Linked Labor Histories: New England, Colombia, and the Making of a Global Working Class

by Aviva Chomsky, Gilbert M. Joseph (Series Editor)

Exploring globalization from a labor history perspective, Aviva Chomsky provides historically grounded analyses of migration, labor-management collaboration, and the mobility of capital. She illuminates the dynamics of these movements through case studies set mostly in New England and Colombia. Taken together, the case studies offer an intricate portrait of two regions, their industries and 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 labor and management at two early-twentieth-century Massachusetts one that transformed the global textile industry by exporting looms around the world, and another that was the site of a model program of labor-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, the Caribbean, and Colombia. She considers how towns in Rhode Island and Massachusetts began to import Colombian workers as they struggled to keep their remaining textile factories going. Most of the workers eventually landed in service cleaning houses, caring for elders, washing dishes. Focusing on Colombia between the 1960s and the present, Chomsky looks at the Urabá banana export region, where violence against organized labor has been particularly acute, and, through a discussion of the AFL-CIO’s activities in Colombia, she explores the thorny question of U.S. union involvement in foreign policy. 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 labor unions in both countries, were affected. Linked Labor Histories suggests that economic integration among regions often exacerbates regional inequalities rather than ameliorating them.

Genres: History, Latin American History, Labor, American History, Nonfiction

416 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Aviva Chomsky is professor of history and coordinator of Latin American Studies at Salem State University. The author of several books, Chomsky has been active in Latin American solidarity and immigrants' rights issues for over twenty-five years. She lives in Salem, Massachusetts.

Reviews

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chomsky sets out to offer an alternative account on the history of globalization by focusing on developments in New England and Colombia through the lens of labor history. Indeed, tje author posits that "labor history is at the heart of understanding globalization" (4).

Notable in Chomsky's research are the myriad ways in which labor New England in New England and labor in Colombia are intimately connected. Colombia is where many of the textile mills of Massachusetts were relocated- it is also where the coal which powers Salem's electiricity generators was mined. Whilst Massachusetts faced rising unemployment and urban decline, Colombia became a "neoliberal paradise" of cheap labor and minimum regulations.

The violence enacted on unionising efforts in Colombia leads Chomsky to conclude that: "violence and repression are an integral part of the economic model of globalization, built into its very structures" (188). This makes widespread unionising cooperation with companies in both regions very sad, but unlike Chomsky I find this cooperation understandable- we are all, in our own ways, only trying to get by and see another day.

[Mayonez Sidorovich · Rating 4 out of 5]

An insightful and poignant examination of the ways that organized labor has responded to capital accumulation, for better or worse. Emphasizing the connections between unions in the US and Latin America shines a spotlight on the atrocities American labor has endorsed, but calls for increased global consciousness.

[Jamie Bronstein · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author attempts mightily to pull together some very disparate chapters into a compelling whole, but just doesn't get all the way there.

Her central argument is that the "race to the bottom" for workers knits together the global North and South, and thus that no unionization that fails to take this into account is going to succeed. On the other hand, she doesn't have many success stories about transnational unionization either. There is occasionally some hectoring of the reader, and condemnation of the notion of neoliberalism without any attempt to explain why the concept has such purchase, even among workers themselves.

Much of the book reads like reporting rather than an attempt to use diverse sources to craft a historical argument.

[Jackie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Okay. If you're obsessed with the Columbian trade industry and industrialization in general, you go for it. If not, stay very, very, far away. My professor wrote this book. She has some interesting parts, like where actual involved people were interviewed and gave testimony. Those are heartfelt and real. The rest is dribble about factories and pure blocks of historical information. It's difficult to switch between the testimonies and the facts. Her writing style is extremely difficult to read, making it even harder when the subject is not super interesting to start with.

[Aura · Rating 2 out of 5]

The dull, heavy narrative makes this book very hard to read. Chomsky's argument is interesting, but the ties between the US and Colombia are not that clear. She succeeds more in showing the complex processes of Globalization and their negative effects.