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

by Jefferson R. Cowie

Overview

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 Juárez, Mexico—four 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 national—and ultimately international—story of economic and social change.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781565846593
Publisher:	New Press, The
Publication date:	04/01/2001
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Jefferson Cowie is a professor of labor history and the chair of the department of labor relations, law, and history at Cornell University. He is the author of Capital Moves: RCA's Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor (The New Press), which received the 2000 Philip Taft Prize for the Best Book in Labor History, and of Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (The New Press), which received the Francis Parkman Prize for the Best Book in American History from the Society of American Historians and the Merle Curti Award from the Organization of American Historians. He lives in Ithaca, New York.

Editorial Reviews

"A conceptually rich and deeply humane book." —Michael Kazin, author of The Populist Persuasion: An American History

"Capital Moves is must reading for those who want to understand the forces that have reshaped the American and global economies over the last half-century." —Thomas J. Sugrue, University of Pennsylvania

"Capital Moves is a stunningly important work of historical imagination and rediscovery that links the present with the past in a fashion that is exciting and suggestive." —Nelson Lichtenstein, University of Virginia

From the Publisher

A conceptually rich and deeply humane book.

Michael Kazin

[A] stunningly important work of historical imagination and rediscovery that links the present with the past...exciting and suggestive.

Nelson Lichtenstein

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

Thomas J. Sugrue

Cowie (industrial and labor relations, Cornell Univ.) highlights the power of financial capital in his examination of four RCA factory sites: Camden, NJ; Bloomington, IN; Memphis, TN; and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. RCA moved production from one site to the next in search of cheap, compliant, and usually female labor; as workers developed a sense of entitlement to their jobs and demanded better conditions, the company saw them as less desirable and looked for less-sophisticated substitute workers. Cowie outlines the history of labor relations at each site along with the surrounding political conditions. He also takes a wider look at labor organization and its ties to politics, noting that while capital became international, labor organization remained local, giving workers less power. In describing one company in depth, Cowie provides valuable insight into the increasingly global work force. Recommended for academic and larger public libraries.--A.J. Sobczak, Covina, CA

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