Boom, Bust, Exodus

  

Title: Boom, Bust, Exodus: The Rust Belt, the Maquilas, and a Tale of Two Cities

Author: Chad Broughton

Publisher: 1.2.2015

Release Date: Oxford University Press

Publisher’s Summary 

"Chad Broughton has written a deeply-observed and nuanced account of one of the stories of our time: the migration of a once-thriving American factory over the border into Mexico. When he learns of Maytag's plans to shutter its refrigerator plant, a move decried by a young Senator Obama, Broughton begins a decade-long dive into the drama that envelops both Galesburg, Illinois, where townspeople are losing their $15.14-an-hour livelihood, and Reynosa, Mexico, where the same jobs will pay $1.10 and come with a cost. The results are both epic and surprising. The pitfalls of such a project are many, but Broughton avoids pity and screed, delivering a story that is beautifully detailed and rich in human and historic dimension. Most of us talk about a global economy with a vague sense of what that really means. With Boom, Bust, Exodus Broughton has defined it indelibly." --Ann Marie Lipinski, Curator, Nieman Foundation for Journalism, Harvard University


In 2002, the town of Galesburg, a slowly declining Rustbelt city of 34,000 in western Illinois, learned that it would soon lose its largest factory, a Maytag refrigerator plant that had anchored Galesburg's social and economic life for decades. Workers at the plant earned $15.14 an hour, had good insurance, and were assured a solid retirement. In 2004, the plant was relocated to Reynosa, Mexico, where workers spent 13-hour days assembling refrigerators for $1.10 an hour.

In Boom, Bust, Exodus, Chad Broughton offers a ground-level look at the rapid transition to a globalized economy, from the perspective of those whose lives it has most deeply affected. We live in a commoditized world, increasingly divorced from the origins of the goods we consume; it is easy to ignore who is manufacturing our smart phones and hybrid cars; and where they come from no longer seems to matter. And yet, Broughton shows, the who and where matter deeply, and in this book he puts human faces to the relentless cycle of global manufacturing.

It is a tale of two cities. In Galesburg, where the empty Maytag factory still stands, a hollowed out version of the American dream, the economy is a shadow of what it once was. Reynosa, in contrast, has become one of the exploding post-NAFTA "second-tier cities" of the developing world, thanks to the influx of foreign-owned, export-oriented maquiladoras--an industrial promised land throbbing with the energy of commerce, legal and illegal.

And yet even these distinctions, Broughton shows, cannot be finely drawn: families in Reynosa also struggle to get by, and the city is beset by violence and a ruthless drug war. Those left behind in the post-Industrial decline of Galesburg, meanwhile, do not see themselves as helpless victims: they have gone back to school, pursued new careers, and learned to adapt and even thrive.

In an era of growing inequality and a downsized middle class, Boom, Bust, Exodus gives us the voices of those who have borne the heaviest burdens of the economic upheavals of the past three decades. A deeply personal work grounded in solid scholarship, this important, immersive, and affecting book brings home the price and the cost of globalization.

My Review

I've wanted to read this book since I first heard about it in 2014. I finally bought a copy last year but kept waiting for "the right time" because I knew it would be A LOT. I knew that Boom, Bust, Exodus would take me longer to complete than most of my other reading selections but I also knew it was going to be an extremely emotional book for me. I grew up in Galesburg and several of the other nearby small towns featured in this book and worked at Maytag in the late '90s. As a single mother with only a high school diploma, factory work was my lifeline. My layoff was devastating and life-changing, and the subsequent closing of the factory in 2004 decimated the entire town. I wasn't sure I wanted to read about and relive my experiences, but I also felt like I was finally (25 years later) far enough removed from the situation to be able to objectively analyze what really happened. 

Ralph Hake, how do you sleep at night?

In simple terms, Ralph Hake became CEO in 2001 and said to hell with the union, company pride, and all the company's founding principles. Why pay local workers $15/hour when we can outsource to Mexican workers for $1/hour? Thinking he was cutting costs and boosting shareholder stock, customer satisfaction actually dropped to an industry-wide low and the company was bought by Whirlpool (where Hake previously held executive positions for 12 years.) Hake then retired to Las Vegas with his 12 million dollar parachute, while thousands of families and entire towns had their lives upended. 

While this single tale of corporate greed is all too common in our modern society, Broughton shows all of the politics and economics through a personal lens into the lives of both the American and Mexican workers. While I was all too familiar with the Galesburg side of this story, this was the first time I was given a glimpse into the lives of the workers in Reynosa, Mexico. These workers dealt with dangerous working (subjected to harmful chemicals, no fire alarms/sprinkler systems) and living conditions (difficulty accessing affordable housing, deadly neighborhood gangs) all while barely making ends meet. Broughton's intensively detailed research into the repercussions of a single company's closing exemplifies larger issues, including the shrinking middle class, the demise of the Rust Belt, and the problems with globalization, outsourcing, and deindustrialization.