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by Joshua B. Freeman


  11.Daniel Nelson, American Rubber Workers and Organized Labor, 1900–1941 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 82–83, 234–45, 257–64, 271, 307–09, 315–17; Charles A. Jeszeck, “Plant Dispersion and Collective Bargaining in the Rubber Tire Industry,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1982, 31, 47–54, 106–08.

  12.The Bloomington plant swelled to more than eight thousand employees after RCA began producing televisions there, but the company eventually shifted much of the production first to Memphis and then Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Jefferson Cowie, Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 10, 15, 17, 22–35, 42–43.

  13.In a further effort to avoid interruptions in production, General Motors, unlike Ford, made it a policy to use outside suppliers for a majority of the parts and accessories that went into its vehicles. Douglas Reynolds, “Engines of Struggle: Technology, Skill and Unionization at General Motors, 1930–1940,” Michigan Historical Review 15 (Spring 1989), 79–80; New York Times, Aug. 12, 1935; Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 208.

  14.Jeszeck, “Plant Dispersion,” 33–35; “Flying High,” Kansas City Public Library, http://www.kclibrary.org/blog/week-kansas-city-history/flying-high, and “Fairfax Assembly Plant,” GM Corporate Newsroom, http://media.gm.com/media/us/en/gm/company_info/facilities/assembly/fairfax.html (both accessed Apr. 5, 2016); Schatz, Electrical Workers, 233. On war-related industrial development in the Southwest, see Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Sunbelt Capitalism: Phoenix and the Transformation of American Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).

  15.Metzgar, “The 1945–1946 Strike Wave”; Freeman, American Empire, 39–41; Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 93–97; Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945–60 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 138–39.

  16.Kim Phillips-Fein, “Top-Down Revolution: Businessmen, Intellectuals and Politicians Against the New Deal, 1945–1964,” Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 2004, 220; Joshua B. Freeman, Working-Class New York: Life and Labor since World War II (New York: New Press, 2000), 60–71; Tami J. Friedman, “Communities in Competition: Capital migration and plant relocation in the United States carpet industry, 1929–1975,” Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 2001, 22, 70–76, 201–04.

  17.Schatz, Electrical Workers, 170–75; Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands, 97–114.

  18.Schatz, Electrical Workers, 233–34.

  19.Schatz, Electrical Workers, 234–36; Freeman, American Empire, 303–06; Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 128–29; James C. Cobb, The Selling of the South: The Southern Crusade for Industrial Development, 1936–1980 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982); Friedman, “Communities in Competition,” 111–66.

  20.See, for example, Martin Beckman, Location Theory (New York: Random House, 1968); Gerald J. Karaska and David F. Bramhall, Locational Analysis for Manufacturing: A Selection of Readings (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969); and Paul Krugman, Geography and Trade (Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), esp. 62–63 for discussion of Akron.

  21.Counter to the common management view, the productivity of unionized workers often exceeded that of nonunion workers. Roger W. Schmenner, Making Business Location Decisions (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1982), vii, 10–11, 124–26, 154–57, 239; Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands, 104; Lawrence Mishel and Paula B. Voos, eds., Unions and Economic Competitiveness (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1992).

  22.Kimberly Phillips-Fein, “American Counterrevolutionary: Lemuel Ricketts Boulware and General Electric, 1950–1960,” in Lichtenstein, ed., American Capitalism, 266–67; John Barnard, American Vanguard: The United Auto Workers during the Reuther Years, 1935–1970 (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2004), 483; Cowie, Capital Moves, 53–58. See also Friedman, “Communities in Competition,” 380–81, 403–21.

  23.Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis, 130–35.

  24.Steve Jefferys, Management and Managed: Fifty Years of Crisis at Chrysler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 155; Historic American Engineering Record, Mid-Atlantic Region National Park Service, “Dodge Bros. Motor Car Company Plant (Dodge Main): Photographs, Written Historical and Descriptive Data” (Philadelphia: Department of the Interior, 1980), 20.

  25.Freeman, American Empire, 115; U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1967 Census of Manufactures, vol. 1: Summary and Subject Statistics (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1971), table 1 (pages 2–4).

  26.Charles Fishman, “The Insourcing Boom,” The Atlantic, Dec. 2012; Mark Reilly, “General Electric Appliance Park,” in John E. Kleber, ed., The Encyclopedia of Louisville (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), 333–34.

  27.“The Rebirth of Ford,” Fortune, May 1947, 81–89. The Evans photographs are now held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and can be seen at http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/281891 and http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/279282 (accessed Apr. 11, 2016).

  28.Warren Bareiss, “The Life of Riley,” Museum of Broadcast Communications—Encyclopedia of Television (accessed Apr. 11, 2016), http://www.museum.tv/eotv/lifeofriley.htm. See also George Lipsitz, “The Meaning of Memory: Family, Class, and Ethnicity in Early Network Television Programs,” Cultural Anthropology 1 (4) (Nov. 1986), 355–87.

  29.Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor ([2002] Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 148–62, 215–18; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census of Manufactures, 1972, vol. 1, Subject and Special Statistics (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976), 68; Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society; A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York: Basic Books, 1973); Freeman, American Empire, 303–06, 344–49; Metzgar, Striking Steel, 210–23.

  30.Anders Åman, Architecture and Ideology in Eastern Europe during the Stalin Era; An Aspect of Cold War History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 76; Sonia Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet Problem with Two ‘Unknowns’: How an American Architect and a Soviet Negotiator Jump-Started the Industrialization of Russia: Part II: Saul Bron,” Industrial Archeology 37 (1/2) (2011), 21–22; “History—Chelyabinsk tractor plant (ChTZ)” (accessed Jan. 18, 2016), http://chtz-uraltrac.ru/articles/categories/24.php; New York Times, Feb. 25, 2016; Stephen Kotkin, Steeltown, USSR: Soviet Society in the Gorbachev Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), xii–xiii, 2, 5.

  31.Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 80–81.

  32.Alan M. Ball, Imagining America: Influence and Images in Twentieth-Century Russia (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 162.

  33.Most of the housing in Avtograd consisted of apartments for individual families in five to sixteen story buildings. Siegelbaum, Cars for Comrades, 81–109; Wall Street Journal, Apr. 11, 2016.

  34.KAMAZ, “History,” https://kamaz.ru/en/about/history/ (accessed May 2, 2017).

  35.Siegelbaum, Cars for Comrades, 112–24; Wall Street Journal, Apr. 11, 2016; KAMAZ, “History”; KAMAZ, “General Information” (accessed May 2, 2017), https://kamaz.ru/en/about/general-information/.

  36.Czechoslovakia was exceptional in having a large communist party with substantial popular support. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005), 129–39, 165–96; Åman, Architecture and Ideology, 12, 28–30, 147; Mark Pittaway, “Creating and Domesticating Hungary’s Socialist Industrial Landscape: From Dunapentele to Sztálinváros, 1950�
�1958,” Historical Archaeology 39 (3) (2005), 76, 79–80.

  37.Romania never had a “first socialist city” of the sort found elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Åman, Architecture and Ideology, 77 (“cult of steel”), 81, 147, 157–61; Ulf Brunnbauer, “‘The Town of the Youth’: Dimitrovgrad and Bulgarian Socialism,” Ethnologica Balkanica 9 (2005), 92–95. See also Paul R. Josephson, Would Trotsky Wear a Bluetooth? Technological Utopianism under Socialism, 1917–1989 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 65–119.

  38.Åman, Architecture and Ideology, esp. 33–39, 102–03, 158, 162; Pittaway, “Hungary’s Socialist Industrial Landscape,” 78–81, 85–87; Brunnbauer, “‘The Town of the Youth,’” 94, 98–111; Katherine Lebow, Unfinished Utopia: Nowa Huta, Stalinism, and Polish Society, 1949–56 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 46, 52–56.

  39.Paweł Jagło, “Steelworks,” in Nowa Huta 1949+ [English version] (Kraków: Muzeum Historyczne Miasta Krakowa, 2013), quote on 18; Lebow, Unfinished Utopia, 19–26, 36–40, 69; Alison Stenning, “Placing (Post-)Socialism: The Making and Remaking of Nowa Huta, Poland,” European Urban and Regional Studies 7 (Apr. 2000), 100–01; Boleslaw Janus, “Labor’s Paradise: Family, Work, and Home in Nowa Huta, Poland, 1950–1960,” East European Quarterly XXXIII (4) (Jan. 2000), 469; H. G. J. Pounds, “Nowa Huta: A New Polish Iron and Steel Plant,” Geography 43 (1) (Jan. 1958), 54–56; interview with Stanisław Lebiest, Roman Natkonski, and Krysztof Pfister, Nowa Huta, Poland, May 19, 2015. The largest U.S. Steel mill, in terms of employment, the Bethlehem Steel Sparrows Point complex, had 28,600 workers in 1957 and a capacity of 8.2 million tons a year. The U.S. Steel mill in Gary, Indiana, peaked at an estimated 25,000 workers in 1976. In 1996, with only 7,800 workers remaining, it produced 12.8 million tons of steel. Mark Reutter, Sparrows Point; Making Steel—The Rise and Ruin of American Industrial Might (New York: Summit Books, 1988), 10, 413; Chicago Tribune, Feb. 26, 1996.

  40.Lebow, Unfinished Utopia, 37–40; 61–62, 74–77, 82–88, 92–93, 97–98, 103; Janus, “Labor’s Paradise,” 455–56; Poland Today 6 (7–8) (July–Aug. 1951), 14. Photographs of the construction of Nowa Huta, including of female plasterers, can be seen in Henryk Makarewicz and Wiktor Pental, 802 Procent Normy; pierwsze lata Nowej Huty [802% Above the Norm: The Early Years of Nowa Huta] (Kraków: Fundacja Imago Mundi: Vis-à-vis/etiuda, [2007]).

  41.Lebow, Unfinished Utopia, 65, 71, 157–58; Paweł Jagło, “Architecture of Nowa Huta,” in Nowa Huta 1949+, 26.

  42.Leszek J. Sibila, Nowa Huta Ecomuseum: A Guidebook (Kraków: The Historical Museum of the City of Kraków, 2007); Jagło, “Architecture of Nowa Huta”; Lebow, Unfinished Utopia, 29–35, 41–42, 71–73; Åman, Architecture and Ideology, 102–103, 151–53; Nowa przestrzeń; Modernizm w Nowej Hucie (Kraków: Muzeum Historyczne Miasta Krakowa, 2012). For U.S. comparison, see Freeman, American Empire, 12–27, 136–39.

  43.Lebow, Unfinished Utopia, 3, 146–49; Åman, Architecture and Ideology, 151; stamps: https://www.stampworld.com/en_US/stamps/Poland/Postage%20stamps/?year=1951 and http://colnect.com/en/stamps/list/country/4365-Poland/theme/3059-Cranes_Machines (accessed Nov. 25, 2016); Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–56 (New York: Doubleday, 2012), 360, 372, 377–78, 384–85 (quotes from Ważyk in her translation on 384); Andrzej Wajda, Man of Marble (Warsaw: Zespól Filmowy X, 1977). See also Marci Shore, “Some Words for Grown-Up Marxists: ‘A Poem for Adults’ and the Revolution from Within,” Polish Review 42 (2) (1997), 131–54.

  44.Brunnbauer, “’The Town of the Youth,’” 96–97, 105; Janus, “Labor’s Paradise,” 454–55; Pittaway, “Hungary’s Socialist Industrial Landscape,” 75–76, 82–85.

  45.Judt, Postwar, 172; Janus, “Labor’s Paradise,” 464–65; Lebow, Unfinished Utopia, 45, 47, 50–51, 56; interview with Lebiest et al.

  46.Janus, “Labor’s Paradise,” 459–64; Brunnbauer, “‘The Town of the Youth,’” 105; Lebow, Unfinished Utopia, 124–25, 138–45; Pittaway, “Hungary’s Socialist Industrial Landscape,” 87.

  47.Sztálinváros was renamed Dunaújváros in 1961. Josephson, Would Trotsky Wear a Bluetooth?, 85–86; Applebaum, Iron Curtain, 459; Pittaway, “Hungary’s Socialist Industrial Landscape,” 88–89.

  48.Paweł Jagło, “Defense of the Cross,” in Nowa Huta 1949+, 39–40; Lebow, Unfinished Utopia, 161–69.

  49.Paweł Jagło, “Anti-Communist Opposition,” in Nowa Huta 1949+; Stenning, “Placing (Post-) Socialism,” 105–06; Chicago Tribune, June 10, 1979.

  50.Kraków environmentalists often blamed the steel mill for the severe air pollution in the city, but prevailing winds took emissions from Nowa Huta eastward, away from the city, not toward it. Local plants, industry west of Kraków, coal-burning furnaces, and growing traffic were more responsible. Maria Lempart, “Myths and facts about Nowa Huta,” in Nowa Huta 1949+, 50.

  51.Judt, Postwar, 587–89; Stenning, “Placing (Post-)Socialism,” 106; Jagło, “Anti-Communist Opposition.”

  52.The official government-recognized union tacitly supported the 1988 strike, though with its own, more modest demands. The discussion of Solidarity in Nowa Huta is drawn primarily from Lebow, Unfinished Utopia, 169–76, and my interview with Lebiest et al. See also Jagło, “Anti-Communist Opposition”; New York Times, Nov. 11, 1982, Apr. 29, 1988, May 3, 1988, and May 6, 1988; and Judt, Postwar, 605–08.

  53.Interview with Lebiest et al.

  54.“Poland Fights for Gdansk Shipyard,” BBC News, Aug. 21, 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6956549.stm; “Gdansk Shipyard Sinking from Freedom to Failure,” Toronto Star (accessed May 6, 2016), https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2014/01/27/gdansk_shipyard_sinking_from_freedom_to_failure.html).

  55.New York Times, Nov. 27, 1989; interview with Lebiest et al.; Jagło, “Steelworks,”19–20; Stenning, “Placing (Post-)Socialism,” 108–10, 116.

  56.New York Times, Oct. 6, 2015, and Oct. 7, 2015.

  57.Harold James, Krupp: A History of the Legendary German Firm (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 39; Werner Abelshauser, The Dynamics of German Industry: Germany’s Path toward the New Economy and the American Challenge (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), 3, 85–86, 89.

  58.Though in some respects the Wolfsburg plant was modeled on River Rouge, Volkswagen did not integrate backward to make all its parts, instead purchasing many from a network of closely connected suppliers. Abelshauser, Dynamics of German Industry, 91–104, 108–09; Volker R. Berghahn, The Americanization of West German Industry 1945–1973 (Lemington Spa, NY: Berg, 1986), 304–09.

  59.Werner Abelshauser, Wolfgang Von Hippel, Jeffrey Allan Johnson, and Raymond G. Stokes, German Industry and Global Enterprise; BASF: The History of a Company (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 487–99 (quote on 488); New York Times, Oct. 27, 2014; “BASF Headquarters” (accessed May 16, 2016), https://www.basf.com/us/en/company/career/why-join-basf/basf-at-a-glance/basf-headquarters.html.

  60.New York Times, Oct. 6, 2015; Gillian Darley, Factory (London: Reaktion Books, 2003), 187–89.

  61.Joel Beinin, Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 99–113 (“citadels” on 109), 127, 158; Beinin, “Egyptian Textile Workers Confront the New Economic Order,” Middle East Research and Information Project, Mar. 25, 2007, http://www.merip.org/mero/mero032507; Beinin, “The Militancy of Mahalla al-Kubra,” Middle East Research and Information Project, Sept. 29, 2007, http://www.merip.org/mero/mero092907; “The Factory,” Al Jazeera, Feb. 22, 2012, http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/revolutionthrougharabeyes/2012/01/201213013135991429.html; “Mahalla textile workers’ strike enters eighth day,” Daily News Egypt, Feb. 17, 2014, http://www.dailynewsegypt.com/2014/02/17/mahalla-textile-workers-strike-enters-eighth-day/; Alex MacDonald and Tom Rollins, “Egypt’s Mahalla textile factory workers end four-day strike after deal reached,” Middle East Eye, Jan. 17, 2015, http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/egypts-mahalla-textile-factory-workers-end-four-day-strike-after-management-agreement-
260129749.

  Chapter 7

  “FOXCONN CITY”

  1.Pun Ngai, Shen Yuan, Guo Yuhua, Lu Huilin, Jenny Chan, and Mark Selden, “Apple, Foxconn, and Chinese Workers’ Struggles from a Global Labor Perspective,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 17 (2) (2016), 166; Jason Dean, “The Forbidden City of Terry Gou,” Wall Street Journal, Aug. 11, 2007. Ngai, Chan, and Selden have written the most important study of Foxconn and of Apple in China, Dying for an iPhone, from which I have greatly benefited. It is forthcoming in English but available in Spanish and Italian editions, Morir por un iPhone (Bueno Aires: Ediciones Continente S.R.L., 2014) and Moirire per un iPhone (Milan: Jaca Books, 2015).

  2.To offset the wage hikes, Foxconn also raised its prices. New York Times, May 25, 2010, June 2, 2010; Elizabeth Woyke, The Smartphone: Anatomy of an Industry (New York: New Press, 2014), 135–36; Bloomberg Businessweek, June 7, 2010, Sept. 13, 2010; “Foxconn’s Business Partners Respond to Suicides,” CCTV Com English, May 20, 2010, http://english.cntv.cn/program/china24/20100520/101588.shtml; “Foxconn Shares Dive on Suicides,” CCTV Com English, June 29, 2010, http://english.cntv.cn/program/bizasia/20100528/102843.shtml; “Foxconn to Hike Prices to Offset Pay Increase,” CCTV Com English, July 22, 2010, http://english.cntv.cn/20100722/104196.shtml; “Foxconn Hikes Salaries Again in South China Factory After Suicides,” CCTV Com English, Oct. 1, 2010, http://english.cntv.cn/program/20101001/101698.shtml.

 

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