Few things demonstrate the process of silent integration more effectively than the fact that about 75 percent of the Bloomington RCA jobs had been lost before the acronym "NAFTA" even entered the political discourse. Indeed, the threat of capital flight had hung over all labor relations at the plant since the late 1960s, but by the 1990s, with global pressures increasing and labor law turned against the workers, it became a weapon wielded aggressively against the dwindling numbers of RCA employees. In 1991, during standard contract negotiations between the Bloomington union local and the company, for instance, RCA-Thomson demanded a wage cut of $2 an hour or it would relocate all of the 20-inch sets, one of the factory's staple products, to Mexico, where it could save nearly $80 on every set produced. Rather than submit to extortion and surrender 20 percent of their members' paychecks, the union representatives decided to call the company on their threat. Their response clearly demonstrated the distance the Bloomington workforce had traveled since the early days. "We caucused back in the room," reported an exasperated Bill Cook, and decided, "Fuck it! Move 'em! And they did."

The union made its bold decision to call the company's bluff in the context of events it had closely observed unfolding at Zenith's operations in Missouri. Their competitor had followed a similar migratory path, moving from industrial Chicago to Springfield, Missouri, and finally to Matamoros and Reynosa, on the Mexican border. Having just witnessed the Zenith IBEW local make painful concessions on the promise that the workers would get to keep what remained of their jobs, only to see them transferred to Mexico six months later, the RCA local was not in the mood to offer much in the way of concessions. "The story going around the [Zenith] plant was, if you didn't give them the wage concession, they were going to move to Mexico," explained a former Zenith employee who had worked at the plant over twenty-four years. All of the concessions they granted to keep the plant open, however, "just gave them an extra five years to finalize their plans to move. We just helped pay for it." [...]