US:FOR THE first time in years, the General Motors plant in Parma, outside Cleveland, is about to see some major construction when the ground is broken on a new project later this year. The new building on the factory's car park won't be part of the car plant, however. It's a veterans' outpatient clinic to treat wounded soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.
General Motors is still Parma's biggest employer, but jobs at the factory have dwindled from 10,000 in the 1980s to about 1,700 today. Parma itself has shrunk with the factory, from 120,000 in the 1970s to 83,000 today.
"It started to happen in the 1990s," the city's mayor, Dean DePiero, said when I called him at city hall last week.
"There were a lot of spin-off businesses as well. Over the last 15 years, a lot of those have either shrunk in size and scope or they've just gone by the wayside and closed their doors."
Parma's decline mirrors the experience of numerous rust-belt towns across Ohio, a state that has become a key battleground in the race for the US presidency. Hillary Clinton needs victories in tomorrow's primaries in Ohio and Texas if she is to remain a contender for the Democratic nomination.
A new poll yesterday showed Clinton in a virtual tie in Ohio with Barack Obama, who has moved into the lead in Texas. Obama is hoping to deliver a knock-out blow tomorrow and he has been spending heavily in Ohio, running twice as many TV ads as Clinton and investing heavily in phone banks and operations to get out the vote.
In Texas, Clinton has focused on national security in an attempt to raise doubts about Obama's readiness for the presidency. The two candidates have run duelling TV ads featuring children sleeping while a phone rings at 3am in the White House. In Clinton's ad, she suggests that her experience makes her ready to be commander in chief, but Obama's ad says that the judgment he showed in opposing the Iraq war is more important.
The big issue in Ohio is neither national security nor the Iraq war but trade policy and the impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), a pact former president Bill Clinton signed with Canada and Mexico.
Ohio's industrial decline didn't begin with Nafta, but the trade deal has undoubtedly accelerated it, even if precise job loss numbers are difficult to establish. The Economic Policy Institute, a left-wing think tank, estimated two years ago that Nafta cost Ohio about 50,000 jobs, putting it fifth among all US states in the number of jobs and job opportunities lost since the trade agreement.
"Where they've had full-scale plant closings, where you had 1,000 or 2,000 jobs pick up and walk away and it's 25 per cent of your local income tax, it's devastating to a community," DePiero said.
Parma voters may be preoccupied with Nafta, but DePiero says the job losses in the city and around the Cleveland area in general may have less to do with the trade pact than with a long-term loss in competitiveness.
"General Motors hasn't moved any plants to Mexico. I think it's more a result of the company shrinking, the company not having the market share it once did," he said.
"It's the same thing with Ford, which is in Brook Park. They're not moving stuff overseas or over the border but their production's down, their sales are down and their company's shrinking, so they're closing plants. The jobs have disappeared. It's not like they picked up and moved, they just disappeared," he said.
DePiero endorsed Clinton when she visited Parma a couple of weeks ago and sampled pierogi (stuffed dumplings) at a local restaurant. He believes Clinton will win Parma and Ohio itself but she has faced an uphill battle in presenting herself as a fierce fighter against unfair trade policies.
Clinton has praised Nafta in the past, although former White House aides say she privately opposed the deal in the 1990s, urging her husband to spend political capital on healthcare reform instead.
Both Clinton and Obama have called for a renegotiation of Nafta to enhance the protection of US jobs but Obama has accused Clinton of coming late to the anti-Nafta party.
Obama's own credibility on the issue took a knock last week when CTV, a Canadian broadcaster, reported that his top economic adviser had told Canadian officials that Obama's promise to renegotiate Nafta was just campaign rhetoric.
Obama confirmed that the adviser, Austen Goolsbee, met a Canadian official at the consulate general in Chicago, but insisted that he didn't contradict the candidate's statements about trade.
"'If I'm not mistaken, they had a very cordial conversation and there was at no point any suggestion in any way that I wasn't as serious as I can be about the need to make changes in Nafta," Obama said.
DePiero would like to see some changes in Nafta, but he says that Parma has already accepted that the city must look elsewhere for its future.
"I think people have kind of come to the realisation that it's a different trade world in the last 10 or 20 years. Those jobs aren't going to come back and we've just got to transition our local economy and our regional economy," he said.