Exploring globalization from a labor history perspective, Aviva Chomsky provides historically grounded analyses of migration, labor-management collaboration, and the mobility of capital. She illuminates the dynamics of these movements through case studies set mostly in New England and Colombia. Taken together, the case studies offer an intricate portrait of two regions, their industries and workers, and the myriad links between them over the long twentieth century, as well as a new way to conceptualize globalization as a long-term process.
Chomsky examines labor and management at two early-twentieth-century Massachusetts factories and then follows the path of the textile industry from New England to the U.S. South, Puerto Rico, Japan, Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and Colombia. She considers how towns in Rhode Island and Massachusetts began to import Colombian workers as they struggled to keep their remaining textile factories going. Focusing on Colombia between the 1960s and the present, Chomsky looks at the Uraba banana export region, where violence against organized labor has been particularly acute, and, through a discussion of the afl-cio's activities in Colombia, she explores the thorny question of U.S. union involvement in foreign policy.