Apropos of globalization and NAFTA discussion, a great document is available at http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/lib/e_archive/NAFTA/ It is: The Effects of Plant Closing or Threat of Plant Closing on the Right of Workers to Organize, Submitted to the Labor Secretariat of the North American Commission for Labor Cooperation by Kate Bronfenbrenner, Cornell University The Labor Dept seems to be sitting on the report for reasons that are not hard to imagine. To quote from the summary, "The majority of private sector employers threaten a full or partial shutdown of their facilities during organizing campaigns, and a significant minority proceed to shut down the facility after the union wins the election." Reading this, together with Laurie Dougherty's very interesting descriptions of changes in air conditioner manufacture, begins to paint a picture of what "footlooseness," to use Bill Rosenberg's term, may mean. I still haven't seen a completely satisfying demonstration of the importance of these changes at the macro level (i.e. a riposte to Krugman's challenge), but it does seem plausible that there is deliberate building of excess capacity on a worldwide scale, making it much easier to switch production. (If true we may need to modify theories of capitalism a bit; i.e. capital itself is not scarce and MNCs instead get rents from control of marketing/distribution, but that's a new discussion.) Best, Colin
