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In contrast to the swift shutdown in Memphis and the rapid exodus of consumer electronics from Camden, however, Bloomington's television production simply drifted slowly away. "I think the first move was to Tennessee in a very small way," said the RCA worker Elizabeth Shelton in 1979, "but the rumo…

Little more than two months after the slaying of Dr. King, Virgil Grace, IUE Local 730's black president, penned a manifesto that reflected the new militancy. "This Local Union has, for almost a year and a half," he wrote, "explored every avenue searching for evidence to substantiate the theory tha…

Despite high expectations, RCA's presence in Memphis started and ended in labor controversies. After trying and failing to block organizing efforts in Camden and Bloomington, RCA immediately conceded the unionization of the Memphis plant in order to make sure the workers would choose the union of R…

Even though the work factor system had supposedly eliminated the need for a stopwatch, the minutes of Local 1424's monthly meetings reveal an obsession with ensuring that each shop steward had one to keep the pace of the line from being pushed above "objective" limits. Stewards had to circulate eve…

Arguably, the forced regimentation and rigor of the assembly line had the single most profound effect on the workers' sense of their relation with the company. An RCA worker's every motion on the line had been broken down into its smallest elements by a sophisticated version of Taylorism known as t…