Over the past thirty years, the meatpacking industry has been transformed from an urban to a rural-based industry. This restructuring has been made possible by technological innovations that have enabled new packing companies to site their plants in rural areas close to feedlots in right-to-work states (Skaggs 1986: 180211). One of the areas most affected by this restructing process is southwestern Kansas. Since 1969, the region has witnessed the construction of four major beefpacking plants, employing more than seven thousand persons, including the world’s largest plant, in Holcomb, seven miles west of Garden City (Figure 2.1). The new packing companies...

The Tour The doors to the guard station were marked in Spanish and Vietnamese—but not in English. The uniformed guard behind the glass window said to sign in, mentioning who we represented and the time. After we all finished, he let us inside the high chain-link fence, where we were met by someone who led us down a long walkway and into the plant. From there we were ushered through the cafeteria and into a training room, given brand new white hardhats and smocks along with yellow foam-rubber earplugs. As we clumsily adjusted the plastic headbands inside the hardhats,...

There were five plate boners on the line, and the Hispanic guy across the conveyor from me seemed pretty new at the job. He had a stack of four or five untrimmed plates teetering on the cutting board next to him, the cutting board that should have been the work station of another plate boner, but we were running short crewed. Short crewing was the usual state of affairs on this new and brightly lit packinghouse processing floor. He also had a big stack of ribs next to him, a two-foot-high pile of uncleaned bones; he had boned the meat...

My first insight into the “objective conditions of existence” experienced by refugee packing-plant workers came during the summer of 1987 when I conducted research on refugee day-care needs for the Garden City area office of the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services. Together with my six-year-old son, I had arranged to live in Garden City for ten days as the paying guest of a Sino-Vietnamese couple with two young children. Both Tinh and his wife, Mai, worked at IBP, Garden City’s largest packinghouse employer, though during my stay Mai was on leave because of recent childbirth. Tinh had been...

Since 1960, immigration has transformed Miami¹ as much if not more than any other major U.S. city, recasting it from a southern U.S. retirement and vacation center to the northern capital of Latin America (Garreau 1981; Levine 1985). By 1980, Miami had the highest proportion of foreign-born residents of any U.S. metropolitan area, proportionally 50 percent more than either Los Angeles or New York (see Figure 6.1).

But it is not simply the number of foreigners that makes Miami the capital of Latin America. Even more important is who and where the Latins are and what they are doing in...

During 1987, the Miami Beach Convention Center was the largest single building being constructed in Dade County. It was being built solely by union labor, an anomaly in Miami’s primarily nonunionized construction industry. Thirty years ago, however, before the Cubans took over most of the industry, the convention center would not have been such an aberration. Then, the unions controlled most of the industry, and virtually all the workers were white Anglos, with the exception of African American laborers. Now, things are different. Not only have the unions lost control of most of the industry, but among the workers there...

Behind tall fences and barren walls in the northwest section of Greater Miami are many small apparel firms, the epitome of sunbelt industry. There are no smokestacks or grimy buildings, just low-lying concrete-block rectangles joined by acres and acres of pavement covered with thousands of automobiles. Inside the buildings is the sunbelt’s most attractive economic asset: abundant, mostly nonunion, mostly female, low-wage immigrant labor. I In Miami, nearly fifteen thousand women, almost all immigrants and primarily Cuban, cut and sew the latest in fashions.

When the national Chicago-based corporation bought the Miami apparel firm, they had big plans. They intended...

At the meeting, all the Haitians—Sam, Edmond, Bobier, Joseph, Bobby, Lucy, and many others—sat at one long table. Lucy was the only female. We did two separate evaluations; the second one gave us the opportunity to rate each manager individually. Bobby did a quick translation for the Haitians, but I knew he was speaking too quickly for Lucy to write because her writing skills are not that good. I took the second paper from her. I filled out the top, the part where it asked for your occupation in the restaurant. I wrote “kitchen worker,” then I filled...

In the early 1990s, pessimism about the future of Philadelphia was frequent in everyday conversations and newspaper editorials. This once-mighty city had been a major port during the colonial period and the largest industrial center in the United States until the construction of the Erie Canal. Our two years of research in 1988 and 1989 preshadowed the fiscal crisis. Doomsday discourses about the state of the city were constantly heard on the street and in the media. As the city publicly revealed its fiscal crisis in September 1990, citizens were not surprised. According to one auto repair shop owner, “The...

The decline of Summit Lighting, a lighting-fixture plant, was obvious in 1989.¹ Signs outside the personnel department’s outer door boldly announced, in English and Spanish, “No Jobs Available.” By early 1989, only nine hundred workers remained of the more than one thousand five hundred employed less than four years earlier. Management had terminated not only production workers but also lower-level management. In the spring of 1989, they even eliminated their security department, contracting with an outside firm for part-time security officers. Machines sat idle, covered up, and permanently shut down. Instead of a manufacturing plant, it looked like a warehouse...

This comment was made in an interview with the Philadelphia regional head of a national supermarket chain. As Philadelphia shifts from a manufacturing to a service-oriented economy, the retail sector has become increasingly significant as a source of work. Yet pressures on the retail industry have decreased the reliance on trained, experienced, full-time workers with career ladders and has created stressful, high-turnover, part-time work. These pressures also have degraded the quality of work, which primarily entails social interactions with customers.

This chapter explores the way in which store interactions have been shaped by the exigencies of economic goals and strategies...

Almost every state in the United States during the 1980s designated enterprise zones in the hope that they would stimulate capital investment in economically and socially distressed urban areas. Proponents of enterprise zones believe that an easing of governmental regulations and tax burdens on business will create a friendly atmosphere for redevelopment and revitalization in specific areas of cities where unemployment is high.

The flurry of media attention and public debate devoted to enterprise zones had gradually waned by the late 1980s, until the Los Angeles riots in the spring of 1992 brought pressure to bear on Washington to formulate...