Boom, Bust, Exodus; The Rust Belt, The Maquilas, and a Tale of Two Cities

New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2015. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. [8], 399, [1] pages. Contains Epilogue, Notes on Method, Acknowledgments, Notes, Index, 1 black and white and 26 full color photographs. Chad Broughton is author of Boom, Bust, Exodus: The Rust Belt, the Maquilas, and a Tale of Two Cities and contributor to The Atlantic magazine. Broughton is an American sociologist at the University of Chicago in the Public Policy Studies program in the College. His areas of specialty include ethnography, urban sociology, poverty and inequality, transnationalism and immigration, and labor studies and the sociology of work. Broughton, born in 1971, received his Bachelor of Arts from Indiana University in 1993 and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2001. The author captures the effects of industry relocation on individuals and towns in our globalized economy. Before the Maytag refrigerator plant in Galesburg, Illinois closed its gates and moved operations to the city of Reynosa, Mexico, the about-to-be-displaced workers fought the closing. In this book, Broughton provides a bird's eye view of the intended and unintended consequences of globalization.

Derived from a Kirkus review: You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. As this sociological study shows, that, at least, is what they tell the eggs.

Galesburg, Illinois, was once a town of steel, glass and rubber, devoted to meeting "America's seemingly insatiable postwar appetite for appliances." Newcomer workers received the less-than-desirable jobs, loading trucks and stuffing refrigerators with insulation and the like. "Appliance City," as the enormous factory was called, had a population of 5,000 in its heyday, and it was something of a blue-collar paradise, its jobs paying $15-plus per hour with ample benefits. As Broughton observes, in the late 1950s, Admiral, Maytag and other American manufacturers were producing 3 million refrigerators per year, along with washers and dryers. Half a century later, almost all that work had been outsourced, the good factory work moving to plants just across the border in Mexico, where a $15-per-hour job could be filled for $15 per day or less. As a result, the sleepy border town of Reynosa, Mexico, where Galesburg's jobs went, has increased 1,000 percent in population, bringing all the usual crime. Broughton limns the story with interviews with those left behind and those newly hired, as well as the intermediaries who profit from others' loss. Sad is the author's account of the cognitive dissonance that has settled like a shroud over both cities, as workers in Reynosa work 13-hour shifts and lose connections with their families and as the people of Galesburg try to convince themselves that things are for the better in a new world of flipping burgers and stocking shelves at the big-box store down the road.

Broughton's book provides ample documentation of a central truth of late-American history-namely, that capital has no country.