The disappearance of auto manufacturing jobs from California in the late twentieth century was a story that could be told of many other industries that experienced similar catastrophic shrinkage.

Steel production facilities in Vernon, Fontana, and San Francisco downsized dramatically or closed their doors. The aerospace industry, California’s largest manufacturing sector, accounted for close to 200,000 workers, or more than a fifth of all manufacturing jobs, in 1987. It celebrated the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s by jettisoning over a third of its employees. Unionized Los Angeles garment factories were dismantled and shipped off to Asia and Latin America—although the industry continued to grow in the city through the reestablishment of low-wage, nonunion sweatshops.

Even agriculture, tied to the geography of the land like no other business, saw large parts of its industrial infrastructure uprooted. In 1994 the Watsonville Green Giant packing plant moved to Mexico. By then, thousands of workers in a dozen plants had lost their jobs in a town that had processed nearly half the frozen foods of the United States only a few years before. A nineteen-month strike by Teamsters Local 912 cannery workers in the late 1980s couldn’t stop the industry from doing as it pleased.

In 1980, 21 percent of national income share came from manufacturing. By 2005, it had declined to 12 percent. California’s economy was reshaped in twenty-five years as businesses decided to move offshore, seeking higher profits through cheap labor and ineffective or nonexistent labor laws. Left behind were devastated rustbelt communities—not as obvious as in the northeast of the country, due to the sheer size of the Golden State’s economy and its economic diversity—but still leaving giant holes where well-paying jobs once were and large numbers of displaced workers. The tax base of cities and counties across the state deteriorated as worker incomes slumped and corporate taxes disappeared, compounding the problem of how to fund local services in the wake of Proposition 13, precisely at the moment when they were most needed.