When electrical firms searched for labor across the economic globe, they sought a simple package: low wages, a peaceful industrial relations environment, and an abundance of young, unemployed women. The circumstances that caused a firm to choose a given community, however, were fundamentally transformed by the very presence of the factory. As one of the RCA managers in charge of finding new plant locations explained, these changes become unacceptable to corporate leaders, and once again they search for a new location. Many managers, he said, "say a plant should never be at one location more than twenty years, because of the development of habits, of wage structures, of seniority, and you should move those things every twenty years .... There is some sanity, some credibility to that statement." In contrast, he continued, "There are some older manufacturing sites that are still productive. A lot of it has to do with the mentality that had developed in the workforce." The power to decide whether a community's "mentality" was acceptable or not remained the right of the corporation as workers' local actions could be countered with the simple existence of what to them was a distant and abstract alternative to their own place.

Even though protectionism appeared to be a ready solution to the globalizing labor market, U.S. trade unionists remained hamstrung by their push for higher tariff barriers. Protectionist restrictions tended to offer little to workers on the community level, and tariffs often actually insulated corporations from competitive pressures and still left management free to squeeze its workforce. Most important, protectionism tended to erect "barriers of ill will" between the wage earners of different nations-particularly those of the First and Third Worlds. The lessons that might have been learned from the migration of capital to the U.S. South-that regulatory mechanisms that ensured an upward, rather than downward, harmonization of regional economies may be the only solution-were lost when it came to formulating strategies for the transnational level. Although the flight of jobs to foreign lands indicated that business and the state had abdicated their ends of the postwar bargains, organized labor continued to try to uphold the entire framework through protectionist measures until a Democratic president put his full weight behind the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, signaling the bitter end. The PATCO strike, when President Reagan permanently replaced striking air-traffic controllers, is frequently cited as the symbolic end of labor's political clout. Labor's power had been dwindling since the 1970s, and the passage of NAFTA by a member of"labor's own" party demonstrated just how marginal organized labor had become to the political process. [...]