Welcome to Bookmarker!

This is a personal project by @dellsystem. I built this to help me retain information from the books I'm reading.

Source code on GitHub (MIT license).

Manufacturers increased prices to offset the high wages that constituted their side of the compact, which made life hard for Americans whose pay wasn’t tied to industrial revenues. As economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote of the dynamic, “A passenger in even a very fast automobile is reasonably certain of keeping up with it. A man running alongside is not so well situated.”38 Suburban military Keynesianism was a speedy car, and not everyone was along for the ride. The program left workers behind in new ways. For example, the unionized fruit industry, with its relatively high pay, had been open to undocumented immigrants, but only U.S. citizens were generally eligible for defense work. Still, Northern California’s Mexican population boomed as workers came from every direction toward the new center of prosperity, many solicited by regional labor contractors looking to fill jobs in the fields. In 1948, the Supreme Court struck down restrictive real estate covenants, allowing documented Mexican workers to live anywhere they wanted, but the Supreme Court couldn’t make high-technology firms hire them, even for nondefense work. Meanwhile, mechanization changed food production in California: The state’s agricultural workforce declined (in absolute terms) by over 20 percent between 1949 and 1969, though workers harvested virtually the same amount of acreage.viii Braceros, Mexican-Americans, and undocumented Mexican immigrants, cordoned away and together on the segregated labor market, all vied for the same shrinking set of jobs.

—p.234 3.1 Space Settlers (221) by Malcolm Harris 1 week, 3 days ago