To Move a Mountain: Fighting the Global Economy in Appalachia.

TO MOVE A MOUNTAIN: FIGHTING THE GLOBAL ECONOMY IN APPALACHIA

By Eve Weinbaum. New Press, 2004.

To Move a Mountain presents three community case studies of how grassroots organizations responded to the closures of local factories, the loss of permanent jobs, and the increase in contingent work as capital implements new ways of increasing its profit under a globalized economy.

The book records the responses of workers in three small-to-medium size towns in Tennessee and their efforts in "mobilizing a local social movement around the issues of the global economy." These are the Greenbrier Industries in Clinton, Tennessee, an apparel factory which closed without warning in January 1993 displacing 700 workers as the company shifted production to Israel; the Acme Boot company which moved production to Puerto Rico; and the General Electric in Morristown, Tennessee, which terminated all its workers and relocated its warehouse to a town only 30 miles away.

Utilizing a variety of data-gathering methods through a three-year period (1993-1995), Weinbaum provides persuasive evidence of the negative impact on workers of economic policies that place profit over the welfare of workers. The loss of jobs as plants easily relocate to neighboring areas or to foreign countries transformed workers previously enjoying relatively higher wages, health insurance and pension benefits, into contingent workers dependent on the vagaries of the market and of the factory owners. Women, members of minority groups and the elderly suffered most, as they were the first to be laid off and the last to be rehired.

The book's focus on the effect of organizing and leadership on grassroots mobilization makes a valuable contribution to the literature of social movements and globalization. The three case studies provide dear lessons on the elements that frame the nature, conduct and development of grassroots organizing:

1. Organized and sustained struggle requires enormous resources and support.

2. The differences in the way groups defined issues, waged campaigns, and formed coalitions, as well as the changes in participants' understandings and their material conditions, are directly related to the type of leadership and organizing that characterized each effort.

3. Sustained political struggle also requires a willingness to fail along the way.

And while Weinbaum herself acknowledges that in all three case studies, "concerted action failed to recover a single job," it is her documentation of the broadening of the workers' own analysis of the root causes of their displacement, the growth in their political consciousness, and the enhancement in their skills in mobilization and alliance building that buttress her optimistic conclusion that "grassoots organizing remains the only alternative to an antidemocratic and ultimately economically destructive politics of business development." This growth in workers' analysis and perspective is best exemplified in the case study of the organizing and mobilizing efforts of the displaced workers of General Electric, who successfully organized around the issue of contractual work, held mobilizations, formed alliances, and linked up with workers from other countries. Their experience underscores the reality that in the era of globalization, "all local struggles have an international dimension. The recovery of the dignity of labor as part of human freedom by workers of the first world is also an integral of that struggle (See also: Amiya Kumar Bagchi, "The Parameters of Resistance," www.monthlyreview.org/0703bagch.htm).