Capital Moves: Rca’s Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor: Jefferson R. Cowie

• Filed under: Recommended

From Library Journal
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.AA.J. Sobczak, Covina, CA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Much has been written to document and lament the loss of American jobs to cheap labor abroad. Cowie’s study of RCA, though, shows that U.S. companies have a long history of seeking out inexpensive labor. Before moving to Juarez, Mexico, in the 1970s, RCA had already moved its television manufacturing operations twice within the U.S. Cowie traces RCA’s journey from Camden, New Jersey, to Mexico. After its manufacturing facilities were successfully unionized in the 1930s, RCA decided to decentralize operations and relocated a major factory to nonunion southern Indiana in 1940. In the 1960s, the company experimented with expansion into the South, but operations in Memphis were shut down within five years. Cowie shows how the same factors that determined RCA’s first two moves were the same ones that influenced the move to Mexico. He does not focus, however, on the painful economic consequences of plant closures. In spite of the shutdowns, he shows that wherever RCA opened a new plant, each community was permanently transformed by the economic empowerment of its workforce. David Rouse

order Capital Moves: Rca’s Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor: Jefferson R. Cowie form Amazon.