What The Swifties Cost Us

On the day that the Swift Boat controversy reached a rabid apogee--that would be the day a Bush campaign lawyer resigned because of his ties to the Swifties, and Max Cleland made the stagy delivery of a protest letter to the Bush ranch--a woman named Elba Nieves stood at a town meeting in Philadelphia and told John Kerry that she had recently been laid off. The candidate proceeded to ask her a series of questions. She answered with quiet dignity. She had worked in a ribbon factory for four years. She said the company was having trouble keeping up with foreign competitors and was forced to close when it was refused a new bank loan. She was given no notice of termination, no severance package. Her shift--about 300 people--was simply called together at the end of a workday and dismissed. "They were changing the locks even before we left," she added. The audience, composed mostly of trade unionists, gasped and groaned.

I called Nieves the next day to check the details of her story, and, as it happened, there were some complicating factors. First, she admitted that her question had been precooked--her union had asked her to come to the event and tell the story. Kerry turned to Nieves immediately; her question was the first. This, in itself, isn't a terrible thing: George Bush constantly manages to "find" small-business people at his town meetings whose companies are booming because of his tax cuts. But Nieves went on to tell me that she recently had been called back to work at the ribbon factory and refused to return, on the advice of her union, because the company wouldn't continue her health insurance. Hmm, I thought: If I were a coldhearted political operative, I could get some rich friends to finance a group of Nieves' fellow employees--perhaps those who had returned to work without health insurance--call them Ribbon Workers for Truth and make this poor woman's life a trial. (As it is, I've acted as a Not-So-Swift Columnist for Truth by revealing some of the more problematic details of her story.)

Ribbon Workers for Truth would be a nasty bit of business. It would purposely elide the most important fact--the larger truth--of Nieves' story: that she was laid off, and in a particularly brutal way. As she left the factory on Aug. 4, she had no idea how she would support her three children. She still doesn't know. And the uncertainty of her fate is a question with enormous political ramifications: What do we, as a nation, do about the downside of economic globalization? In fact, the real reason why Ribbon Workers for Truth would exist would be to divert attention from that question. The Ribbies would also turn Nieves' refusal to return to work without a health plan into a "character" issue--and thus evade the essential ridiculousness of a health-insurance system that would usually provide Nieves care (through Medicaid) if she were on welfare but doesn't if she is working a full-time job for an employer without a health plan.