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

by Cowie, Jefferson

• ISBN13: 9781565846593
• ISBN10: 1565846591
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-04-01
• Publisher: New Pr

Summary

The highly acclaimed account of one renowned company's labor struggles in its rise to global power. 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, Mexicofour 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 nationaland ultimately internationalstory of economic and social change. 22 black-and-white photographs.

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