Capital moves : RCA's seventy-year quest for cheap labor / Jefferson Cowie.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cowie, Jefferson.

Contributor:

Class of 1924 Book Fund.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

RCA Corporation--History.

RCA Corporation.

Electronic industry workers--United States--History.

Electronic industry workers.

Employees.

History.

United States.

RCA Corporation--Employees--History.

Business relocation.

Physical Description:

x, 273 pages : illustrations, map ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, 1999.

Summary:

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 important, recounts how they came to fight against the idea that they were simply "cheap labor."

Jefferson Cowie follows RCA's winding path across North America as he 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.

Cowie shows how, in each case, the opening of a new factory radically altered working-class politics as employees, the majority of whom were women, developed a sense of entitlement and control over private investment in their community. He reveals the deep similarities among these communities' experiences and the important differences and distances that stand in the way of any solidarity among them. A powerful account of the people and practices in the path of capital flight, his book reminds us that the sweeping forces of globalization are very much a local matter.

Contents:

Abbreviations ix

1 In Defiance of Their Master's Voice: Camden, 1929-1950 12

2 "Anything but an Industrial Town": Bloomington, 1940-1968 41

3 Bordering on the Sun Belt: Memphis, 1965-1971 73

4 The New Industrial Frontier: Ciudad Juarez, 1964-1978 100

5 Moving toward a Shutdown: Bloomington, 1969-1998 127

6 The Double Struggle: Ciudad Juarez, 1978-1998 152

7 The Distances In Between 180.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 243-261) and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Class of 1924 Book Fund.

ISBN:

0801435250

0801485223

OCLC:

40298442