Quality Facility Management Book

Labor historian Jefferson Cowie follows RCA's radio and television manufacturing operations from Camden, New Jersey to Bloomington, Indiana to Memphis, Tennessee and finally to a maquiladora industrial park in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. RCA's quest for a cheap, docile and sexually stratified workforce fails to ensure its survival as an independent company, but vividly illustrates the flight of capital to havens of cheap labor and lax regulation. Cowie's work is at once scholarly, compassionate and balanced as it considers both the benefits and detriments of manufacturing as it waxes in one community but wanes in another. Over a decade old, this book's message rings truer than ever: If labor and its policymaking allies are to counterbalance multinational corporations, they must integrate their efforts worldwide.