Linked Labor Histories

Exploring globalization from a labour history perspective, Aviva Chomsky provides historically grounded analyses of migration, labour-management collaboration, and the mobility of capital. She illuminates these dynamics through case studies set mostly in New England and Colombia. Taken together, the case studies offer an intricate portrait of two regions, their industries, their workers, and the myriad links between them over the long twentieth century, as well as a new way to conceptualize globalization as a long-term process. Chomsky examines labour and management at two early-twentieth-century Massachusetts factories: one that transformed the global textile industry by exporting looms around the world, and another that was the site of a model programme of labour-management collaboration in the 1920s.She follows the path of the textile industry from New England, first to the U.S. South, and then to Puerto Rico, Japan, Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, and Colombia. She considers how towns in Rhode Island and Massachusetts began to import Colombian workers as they struggled to keep their last textile factories going. Most of the workers eventually landed in service jobs: cleaning houses, caring for elders, washing dishes. Focusing on Colombia between the 1960s and the present, Chomsky looks at the Uraba banana export region, where violence against organized labour has been particularly acute, and she explores the thorny question of U.S. union involvement in foreign policy through a discussion of the AFL-CIO's activities in Colombia.In the 1980s, two U.S. coal mining companies began to shift their operations to Colombia, where they opened two of the largest open-pit coal mines in the world. Chomsky assesses how different groups, especially labour unions in both countries, were affected. "Linked Labor Histories" suggests that economic integration among regions often exacerbates regional inequalities rather than ameliorating them.