Dubai.
Southwire also changed its incorporation from Georgia to Delaware in 1993 for tax purposes. It is listed as a foreign for-profit corporation in Georgia, since it is not incorporated there.
Nunn, if you’re going to attack someone for outsourcing, you probably shouldn’t use someone who has outsourced.
