Twenty-Five Years and Still Recovering: A Brief Reflection on NAFTA’s Impact on Southside, Virginia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has had a detrimental effect on Southside, Virginia. Southside, Virginia, particularly Martinsville, VA and Henry County, VA served as a hub for the furniture and textile industries, such as Bassett Furniture and Bassett-Walker Apparel, in the United States. After NAFTA’s implementation, these companies eliminated jobs and moved manufacturing overseas to China or across the border to Mexico where they could exploit low wage workers. Neglecting the social responsibility that these corporations had to the workers that had built their companies and made their products world renown, manufacturers closed their doors leaving workers without any other job prospects. Since NAFTA began its assault on Southside, Virginia, areas such as Martinsville, have suffered from mass unemployment and brain drain. A shimmer of hope was found by some workers that took advantage of NAFTA-Trade Adjustment Assistance under the 1974 Trade Act. These individuals attempted to go back to school and obtain new job skills but then found that jobs were still not available to them despite their newly acquired job skills and education. Others had no other option but to leave their homes and uproot their families in search of new job opportunities. Even though Martinsville and surrounding areas are beginning to “recover” from the losses inflicted by NAFTA, the area still continues to feel its effects and may feel those effects once again with the enactment of the recently signed United State-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.016 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".