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Norridgewock, Maine. At the factory here owned by New Balance, the last major athletic shoe brand to manufacture footwear in the United States, even workers on the shop floor recognize that in purely economic terms, the operation doesn’t make sense.

The company could make far more money if, like Nike and Adidas, it shifted virtually all of these jobs to low-wage countries.

So employees try each shift to make it up. Conversations on the shop floor are sparse at best, and the tasks at each work station have been stripped of waste and precisely timed. Workers cut leather for a pair of shoes in 88 seconds, handle precise stitching in 37 seconds and glue soles to uppers even faster.

“The company already could make more money by going overseas and they know it,” said Scott Boulette, 35, a burly team leader who has his son’s name tattooed in Gothic letters down his left forearm. “So we hustle.”

But now comes what may be an insurmountable challenge. The Obama administration is negotiating a free-trade agreement with Vietnam and seven other countries, and it is unclear whether the plant can stand up to a flood of shoes from that country, already one of the leading exporters of footwear to the United States.

“We are deeply concerned by the inclusion of Vietnam in a potential free-trade agreement,” said Rob DeMartini, president and chief executive of New Balance.

The workers’ predicament highlights the difficulty facing the Obama administration as it seeks free-trade agreements as a potential remedy for US unemployment, now at 9.2 percent.

Backed by many economists, the administration says the agreement with Vietnam and the other countries, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, would create US jobs by opening up Asian countries to US exports such as computers from California and paper products from Maine.

“This agreement will create a potential platform for economic integration across the Asia-Pacific region, a means to advance US economic interests with the fastest-growing economies in the world,” US Trade Representative Ronald Kirk told Congress in announcing that negotiations were about to begin.

Moreover, importing shoes from Vietnam at lower costs would benefit some in the United States, either by reducing prices for consumers or raising profits for manufacturers that have their operations overseas.

But the example of New Balance, which has long resisted the exodus of American footwear manufacturers, highlights the fact that despite the benefits of free trade, it can also destroy some US jobs, and those losses are felt more acutely in a time of high unemployment.

The company’s main concern is that any free-trade agreement with Vietnam would likely eliminate the steep tariff on imported footwear, making Vietnamese sneakers even cheaper than they already are.

New Balance officials said removing the tariff would also undermine years of efforts at the company’s five New England factories to compete against cheap foreign labor. The plants employ 1,000 workers. Those employees earn upward of $10 an hour, plus benefits, while labor costs in China are about $1.50 an hour, and even less in Vietnam.

With the support of some New England legislators, the company is hoping that an unusual exemption can be created in any agreement with Vietnam to maintain the tariff on the shoes New Balance makes in the United States.

“Making footwear in the US isn’t as easy or as profitable as making them overseas. If it were, every company would still be doing it,” DeMartini said. “We will continue to ask our negotiators to embrace President Obama’s manufacturing agenda and to save what is left of our nation’s once-vibrant shoe-making economy.”

For decades, shoes coming in from China and Vietnam, the largest sources of imported footwear, have been hit with tariffs of as much as 20 percent or more.

The shoe tariff, by pushing up the cost of importing shoes, means a pair of athletic shoes made in the Norridgewock factory or anywhere else in the United States is more competitive than it otherwise would be, and partially offsets the costs of higher wages paid here. On a pair of shoes that comes into the country valued at $30, for example, a typical 20 percent duty amounts to $6. (In many cases, the markup amounts to 100 percent, meaning those shoes would sell to consumers for $72.)

About 25 percent of the shoes New Balance sells in North America are either manufactured or assembled at one of the five New England factories, despite the likelihood that owner Jim Davis could improve profits by joining other shoemakers overseas.

But while the tariff may be protecting New Balance’s 1,000 US workers, it appears to have done little to protect the rest of the US shoe industry, which employed as many as 250,000 people in the 1950s but fewer than 15,000 people today.

The Washington Post