Two new books on labor struggles from faculty members in Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) were recently published by Cornell University Press.

Jefferson Cowie is the author of Capital Moves: RCA's 70-Year Quest for Cheap Labor, which tells the story of four communities, Camden, N.J., Bloomington, Ind., Memphis, Tenn., and Juárez, Mexico. Each is transformed by the opening of an RCA industrial plant from the 1930s through the 1970s — and in the case of the first three towns a plant closing too — as the firm scoured the country and hemisphere in search of cheap and desirable labor.

Kate Bronfenbrenner wrote Ravenswood: The Steelworkers' Victory and the Revival of American Labor with co-author Tom Juravich of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Ravenswood, which is published under Cornell Press's ILR Press imprint, recounts the battle between United Steelworkers of America (USWA) and Ravenswood Aluminum Corp. over one of its plants in West Virginia. The authors tell how the Ravenswood company, on the eve of the expiration of its contract with USWA, chose not to discuss health and safety violations at the plant, despite five work-related employee deaths in a single year. Instead the company locked out all 1,700 employees and hired permanent replacements. In the face of turmoil in the steel industry as a whole, a resolutely anti-union plant manager and a company owner who was a fugitive from the law hiding out in Switzerland, the steelworkers' local managed to win a new contract, mostly by employing innovative tactics, which the book describes in detail.

"This record ... of Ravenswood workers and their community is exciting and inspiring, a marvelous account of courage and solidarity," wrote MIT scholar Noam Chomsky. "It is also highly instructive. As the authors vividly show, the imaginative techniques that were devised to overcome the lockout yield many lessons for working people and unions in the face of 'new, powerful yet diffuse corporate structures,' and socieoeconomic policies that enhance their power."

"Bronfenbrenner and Juravich have blended these workers' voices with a razor-sharp analysis of the winning strategy at Ravenswood," wrote John Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO.

Cowie reveals the remarkable similarities among four communities' experiences. He also shows the important differences that prevented a unified fight by workers in those communities, as the range of workers that U.S. manufacturers could choose from expanded into new regions and countries. Globalization, Cowie shows, can be very much a local matter.

But Cowie also recounts the following anecdote, which suggests that solidarity among laborers in a global economy is still possible. Shortly before RCA closed its Bloomington plant in 1998, employee Rocky Gallagher found an envelope inscribed "To our RCA compadres" taped to the inside of a trailer arriving from Juáez. Opening it, he found several carefully wrapped marijuana "joints." In a modern gesture of solidarity, Gallagher and his Indiana co-workers spent their lunch hour collecting copies of Playboy magazine, which they taped to the truck for its return trip. "It may be on just such tiny transnational acts of faith (however sexist or illegal), that the future of any sort of global working-class politics may depend," wrote Cowie.

Capital Moves is a stunningly important work of historical imagination and rediscovery," wrote Nelson Lichtenstein of the University of Virginia. "Cowie has written no 'contribution to the literature,' but instead has reconfigured a huge slice of recent business and labor history."

Cowie is a visiting assistant professor of labor history at the ILR School. Bronfenbrenner is director of labor education research and a senior extension associate at the school. She is coeditor of the 1999 book Organizing to Win: New Research on Union Strategies, also from Cornell Press under the ILR Press imprint. That book was one of five from Cornell University Press — four of them under the press's ILR imprint — selected as the year's noteworthy books in industrial relations and labor economics by Princeton University's Firestone Library. Cornell titles make up nearly a third of Firestone's list of 16 books in that section this year, substantially more than from any other publisher. To order, call: (607) 277-2211.

Related World Wide Web sites:

• Cornell University press: http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu