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environmental standards. It no longer has to abide by U.S. labor laws. It no longer has to pay a decent wage. Then the company can ship the product back to the United States where, courtesy of the rules, it will pay little if any duty. How can American workers hope to compete against that? They can’t.
    Lisa Gentner worked at a company called Carrollton Specialty Products, housed in a one-story warehouse in Moberly, Missouri, a town of 15,000 in central Missouri. Carrollton was a subcontractor for Hallmark Cards, the global greeting card giant based 125 miles west in Kansas City, Missouri. The largely female workforce of 200 provided the hand assembly for a variety of Hallmark products. They tied bows and affixed them to valentines and anniversary greetings. They glued buttons, rhinestones, and pop-ups inside birthday cards. They made gift baskets.
    As in many towns across the country, the plant was an economic anchor for Moberly. Manufacturing is often pictured as a big-city enterprise, but a substantial number of plants are the lifeblood of small to medium-sized cities.
    Gentner started working on Carrollton’s production line when the plant opened in 1995. She earned $4.25 an hour, or just under $10,000 a year based on a forty-hour workweek. She gradually took on more responsibilities. When a supervisor was out, she would fill in. When the plant manager was off-site, other employees came to her for help. She never had the title of assistant manager, but it was a role she often filled. A single mom raising three small children, she did nearly every job in the plant over time. “The best way I can describe myself was, I was a jack-of-all-trades and a master of quality,” she said.
    She had worked her way up to quality control manager in 2009 when Hallmark dropped a bombshell: the contract that had provided steady work for the women of Moberly for years was canceled and the work would be sent to China.
    Gentner was earning less than $35,000 a year. By then, the pay of women on the production line had risen to just $7 an hour, essentially minimum wage, or less than $15,000 a year. But that was apparently too much for Hallmark Cards.
    “We didn’t earn a lot of money,” Gentner said, but she was learning a lesson that many Americans have had to absorb in recent decades. “The heads of businesses are in it for what they can put in their pocket,” she said, “and the less they can give me, the more they have in their pocket.”
    With jobs scarce in the Moberly area, Gentner did what so many who are thrown out of work do: she enrolled in school, the Moberly Area Community College. With the help of federal retraining funds, she studied business technologies with a goal of earning an associate’s degree two years later. She had no idea whether she’d find a job, but she felt that if she had a grasp of business software she’d have a better chance.
    “My theory was, if there are any businesses left in the United States, they’re going to have an office,” she said. “So it was job security.”
    On the eve of her graduation, the college offered her a full-time position in student services. That job, coupled with a temporary appointment to teach two night courses a week in Microsoft Office programs at the college, brought her income almost to where it had been nearly three years earlier.
    Even though Gentner never expects to make back the money she lost after her job was sent to China, she feels that she’s one of the luckier ones because many of her coworkers still have not found steady work. She’s baffled by government reports indicating that the economy is improving. “I don’t know where they live,” she said.
    In the Moberly area, as in many communities today, things are still rough. Good jobs are only becoming scarcer. As companies ship more and more work offshore, people who do find new jobs usually earn less than they once did.
    “If it keeps up like this, within twenty to thirty years we’re going to be