Democrat launches outsourcing fight
BY SCHUYLER KROPF
Of The Post and Courier Staff
A day after Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Inez Tenenbaum discovered her telephone conference calls were being outsourced to Canada, she launched her own outsourcing fight with Republican rival Jim DeMint.
The topic was T-shirts.
DeMint's campaign bought several hundred T-shirts for boosters to wear. They carry a "Made in Honduras" label.
That's the wrong signal in a state that's lost tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs in the last decade to overseas competition, Tenenbaum's camp charged.
"We don't think outsourcing is good for South Carolina workers and we have shown that we want no part of it," said spokesman Adam Kovacevich.
DeMint's shirts came from Gildan Activewear Inc., a Canadian company with plants in Honduras and a main plant in Mexico, according to the company Web site.
Tenenbaum bought T-shirts, too, but she bought American, ordering fewer than 100 shirts from Jensen Activewear in Norfolk, Va.
DeMint on Tuesday defended the purchase, saying the shirts may have been inexpensively made overseas but supported a pipeline of better-paying American jobs once they entered the country.
Americans started making money from the time the T-shirts arrived in the United States through a seaport, were trucked to a warehouse and screened with DeMint logos, he said.
"Most of the jobs relating to that T-shirt and the higher-paying jobs are in the U.S.," he said, adding that in Honduras "they might have made 20 cents or 30 cents on that T-shirt. All the rest was made in this country and it gave the consumer a better value."
Trade has become a major dividing point between the two candidates fighting to succeed retiring Democrat Fritz Hollings. Tenenbaum, the state's superintendent of education, favors creating a tax incentive program that would reward businesses for returning jobs to the United States.
DeMint, the incumbent 4th District U.S. representative from Greenville, says outsourcing can be good for U.S. industries because it keeps them compet-itive and allows them to shift emphasis toward manufacturing high quality goods for sale overseas.
On Monday, outsourcing became personal for Tenenbaum. During a telephone conference call with South Carolina print reporters, some of her staffers were stunned to learn the call had been coordinated through workers in Montreal.
DeMint on Tuesday said Tenenbaum's exposure to telephone outsourcing was limited and overblown.
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