THE CHILDREN OF NAFTA sounds as if it could be the title of a sequel to the Chronicles of Narnia or perhaps another of C.S. Lewis's theology-hued fantastications. Then one's eyes scroll across the book's somber subtitle – Labor Wars on the U.S.-Mexico Border (California, $27.50) – and we know we're still standing in the light of common day. The subject of Children (whose author is David Bacon, a longtime labor activist and sometime Bay Guardian contributor) is neither make-believe nor God but the sweatshop horrors, worthy of Dickens, that have arisen on the far shores of the Rio Grande in the past lovely decade of free trade in North America.

The book, though meticulously reported, is freely emotive. There is anger, sympathy, sorrow, despair, even shy glints of hope – but mostly, if implicitly, there is contempt. It isn't Bacon's contempt (he is angry and sad, in the main), nor is it the contempt of the maquiladoras, the Mexican laborers who toil in the factories and fields of the great yanqui concerns. It is the contempt of the yanquis themselves – owners, overlords, overseers, bosses – and it isn't merely the contempt of the powerful for the powerless but of the educated and technocratic for those who work with their hands and their bodies, who perform jobs that might be necessary but are not regarded as worthy.

There are racial and cultural dimensions to this contempt, certainly, but there is also an intramural aspect. In our salmonlike striving toward a middle-class, white-collar American utopia, in which every fresh-faced child goes to the best possible college and gets a job that involves sitting in front of a pixilated screen while dressed in a button-down shirt, we regard as unacceptable – dishonorable – the wish to do manual labor: to make furniture or cobble shoes or paint bedrooms or sew pillows. (The New York Times's ineffable Thomas Friedman, twit-king of punditry, made a dismissive reference in one of his recent columns to the making of pillows, which made me think pillow-making is something we should be doing more of.) Our preferred word for those tasks is menial, synonyms for which include lowly, humble, and servile, all of which imply some sort of disgrace. Menial jobs are the ones we are busy exporting to places we regard as lowly, humble, and servile – places that are, really, anywhere but here, within our own enchanted, classless (though upwardly mobile, in an anxious sort of way) borders.

For a society that purports to classlessness, America is remarkably class-conscious and (no coincidence) its citizens deeply insecure about their class standing. At the same time, we as a people are in denial about the trials and tribulations of the pixilated, technocratic good life. Even those of us suited by temperament and inclination to the electronic trafficking of words, ideas, and images understand that this sort of existence can never be a whole life. That is why so many white-collar, nine-to-five, cubicle-farmed, information-age toilers recreate by cooking or gardening – by doing something physical, even menial, rather than intellectual.

And as in the life of an individual, so in the life of the wider society. One need not embrace romantic visions of the downtrodden proletariat to accept the proposition that a society without people able and willing to work with their hands – to perform necessary tasks and make useful things, and to take pride in the doing – is an incomplete and lesser, and perhaps even vulnerable, society. It is so much the worse if the loss of the physical dexterities is willful and self-inflicted, if the society has purged itself of "low prestige" jobs by encouraging its companies to send them overseas, while herding the displaced into fast-food restaurants to flip minimum-wage burgers and teaching its children that aspirations to manual labor are unthinkable.

In all the hullabaloo about the hemorrhage of jobs under the calamitous administration of George W. Bush (who is to the presidency what the Hindenburg was to air travel), no mention is made that we have lost, or nearly lost, along with those millions of jobs, entire industries – and with those industries, skills. If you go into any big retailer these days in search of a toaster or watch or television or stereo or pair of jeans or sneakers, even a pillow – virtually any ordinary consumer item of the sort we all use every day – you are almost sure to find, if you look, that your choices, though labeled with the familiar old American brands, are made in China.

There is something funny and pathetic about a country that spends untold fortunes on manufacturing cruise missiles and deep-space death rays but can't make its own underwear. We are dressed to kill, you might say – not to live.