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

Book cover image of Capital Moves: Rca's Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor by Jefferson R. Cowie

Authors: Jefferson R. Cowie
ISBN-13: 9780801435256, ISBN-10: 0801435250
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: New Press, The
Date Published: April 1999
Edition: (Non-applicable)

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Author Biography: Jefferson R. Cowie

Book Synopsis

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.

Thomas J. Sugrue

[M]ust reading for those who want to understand the forces that have reshaped the American and global economies...

Table of Contents

Abbreviations
Introduction1
1In Defiance of Their Master's Voice: Camden, 1929-195012
2"Anything but an Industrial Town": Bloomington, 1940-196841
3Bordering on the Sun Belt: Memphis, 1965-197173
4The New Industrial Frontier: Ciudad Juarez, 1964-1978100
5Moving toward a Shutdown: Bloomington, 1969-1998127
6The Double Struggle: Ciudad Juarez, 1978-1998152
7The Distances In Between180
Notes203
Bibliography243
Acknowledgments263
Index267

Subjects