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 importantly, recounts how they came to fight against the idea that they were simply "cheap labor." Jefferson Cowie 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.
Jefferson Cowie is an associate professor of history at the ILR School at Cornell University. He is the author of Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (The New Press, 2010), which received the Francis Parkman Prize, the Merle Curti Award, and was a finalist for the Anthony Lukas Award for nonfiction, in addition to winning several other national prizes. He is also the author of Capital Moves: RCA's Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor (The New Press, 2001), which received the Philip Taft Prize for the Best Book in Labor History for 2000. He is also the co-editor of Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization (Cornell University Press). He lives with his family in Ithaca, New York.
More at: www.jeffersoncowie.com
