undermined organized labor and harmed workers. Focusing on three General Motors plants assembling SUVs-an older plant in Janesville, Wisconsin; a newer and more viable plant in Arlington, Texas; and a "greenfield site" (a brand-new, state-of-the-art facility) in Silao, Mexico-When Good Jobs Go Bad shows how global competition has made nonstop, monotonous, standardized routines crucial for the survival of a plant, and it explains why workers and their local unions struggle to resist. For instance, in the United States, General Motors forced workers to accept intensified labor by threatening to close plants, which led local unions to adopt "keep the plant open" as their main goal. At its new factory in Silao, GM had hand-picked the union-one opposed to strikes and committed to labor-management cooperation-before it hired the first worker. Rothstein's engaging comparative analysis, which incorporates the viewpoints of workers, union officials, and management, sheds new light on labor's loss of bargaining power in recent decades, and highlights the negative impact of globalization on all jobs, both good and bad, from the sweatshop to the assembly line. |