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Capital Moves: RCA's Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor By Jefferson Cowie. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. xii, 273 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-8014-3525-0.)
It does not take long to recognize an excellent book, and this is one. With an innovative and successful mix of labor and business history, economic geography, and gender and community studies, Jefferson Cowie writes a complex story of capital migration, class formation, and social change. His narrative follows the relocation of the radio and television assembly lines of Rcn (Radio Corporation of America) from Camden, New Jersey, in the 1930s to Bloomington, Indiana, in the 1940s and to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, from the 1970s onwards (with an ineffectual attempt in Memphis, Tennessee, in the 1960s).
A clear pattern emerges. In every move, Rcn looked for a pool of young...