Capital Moves: Rca's Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor

by Cowie, Jefferson

• ISBN13: 9780801435256
• ISBN10: 0801435250
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-05-01
• Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr

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."

Author Biography

Jefferson Cowie teaches labor history at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations	vi
Introduction	1	(11)
In Defiance of Their Master's Voice: Camden, 1929--1950	12	(29)
``Anything but an Industrial Town'': Bloomington, 1940--1968	41	(32)
Bordering on the Sun Belt: Memphis, 1965--1971	73	(27)
The New Industrial Frontier: Ciudad Juarez, 1964--1978	100	(27)
Moving toward a Shutdown: Bloomington, 1969--1998	127	(25)
The Double Struggle: Ciudad Juarez, 1978--1998	152	(28)
The Distances In Between	180	(22)
Epilogue to the New Press Paperback Edition	202	(8)
Notes	210	(40)
Bibliography	250	(19)
Acknowledgments	269	(4)
Index	273