Find a pool of cheap, pliable workers and give them jobs - and soon they cease to be as cheap or as pliable. What is an employer to do then? Why, find another poor community desperate for work. This route - one taken time and again by major American manufacturers - is vividly chronicled in this fascinating account of RCA's half-century-long search for desirable sources of labor.

Capital Moves introduces us to the people most affected by the migration of industry and, most important, recounts how they came to fight against the idea that they were simply "cheap labor." Jefferson Cowie follows RCA's winding path across North America as he tells the dramatic story of four communities, each irrevocably transformed by the opening of an industrial plant.