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the alabama review 226 Migration and the Transformation of the Southern Workplace Since 1945. Edited by Robert Cassanello and Colin J. Davis. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009. x, 208 pp. $65.00. ISBN 978-0-8130-3403-4. Migration and the Transformation of the Southern Workplace Since 1945 offers a sweeping look at “the South as a place of transformation,” while paying due attention to the men and women most affected by these changes (p. 7). The cover of the book shows three flags outside the Gates Roofing and Construction Empire in Jacksonville, Florida—the United States flag, the Confederate battle flag, and the flag of Mexico. In their introduction, the editors offer this image up as “a very prophetic monument to the contemporary southern workplace . . . where perceived historic traditions, nationalism, and transnationalism confront each other” (p. 1). The essays that follow elaborate on this theme, tracing how demographic and economic shifts changed and cemented regional traits. Monica Gisolfi’s and Steve Striffler’s chapters on the poultry industry expose the personal devastation wrought by a corporate-mandated contracting system that resulted in small farmers, many of whom cleared only $1,000 annually, underwriting half the capital expenditures for a multibillion dollar business. Gisolfi notes that in Georgia this “reinforced the widespread poverty and an intractable class system long associated with cotton planters” (p. 75). While this scenario fits within a southern tradition that C. Vann Woodward described as “juleps for the few and pellagra for the crew,” Melanie Shell-Weiss traces how the steady influx of Cuban workers into Miami’s garment industry helped transform that metropolis into “the best city in Latin America for doing business” (p. 13). Kelly Minor stresses change in the Sunshine State as well with her essay “The Price of Longevity: Home Demonstration and Rural Reform in Modern Florida.” Minor criticizes the conversion of home demonstration agents from a “vigorous, mission oriented program unified around a singular ambitious goal of rural rejuvenation into a placid, issue oriented collection of advice and seminars” that reflected a Cold War, Sunbelt, and Great Society emphasis on communism, consumerism, and urban poverty (p. 35). Two of the collection’s most intriguing essays link elements of the region ’s past to its present and venture marginally optimistic assessments of its future. Robert Woodrum connects the 2001 murder of three labor leaders in Colombia, South America, to the struggles of coal miners in July 2011 227 Alabama. The slain men represented miners working for Drummond, Ltd., a Birmingham-based company that reaped enormous profits and put thousands of Alabamians out of work when it began importing Colombian coal in the 1990s. Drummond officials allegedly forged ties with South American paramilitary groups who targeted trade unionists and had a hand in the killings. These ties proved strong enough that in 2002 the United Steel Workers of America joined with South American activists and members of the murdered men’s families to sue Drummond for “encouraging” the violence (p. 134). While Woodrum makes it clear that globalization left miners in South America and the American South at the mercy of industrial giants like Drummond, he hopes that workers might somehow “harness these forces” to their advantage (p. 135). In the book’s final essay, Mariel Rose examines what people in western North Carolina mean when they talk about a “mountain work ethic.” For decades this phrase was code to attract industries interested in a white, low-wage, antiunion workforce. Latino arrivals to the region have complicated at least two of these notions with their vigorous union drives in places like Morganton. Rose also compares the reactions foreign migrants to North Carolina face to the discrimination Appalachian men and women encountered when they relocated to places like Detroit during World War II. In both cases, employers and supervisors praised these groups for their work ethic, while native workers and neighbors tended to denounce them as lazy and culturally deficient. Behind both assessments was the reality that these men and women performed labor-intensive jobs for relatively low wages. With the two groups linked by a work ethic rooted in part on the “inherent vulnerability and exploitability of all strangers in a strange...

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