| Capital Moves: Rca's Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor Contributor(s): Cowie, Jefferson (Author) |
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ISBN: 0801435250 ISBN-13: 9780801435256 Publisher: Cornell University Press OUR PRICE: $67.27 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: April 1999 Annotation: Globalization is the lead story of the new century, but its roots reach back nearly one hundred years, to major corporations' quest for stable, inexpensive, and pliant sources of labor. Before the largest companies moved beyond national boundaries, they crossed state lines, abandoning the industrial centers of the Eastern Seaboard for impoverished rural communities in the Midwest and South. In their wake they left the decaying urban landscapes and unemployment rates that became hallmarks of late-twentieth-century America. This is the story that Jefferson Cowie, in "a stunningly important work of historical imagination and rediscovery" (Nelson Lichtenstein), tells through the lens of a single American corporation, RCA. Capital Moves takes us through the interconnected histories of Camden, New Jersey; Bloomington, Indiana; Memphis, Tennessee; and Juarez, Mexico -- four cities radically transformed by America's leading manufacturer of records and radio sets. In a sweeping narrative of economic upheaval and class conflict, Cowie weaves together the rich detail of local history with the national -- and ultimately international -- story of economic and social change. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Business & Economics | Corporate & Business History - General - Political Science | Labor & Industrial Relations - Business & Economics | Labor |
| Dewey: 338.762 |
| LCCN: 98-49784 |
| Physical Information: 1.1" H x 6.3" W x 9" (1.35 lbs) 288 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: Find a pool of cheap, pliable workers and give them jobs--and soon they cease to be as cheap or as pliable. What is an employer to do then? Why, find another poor community desperate for work. This route--one taken time and again by major American manufacturers--is vividly chronicled in this fascinating account of RCA's half century-long search for desirable sources of labor. Capital Moves introduces us to the people most affected by the migration of industry and, most importantly, recounts how they came to fight against the idea that they were simply cheap labor. Jefferson Cowie tells the dramatic story of four communities, each irrevocably transformed by the opening of an industrial plant. From the manufacturer's first factory in Camden, New Jersey, where it employed large numbers of southern and eastern European immigrants, RCA moved to rural Indiana in 1940, hiring Americans of Scotch-Irish descent for its plant in Bloomington. Then, in the volatile 1960s, the company relocated to Memphis where African Americans made up the core of the labor pool. Finally, the company landed in northern Mexico in the 1970s--a region rapidly becoming one of the most industrialized on the continent. |
Contributor Bio(s): Cowie, Jefferson: - Jefferson Cowie is Assistant Professor at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University. He is author of Beyond the Ruins and Capital Moves: RCA's Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor, both from Cornell. |