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Capital Moves: RCA's 70-year Quest for Cheap Labor by Jefferson Cowie
CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS
A city's biggest electronics factory has just shut down one of its parts plants, shifting production to a distant region in search of cheaper labor. Only a few hundred of the thousands of workers once employed by the behemoth still have their jobs; their once-bustling city is starting to turn into an industrial ghost town. Any educated reader can fill in the blanks: the city is Chicago, Detroit, or Cleveland in the 1970s or 1980s, while the industrializing low-wage country could be Taiwan, Indonesia, or Mexico. Pat Buchanan might thunder and Thomas Friedman swoon, but both would agree that "globalization" was the force at work. Competitive pressures from overseas firms mandate lower labor costs--and, in this best of all possible worlds, a lower sticker price for Friedman's Lexus.
Yet in reality, the fount of cheap labor might as easily be Bloomington, Indiana, or Memphis, Tennessee, the decade the 1940s or 1950s. And the city might just as easily be in the Northeast as in the Rust Belt. The relocation, then, couldn't very well be understood as an outcome of something new called "globalization." Which raises the question of whether moving to Mexico is really such a dramatic new development, as Friedman and Buchanan, from their different points of view, believe.
The location decisions of a single electronics firm, the Radio Corporation of America, from the 1920s to the present form the subject of Jefferson Cowie's fascinating Capital Moves. The major argument throughout this hybrid labor and economic history is that the movement of manufacturing across the border isn't a radical break with the past, but an extension of business strategies used throughout the twentieth century to evade bargaining with an organized working class. "Neither the causes of the transnationalization of production nor the problems it creates differ dramatically from those of the transregionalization of labor several decades earlier," as Cowie puts it in tortured academese. This isn't to say that nothing's changed. But by showing that what we dub "globalization" has its roots in capital's footloose history within the United States, Cowie's book is an antidote to both Friedman's euphoria and Buchanan's nostalgia.
The strength of Capital Moves is its...