New York Times - June 9, 2002
A Cloth Man With an Iron Will on Trade Policy By JANE TANNER
SPARTANBURG, S.C. - A few months ago, Jim DeMint expected an easy path to a third term in the House from a western section of South Carolina. Instead, he is facing a tough Republican primary on Tuesday.
What changed was simple: the textile billionaire Roger Milliken put his considerable weight behind Mr. DeMint's challenger, Phil Bradley, a Greenville real estate broker and former state lawmaker.
Mr. DeMint's mistake, in Mr. Milliken's view, was a single vote he cast in late December. Minutes before final consideration of a bitterly contested measure to give President Bush expanded trade negotiating authority, Mr. DeMint switched to a yes from a no, providing the swing vote in a 215-214 outcome. Fellow Republicans and Mr. Bush promised him concessions for the textile industry. Most important was a provision that some garments imported from the Caribbean and South America must use American fabrics dyed and printed in the United States - though the prospects for that concession now appear uncertain.
Mr. Milliken says he was doubtful from the start about the promised concessions, and he has not softened on that vote on the "fast track" authority. "He betrayed us," he said of the congressman in late May, two days before presiding over a fund-raising event for Mr. Bradley in Spartanburg.
Mr. Milliken, 86, the chairman and chief executive of Milliken & Company, the textile and chemical maker that is the nation's 36th-largest private business, is still an adversary to be reckoned with. Since the 1960's, he has wielded significant influence in Washington.
He is a die-hard traditionalist. His critics even call him an isolationist - defiantly fighting the tide of trade history and picking as his main battleground the trade deals that have gutted much of the textile industry in the Carolinas and sent hundreds of thousands of jobs overseas. In the process, he has found himself with an unusual mix of bedfellows, from Senator Strom Thurmond and Pat Buchanan to Ralph Nader and a prominent labor leader.
A gathering of his allies "would look like a bar scene in a `Star Wars' movie," said Jock Nash, Mr. Milliken's longtime Washington lobbyist.
It seems a distinctly quixotic battle. Mr. Milliken, a staunch conservative, is going toe to toe against the Bush administration, most of the nation's business leaders and heavy spending from the retail and apparel lobbies, which were once allies against competition from low-wage countries. His adversaries, though, are not writing him off.
"Milliken ultimately is going to create a lot of havoc," said Erik Autor, international trade counsel for the National Retail Federation. But, he added, "I don't see how he is going to prevail in the end."
It will not be for lack of trying. Mr. Milliken has already elevated this Congressional race into an event of national interest. Mr. Bush appears daily in campaign spots for Mr. DeMint and has stumped for him. The president has also dispatched his senior adviser, Karl Rove, to South Carolina.
Whether Mr. DeMint wins or loses, Mr. Milliken figures that he has managed to shake up lawmakers facing re-election.
His efforts in the South Carolina primary are part of a push to defeat the expanded trade authority. Although the measure passed the Senate last month after eight weeks of debate, significant hurdles remain, and a change of one vote in the House could create a snag.
In addition to Mr. Thurmond, Mr. Milliken's longtime allies include another Republican stalwart, Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, and Senator Ernest F. Hollings, a South Carolina Democrat, who has been fighting fast-track authorization.
Mr. Milliken acknowledges that his influence will diminish when the two Republicans retire this year. With import quotas on textiles and apparel set to be removed at the end of 2004, and Chinese goods expected to flood in, pressure on American industry is high. In April, Mr. Milliken formed the American Textile Trade Action Coalition with Bruce Raynor, a textile union leader, and George Schuster, chief executive of Cranston Print Works in Rhode Island, the oldest textile company in the country.
At stake could be the very heart of the textile industry. Since the enactment of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, the industry has lost 700,000 jobs. One of the largest American rivals of Milliken & Company in textile manufacturing, Burlington Industries of Greensboro, N.C., filed for bankruptcy protection in November.
Since the end of World War II, when the United States helped Japan set up a strong textile industry, textiles and apparel have been a favorite pawn in global negotiations, said Ellen I. Rosen, a Brandeis University resident scholar. Her book, "Making Sweatshops: The Globalization of the U.S. Apparel Industry," will be published in October.
Not much has changed. After Sept. 11, in return for cooperation with the American military, Pakistan asked for concessions on textile imports; Mr. Bush granted about a third of the $1 billion it requested.
Mr. Milliken is skeptical. "I'm totally convinced that the American government told Pakistan, `Ask for $1 billion, and then we can give you something,' " he said, calling the move an attempt to save face with the textile industry.
Not true, said Grant Aldonas, under secretary of commerce for international trade, who negotiated with the Pakistani government. "What the president did was try to strike a balance between the very real need to support one of our main allies in the war on terrorism and the interest of a lot of hard-working men and women in the American textile industry."
Industry experts like Ms. Rosen say Mr. Milliken's latest efforts are futile in light of the industry's growing globalization. But Mr. Milliken's coalition is undeterred. Its main goals are to defeat expanded presidential trade power, to bolster enforcement against illegal textiles and clothing shipments and to cut the trade deficit by opening foreign markets to more American goods.
The coalition is promoting a House resolution aimed at forcing other nations to put their tariffs and import charges in line with those of the United States. "If we ship finished fabric to India, there are 40 percent to 80 percent tariffs and charges that keep it out," said Mr. Schuster of Cranston Print Works. "If India ships the same fabric to us, the tariff is 16 percent."
Mr. Schuster has been criticized because Cranston buys some unfinished textiles from Pakistan and China. But he says the dyeing and finishing done by his United States employees are the real added value.
Despite Mr. Milliken's conservatism - he was an important contributor to Mr. Buchanan's 2000 presidential campaign - many liberals agree with his attempts to thwart the export of jobs to low-wage countries. One of Mr. Milliken's more improbable allies is Mr. Raynor, head of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees. Mr. Raynor first became familiar with the Milliken operations in the early 1980's, when he went to the South to organize unions. Mr. Milliken resisted, and no union has ever operated in his American plants.
In 1982, after a legal battle lasting a quarter-century, Mr. Raynor began overseeing distribution of $5 million in court-ordered back pay to workers from a plant in Darlington, S.C., that Mr. Milliken shut in 1956 - just days after a union was voted in.
At this point, though, Mr. Raynor is more concerned about saving jobs. He says that while he and Mr. Milliken have had their share of battles, he has not even discussed unionization with him.
Another unlikely partner is Mr. Nader, who accompanied Mr. Milliken in the early 1990's to cultivate allies against the World Trade Organization. Mr. Nash, the Milliken lobbyist, works hand in hand with Lori Wallach, head of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, a Nader spinoff that is fighting the fast-track measure.
Mr. Milliken offers a quick response to anyone baffled by his alliance with Mr. Nader: "They don't know me." Indeed, many people are surprised to learn about this very private billionaire.
He was a French history major at Yale, and is now a voracious reader who quotes the economic theorists Friedrich List and Adam Smith while tracing the demise of empires like Spain and Britain to their allowing their manufacturing bases to wither.
He has intense affection for trees and gardens and talks just as passionately about a coral bark Japanese maple in the yard of his modest Spartanburg bungalow as he does about trade issues.
Nina Utne, co-founder of The Utne Reader, praised the Milliken family in the magazine's May issue for environmental sensitivity at its 100,000-acre forest property in Maine. Mr. Milliken's son Roger Jr. runs that operation. (None of the elder Mr. Milliken's three children work directly for the company.) Mr. Milliken would not disclose if the longtime president, Thomas J. Malone, who is 61, would succeed him. Mr. Milliken, in fact, divulges little about the company, whose sales were estimated by Women's Wear Daily at $3.5 billion for last year.
The Spartanburg headquarters are filled with laboratories that have produced 1,600 patents and allowed the company to branch into chemical products that provide a hedge against textile losses. The company has 65 facilities with about 14,000 employees.
Seth Milliken, Mr. Milliken's grandfather, was a co-founder of the business in 1865 in New York City. Roger Milliken, born and raised in the city, joined the company in 1941 and took over in 1947.
Milliken & Company's materials are used in products as varied as automobile upholstery, hotel carpets and the balloons in the Macy's Thanksgiving parade.
Mr. Milliken said he had never considered taking the company public. He has poured a much of his own money into research and development and invested heavily in employee training, people in the industry say.
Another compelling reason to stay private is to protect trade secrets. "They scrap their used equipment because they don't want competitors to see what they do," says Blanton Godfrey, dean of the textiles college at North Carolina State University.
Mr. Milliken is a micromanager. When he donated money to construct a science building at Wofford College in Spartanburg, he sat in on sessions with the architects. "He'd ask us, `Where are trash cans located, and how do they get the trash out?' " Ronald Smith, one architect, said.
On trade, though, Mr. DeMint says Mr. Milliken is out of touch. "My approach has been, `Hey, what we're doing is not working,' " Mr. DeMint said. "What we need to do is recognize that trade is essential to the American economy. The reality is that just sitting on the sidelines and sniping at an administration that has demonstrated that it will help us is counterproductive."
Mr. Milliken sees it differently. "DeMint is a nice guy, but DeMint is going to vote for fast track and Bradley is going to vote to save manufacturing jobs. That's the whole difference."