Jefferson's Cowie's Capital Moves

...For him, what distinguished the maquiladora experience from earlier instances of industrial relocation was not, primarily, its transnationalism nor the presence of young women workers new to industrial life, but the "seemingly inexhaustible abundance" of the elements firms look for in seeking new locales—cheap labor, weak industrial traditions, and divisions within organized labor...

...Unfortunately, he does not explore the sources of what he sees as the limited horizons of the Bloomington workers, rather portraying localism and even exclusivity as inherent in the very notion of community...

...Workers are at a double disadvantage, as Cowie tells it, because the solidarities created by industrial labor tend to be localistic, rooted in particular neighborhoods, cultures, and institutions, making it difficult for them and their organizations to develop empathetic ties with the distant employees that companies are replacing them with...

...The Thomson CEO who closed the Bloomington plant had been a political activist on the left wing of the French Socialist Party, a point Cowie plays for irony but that might be worth deeper exploration...

...Late that year, RCA closed the still-new plant...

...Again, the company hired mostly young women, whom it initially could pay less than their peers at Camden because work opportunities for women were fewer in Bloomington and organized labor was weak...

...The working-class teenager around which the 1979 film Breaking Away, set in Bloomington, revolves—a film Cowie uses to illustrate class relations in the city—does not model himself on a baseball or football player or a rock-and-roll star, but on the panache of an Italian bicycle racer...

...No problem has been more vexing for workers trying to organize and assert their rights than the mobility of capital...

...As more manufacturing jobs became available at RCA and firms that sprung up in its shadow, a labor shortage developed...

...Meanwhile, its operations in Juarez expanded to include three factories, one of which was the most technically advanced and highly automated television manufacturing facility in the world...

...Cowie's sense of the inevitability of the dynamics of capitalist labor relations imparts a pessimistic tone to this firstrate scholarly study...

...In discussing the "maturation" of worker attitudes as a step toward organized struggle, BOOKS Cowie too readily accepts a tight link between stable community and class solidarity...

...The resonance of free-trade issues testifies to continuing jitters about the economy...

...In 1966, to counter massive unemployment along its northern border, Mexico launched the Border Industrialization Program, which suspended tariffs on raw materials and equipment for plants that re-exported their products, so that they did not compete in the internal Mexican market...

...His latest book is Working-Class New York: Life and Labor since World War II...

...Even he does not seem to have too much faith in his concluding suggestion that some sort of transnational regulatory mechanism might alleviate the loss of worker power that comes from the spatial dominance of capital...

...At least one local kid found his way to identifying with people and ways alien to Indiana...

...Cowie situates corporate rootlessness in the very logic of capitalist production, not the greed or heartlessness of particular executives...

...A foray to Memphis proved disastrous...

...Slowly but steadily, the company increased its presence in Juarez, while reducing employment in Bloomington...

...Then came the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., fueling militancy among the plant's black workers...

...JOSHUA B. FREEMAN teaches history at Queens College, CUNY...

...A plant that RCA opened in Bloomington, Indiana, in 1940 became a replacement for Camden...

...By 1953, only seven hundred of what were once nearly ten thousand consumer product jobs were left in Camden, contributing to the city's severe deterioration...

...In the United States, marked as it is by very high levels of geographic mobility, communities of workingclass families with multigenerational roots in the immediate area probably are the exception, not the rule...

...Three strikes at the Bloomington plant in the mid-1960s, two of them wildcats, led RCA to look once again for a way to escape militant workers and rising labor costs...

...By then, RCA had found another spot that had the same advantages it had sought in Bloomington and Memphis—a plentiful labor supply, friendly local officials, weak unions, and "limited industrial culture...

...But the price for capitalist mobility has been the weakening of organized labor and whatever progressive influence it might have...

...Cowie does not claim that RCA's transcontinental journey has had only negative effects...

...Workers in both Bloomington and Juarez benefited from employment opportunities and higher wages that RCA introduced into limited labor markets...

...Yet even in Juarez, the labor market eventually tightened, worker protests began, unions gained clout, and employees began fretting that their employers would relocate to countries with lower labor costs...

...Capital Moves reiterates the importance of history for understanding current political dilemmas, showing that capital mobility— whether or not transnational—is a deep structural element of the political economy, and therefore not subject to quick fixes...

...Slowly, though, conditions changed, in part because of the DISSENT / Spring 2000 ii7 BOOKS company's presence...

...At election time, they are more likely to focus on schools, taxes, guns, crime, religion, even traffic, than monetary policy, antitrust enforcement, or labor law...

...But Cowie, bringing to the disIi8 • DISSENT / Spring 2000 cussion a historical perspective, dispels the novelty of much of what occurred...

...In 1968, RCA opened a television factory in Ciudad Juarez, the first major U.S...

...Union leaders—or for that matter political leaders, like Perot and Buchanan—shape as well as mirror workers attitudes toward complex phenomena like globalization and multiculturalism...

...In 1997, RCA—by then a subsidiary of the French state-owned firm Thomson Consumer Electronics—shuttered its Indiana plant...

...To assemble consumer products, which generally require less skill to make than custom equipment for industrial or military use, the company hired young women and paid them by the piece...

...So many young women workers could be found in northern Mexico that RCA and other border employers made it a policy to systematically replace assemblers as they gained seniority, undermining solidarity and precluding the development of more combative attitudes...

...Since elsewhere is more than likely to be abroad these days, union fears of job loss fuel wariness about globalization...

...What their followers have feared—more than a flood of imports—is an accelerated relocation of jobs from the United States to Mexico and other low-wage countries...

...THE RESENTFUL, even racist, attitudes that Bloomington workers had toward RCA employees in Juarez clearly distressed Cowie...

...In response, RCA began dispersing its production throughout the country...

...A quarter-century of downsizing, factory relocations, and episodes of widespread joblessness has left Americans anxious about their ability to get and keep work, even when unemployment is at a historic low...

...Workers, growing acclimated to an industrial regime and less fearful of losing their jobs, shed their deference toward management...

...An eleven-week strike followed in 1970...

...The story may be more complex, with residents of even fairly parochial communities like Bloomington making conscious choices about the borders of their emotional and cultural world...

...Worker militancy does not arise only from a long process of proletarianization, unfolding in a fixed industrial environment...

...For Cowie, globalization, or at least the maquiladora, represents the same old story, just more of it...

...DISSENT / Spring 2000 n I 19...

...Joshua B. Freeman CAPITAL MOVES: RCA'S SEVENTY-YEAR QUEST FOR CHEAP LABOR by Jefferson Cowie Cornell University Press, 1999 273 pp $29.95 MOST AMERICANS rarely think about the large structures of political economy...

...One electrical-industry union, the left-wing United Electrical Workers (the group that once represented the Camden workers), has been involved in imaginative collaborations with Mexican unions, while another, the more centrist International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (which represented the Bloomington workers), has made fewer efforts to build transnational solidarity...

...The maquiladora plants along the U.S.Mexican border—with their legion of young women workers, many making expensive goods for faraway middle-class consumers, while they themselves returned each night to dusty shacks and shanties—quickly attracted the attention of scholars, journalists, and social activists, who thought they saw a new, frightening version of industrialism...

...Capital Moves—based impressively on research about four sites and in two languages— exemplifies the salutary effect of the revival of geography on the social sciences...

...Time after time, when workers have built strong unions, won higher wages, or created a culture of solidarity, companies have trumped their efforts by closing factories, office complexes, and service centers and opening new ones elsewhere...

...But history also provides us with examples of seemingly parochial groups leaping across space and culture to build spiritual and practical solidarity, from the revolutionaries of 1848 to the antiapartheid campaigners of the 1980s...

...Because companies are more mobile than workers, they can repeatedly start afresh when the experience of industrial work and tightening labor markets lead their employees to fight for more power and money...

...For many workers, globalization connotes threat to their well-being and to national economic and political security, not technical or social progress...

...The two most galvanizing candidates of the 1990s, Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan, built their right-wing populist crusades through attacks on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the World Trade Organization...

...Globalization has an air of newness about it, but Jefferson Cowie's fine study of one corporation's repeated relocations of its manufacturing demonstrates how little is fresh in capital's use of mobility to increase profits and temper the power of labor...

...By the 1960s, it employed some eight thousand workers, primarily making televisions...

...corporation to take advantage of the program...

...In recent years, however, there has been a notable exception: the intense debate in Congress, on talk radio, and on the campaign stump over free trade...

...His own example of Memphis illustrates how shop floor militancy can arise quickly, influenced by events outside the workplace...

...They can provide favorable terrain for organized labor, but they are not a prerequisite of worker struggles...

...Cowie's core argument—that in spite of the claimed novelty of globalization, spatial factors long have been critical to the stability of capitalist production— deserves close attention...

...When in the mid1930s the underpaid Camden workers got swept up in a national tide of unionization, RCA fiercely fought their strike for recognition, using imported thugs, pro-company workers, and cooperative local authorities to do its dirty work...

...Ultimately the Camden workers did win union recognition and an excellent contract...

...Cowie only briefly discusses how politics can influence the nature of solidarity and how far workers' horizons reach...

...Globalization and popular solidarity may not, in the end, be incompatible...

...Organized labor has particular reason to worry...

...The current wave of anti-sweatshop activism—encompassing both unionists and middle-class students— suggests that possibilities for grassroots international cooperation may be greater than evident in the RCA story Cowie tells so well...

...The company's attempt to get a large plant up and running quickly alienated the workforce...

...Managers, by Cowie's account, not workers, are the true citizens of the world...

...In picking RCA to make his argument, Cowie may have chosen too good an example, a case neater than most, that leads him to be excessively schematic, even determinist...

...RCA, the giant maker of radio and then television equipment, first centered its production in a vast complex in Camden, New Jersey...