Country of Exiles

by William R. Leach

  51. Quoted in “Land of the Giants,” BusinessWeek, September 11, 1995, 34.

  52. Quoted in WSJ, November 22, 1995, A1.

  53. Ibid., A1.

  54. “Improved Distribution, Not Better Production Is Key Goal of Mergers,” WSJ, August 29, 1995, A1, A2.

  55. “Without today’s permissive climate in Washington many of [the current] mergers would not have been possible,” said BusinessWeek in 1995 (September 11, 1995, p. 34). For a good survey of this governmental policy toward mergers from Reagan to Clinton, see series on “Amalgamated America,” in WSJ, especially “Concentration,” February 26, 1997, 1, 8; and “Trust in Markets,” February 27, 1997, 1.

  56. Muller, Intermodal Freight Transportation, p. 28. On airline deregulation, see Steven A. Morrison and Clifford Winston, The Evolution of the Airline Industry (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1995).

  57. U.S. Department of Transportation, 1997 Comprehensive Truck Size and Weight Study, II-6, IV-7, 9.

  58. U.S. Department of Transportation, 1997 Comprehensive Truck Size and Weight Study, especially review of deregulatory laws, IV-3-9; phone interview with Bob Withuhn, curator of transportation, the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., December 16, 1996; Bob Gatty, “Why Railroads Are Making the Grade,” Nation’s Business 71 (May 1983), 42–44.

  59. For summary account of this bill, see The Congressional Record, House of Representatives, August 4, 1998, pp. H7011–7019; and for the limitations of the bill, see especially opposition by Henry Hyde, p. H7017. See also “A Sea-Change in Shipping,” Journal of Commerce, October 5, 1998, pp. 1A, 21B.

  60. On surface freight transport, Clifford Winston, et al., The Economic Effects of Surface Freight Deregulation (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1990).

  61. For a description of CSX, see Muller, Intermodal Freight Transportation, p. 93; on Malcolm McLean, see “Containerization at 40,” from a program given by the Container Industry in honor of McLean (courtesy Fayetteville Observer-Times, May 22, 1998); and, on the evolution of regulatory policy regarding cross-modal ownership, author phone interview with unnamed officer at the Office of Proceedings, Surface Transportation Board, Washington, D.C., June 1, 1998.

  62. “Administration to Study Business Concentration,” WSJ, May 13, 1998, A2. Clinton also said that the globalizing and nationalizing of industries placed “a premium on bigness, partly so you can afford to get into new market areas, partly so you can afford to handle bad years—you have more money.”

  63. “Embassies Pave Way for U.S. Executives,” Journal of Commerce, August 12, 1998, 1C; “U.S. Embassies Give American Companies More Help Overseas,” WSJ, January 21, 1997, A1, A12; “Daley to Barnstorm China, Pushing Contracts for U.S.,” WSJ, October 3, 1997, A7; and “Yesterday’s Diplomats Are Today’s Entrepreneurs in Argentina,” WSJ, January 8, 1998, A5.

  64. Wolfgang Demisch, analyst for BT securities, quoted in James Sterngold, “A Swift Transformation,” NYT, December 16, 1996, 1.

  65. See speech by Secretary of Transportation Federico Pena, March 5, 1996, press release, DOT.

  66. Editorial, “Let’s Have Open Skies,” WSJ, June 14, 1996, A14.

  67. “Clearer Skies,” Journal of Commerce, July 13, 1998, 6A; “Open Skies Pact with Peru Excludes Fine Air,” ibid., June 12, 1998, 11A; “Airline Pacts’ Antitrust Question Sparks Controversy,” WSJ, January 3, 1997; “A Megadeal in the Skies,” BusinessWeek, June 3, 1996, 50–51; “U.S. Moves to Allow Two Airlines’ Overseas Ties,” WSJ, May 22, 1996, A2; and “How Maneuvering by Airlines Shaped U.S.-Japan Accord,” WSJ, February 2, 1998, 1.

  68. Quoted in NYT, January 20, 1998, D1.

  69. “Past open-skies deals already are paying dividends,” said the Journal of Commerce in July 1998. “U.S. Department of Transportation studies have shown much stronger traffic growth in open-skies countries where alliances operate than in markets without alliances or open skies (July 13, 1998, 6A).”

  70. The phrase belongs to Saskia Sassen, political economist; see her Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: New Press, 1998), p. xxviii. Sassen writes that “deregulation has … had the effect, particularly in the case of the leading economic sectors, of partly denationalizing national territory.”

  71. “Hope vs. Experience, the Rematch,” WSJ, January 14, 1997, A21.

  72. Muller, Intermodal Freight Transportation, pp. 1–5.

  73. Ibid., p. 2.

  74. “Maxton Native Malcolm McLean, Shipping Innovator, Enters Hall,” Fayetteville [N.C.] Observer-Times, March 21, 1982; and BusinessWeek, April 16, 1979, 80–90.

  75. Quoted in “Malcolm McLean’s $750 Million Gamble,” BusinessWeek, April 16, 1979, 81.

  76. Muller, Intermodal Freight Transportation, pp. 15–16; and Leah Robinson Rousmaniere, Anchored Within the Vail (New York: The Seaman’s Church Institute of New York and New Jersey, 1995), p. 91.

  77. See Jameson Doig, Empire on the Hudson, Epilogue.

  78. “Building ‘Cow-tainers,’ ” Journal of Commerce, May 29, 1998, 3B; and “Acknowledging the Roar of the Cargo,” ibid., 10C. On generalized use of containers by the nineties, see Muller, Intermodal Freight Transportation, p. 23.

  79. Marvin Schwartz, J. B. Hunt: The Long Haul to Success (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1992), pp. 52–53.

  80. Muller, Intermodal Freight Transportation, pp. 55–56.

  81. WSJ, February 3, 1998, A1; and telephone interview with Bob Withuhn, December 16, 1996.

  82. Schwartz, J. B. Hunt, p. 59; and WSJ, February 26, 1997, p. A2.

  83. Interview with Donal H. Lotz, intermodal manager, and Dimitri C. Rallis, principal shipping analyst, of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, April 20, 1998; Terry Brennan, “Eastern Ports’ Fate Hangs on Dredging,” Journal of Commerce, June 22, 1998, 1C–2C.

  84. Interview with Lotz and Rallis, April 20, 1998; Joe Mysak with Judith Schiffer, Perpetual Motion (New York: General Publishing Group, 1997), pp. 229–34; and Lillian Borrone, “Intermodal Transport—The Role of Ports,” speech given at the International Symposium on Liner Shipping, Hamburg, Germany, June 15, 1993 (text courtesy of Don Lotz of the Port Authority of NY/NJ).

  85. On the tropical fish, see “Aquarium Shop Worker Accused of Trafficking in Endangered Fish,” NYT, April 17, 1998, B1; on the Seaman’s Church Institute in Newark, see Rousmaniere, Anchored Within the Vail, pp. 91–93; on the decline in the number of port workers, see NYT, October 13, 1997, B1.

  86. Statement by Rodney Slater, “The National Highway System: Commitment to America’s Future,” March 2, 1995, U.S. Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration.

  87. For an account of this congestion, see Theodore Prince, “Intermodal Bottlenecks,” Journal of Commerce, May 29, 1998, 7A; and “A Fragile System,” ibid., editorial, August 11, 1998, 6A.

  88. Ibid., August 11, 1998.

  89. On this bill, see David Rogers, “Route of the New I-69 Follows a Trail Marked By Politics and Money,” WSJ, May 22, 1998, A1, A9; Eric Planin and Charles Babcock, “Working the System,” Washington Post National Weekly Edition, April 13, 1998, 6; Richard Berke, “Lawmaker Takes Highway to Power,” NYT, September 25, 1997, A18; for a full account of the House bill, see “Highway and Transit Funding,” Congressional Quarterly, House Action Reports (March 31, 1998).

  90. “Small-Town Life Lures Young Professionals,” WSJ, September 29, 1995, B8; on road building’s boon for geology, see John McPhee, Annals of the Former World (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), pp. 23–25.

  91. These figures come from Advertising Age, September 14, 1981; May 12, 1986; May 6, 1991; May 12, 1997 (courtesy of Scott MacDonald, Information Center, Advertising Age).

  92. Kenneth Jackson, “All the World’s a Mall: Reflections on the Social and Economic Consequences of the American Shopping Center,” American Historical Review, 101:4 (October 1996), 1111–21; for the 1972 figure, see, in the same AHR issue, Thomas W. Hanchett, “U.S. Tax Policy and the Shopping-Center Boom of
the 1950s and 60s,” 1106. For the relationship of highways and development, see Owen D. Gutfreund’s dissertation, “Twentieth-Century Sprawl: Accommodating the Automobile and the Decentralization of the U.S.” (Dept. of History, Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1998).

  93. “Power Shortage for ‘Big Box’ Retailers,” WSJ, February 7, 1997, B12, and, for 1997 figure in shopping centers, see “The Scope of the Shopping Center Industry in the United States 1998” (New York: International Council of Shopping Centers, 1998), pp. 2–3. Thayer is quoted in the WSJ article. See also “Retail Building Surges Despite Store Glut,” WSJ, January 17, 1996, A2; and “Retailers Keep Expanding Amid Glut of Stores,” WSJ, May 28, 1996, A21, A26.

  94. See Anita Raghavan, “Mall Rises, But Will Shoppers Come?” WSJ (July 29, 1998), B6.

  95. Author’s visit, September 1996.

  2. THE LANDSCAPE OF THE TEMPORARY

  1. “The Remembering Machines of Tomorrow,” in W. S. Merwin, Miner’s Pale Children (New York: Atheneum, 1970), pp. 127–31.

  2. This account is based on a sketch by Dean Takahashi, “Road Warrior,” Wall Street Journal (hereafter WSJ), November 18, 1996, R27.

  3. Quoted in John Brinckerhoff Jackson, Landscape in Sight: Looking at America, edited by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 246.

  4. For this trend, see James Annable, “Insecure Executives Make the Economy Grow,” WSJ, April 28, 1997, A18; see also Richard Lester (director of the Industrial Technology Center at MIT), The Productive Edge (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), pp. 27–30, and part IV (“Living with Ambiguity: A Path to Faster Growth”) pp. 261–331.

  5. Morris R. Schechtman, Working Without a Net (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1994), pp. 5–6. Newt Gingrich put this book on his reading list for incoming congressional freshmen.

  6. Rosabeth Kanter, World Class (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), pp. 156–57; for another version of this position, see Lester, The Productive Edge, pp. 29–30, 320–27.

  7. Carl Quintanilla, “More Top Executives Are Hitting the Road,” WSJ, January 12, 1996, p. B1.

  8. “Marriott to Buy Renaissance Hotel Group,” WSJ, February 19, 1997, A3; “Marriott to Provide Long-Term Guests a New Economy-Priced Hotel Option,” WSJ, February 13, 1996, B7; “No Room in the Inn,” WSJ, December 13, 1996, B17; “Why Business Travel Is Such Hard Work,” WSJ, December 30, 1996, B1; “Pace of Business Travel Abroad Is Beyond Breakneck,” WSJ, May 31, 1996, B1.

  9. “Global Managers Need Boundless Sensitivity, Rugged Conditions,” WSJ, October 13, 1998, B6. Quintanilla, “More Top Executives Are Hitting the Road,” WSJ, January 12, 1996, B1, B8; “An Overseas Stint Can Be Ticket to the Top,” WSJ, January 1, 29, 1996, B1, B8.

  10. Rachel Beck, “On the Road Again,” Putnam Courier Trader, December 7, 1995, 8B.

  11. Michael Lorelli and Drew Struzan, Traveling Again, Dad? (Traverse City, Mo., Publishers Design Service, 1996).

  12. On Cowley, see Warren Susman, “Pilgrimage to Paris: The Backgrounds of American Expatriation, 1920–30,” Ph.D. diss., Department of History, University of Wisconsin, 1957 (University Microfilm International, 1986), 22–23; on the general history of the early expatriate movement, see Susman and Mary McCarthy, “A Guide to Exiles, Expatriates, and Internal Emigrés,” in Marc Robinson, ed., Altogether Elsewhere (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), pp. 49–58.

  13. Darryl Pinckney, “How I Got Over,” in Robinson, Altogether Elsewhere, p. 34. And on the increase in numbers of businesspeople abroad, see Windham International and National Foreign Trade Council, Global Relocation Trends 1994 Survey Report (New York: Windham International, 1994), p. 9; Global Relocation Trends 1995 Survey Report, 1–13; Global Relocation 1998 Survey Report, pp. 6–10.

  14. Quoted by Michael Paterniti in his “Laptop Colonialists,” New York Times Magazine, January 12, 1997, 24–29, 34.

  15. Barry Newman, “The New Yank Abroad Is the ‘Can-Do’ Player in the Global Village,” WSJ, December 12, 1995, p. A1.

  16. Congress passed a 1996 tax law that attempted to penalize such expatriates, but, as the WSJ reported in 1998, “If [that] law has dissuaded anyone from giving up U.S. citizenship, it doesn’t show.” WSJ, December 28, 1998, p. A2. For the Republican effort to discredit the reform that targeted the rich, see Joint Committee on Taxation, Issues Presented by Proposals to Modify the Tax Treatment of Expatriation, pursuant to Public Law 104-7 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Press, 1995).

  17. BusinessWeek, July 10, 1995, 58–60; BusinessWeek, May 1, 1995, 140; WSJ, February 8, 1995, B1, WSJ, June 2, 1995, A3; WSJ, April 19, 1995, 1; New York Times (hereafter NYT), April 12, 1995.

  18. “Top Dogs: U.S. Financial Firms Seize Dominant Role in the World Markets,” WSJ, January 5, 1996, 1; James H. Johnson, “Realities of the Virtual Enterprise,” unpaginated advertisement, BusinessWeek, December 4, 1995; “Developing World Gets More Investment,” WSJ, December 15, 1995, A9A; “U.S. Companies Again Hold Wide Lead over Rivals in Direct Investing Abroad,” WSJ, December 6, 1995, A2.

  19. On this whole dilemma, see “Disappearing Taxes,” Economist, May 31, 1997, 21–23. This magazine argued that if global companies persisted in eluding the taxpayer, the burden of taxation would fall more and more on labor: “In a world of mobile capital, labour is likely to bear a growing share of the tax burden—especially unskilled workers who are least mobile.”

  20. Quoted in Karen Curnow McCluskey, ed., Notes from a Traveling Childhood: Readings for Internationally Mobile Parents and Children (Washington, D.C.: Foreign Service Youth Foundation, 1994), p. 48.

  21. On American unionization in the post–WWII period, see Edward Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–74 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 40–60, 739–40; and Richard Barnet and John Cavanagh, Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), pp. 310–13; and Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and John Schmitt, The State of Working America 1998–99 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), prepared by the Economic Policy Institute, Washington, D.C., pp. 183–89.

  22. The chicken and meatpacking businesses now produce at unheard-of volumes for the world market, herding countless millions of animals and birds in pens for assembly-line slaughter and packaging; no work has become more ugly or demeaning, which explains why these companies have resorted so completely to immigrant labor (much of it illegal). On the demeaning side of it, see Tony Horwitz for his account of “blues on the chicken line,” in “9 to Nowhere,” WSJ, December 1, 1994, 1. The poultry-processing industry, he writes, “[has been] the second fastest growing factory job in America since 1980,” and it “has consigned a large class of workers to a Dickensian time warp, laboring not just for meager wages but also under dehumanized and often dangerous conditions.” In late 1998, conditions were unchanged; see Laurie P. Cohen, “With Help from INS, U.S. Meatpacker Taps Mexican Work Force,” WSJ, October 15, 1998, A1, A8.

  The literature on every facet of these new brigades is enormous, and countless articles on the “return of sweatshops” have been written in this decade, but see Peter Kwong, The New Chinatown (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992); “Despite Tough Laws, Sweatshops Flourish,” NYT, February 6, 1995, 1; William Branigin, “Sweatshops Are Back,” Washington Post National Weekly Edition, February 24, 1997, 6–7; “Government Links Retailers to Sweatshops,” WSJ, December 15, 1997, B5A; “Garment Shops Found to Break Wage Laws,” NYT, October 17, 1997, B1–3; and Roy Beck, The Case Against Immigration (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996).

  23. Quoted in Alexander Keyssar, Out of Work: The First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 62.

  24. Keyssar, Out of Work, pp. 74–75, 89–90. See also Timothy J. Hatton and Jeffrey G. Williamson, “International Migration, 1850–1939: An Economic Survey,” in Hatton and Williamson, eds., Migration and the International Labor Market, 1850–1939 (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 17, 20, 23.
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br />   25. They were also “structured” in different ways—numbering “men and women who were idle during slow seasons, employees who worked on short time, floaters who migrated from one place to another, casuals, and substitute spinners and printers who were called up only when regular workers were absent or when the demand for labor was unusually great” (ibid., p. 7).

  26. The literature on temps has grown over the years, but see Kevin D. Henson, Just a Temp (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996); Robert E. Parker, Flesh Peddlers and Warm Bodies: The Temporary Help Industry and Its Workers (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994).

  27. Lawrence Mishel et al., The State of Working America 1998–99, pp. 8, 46–7, 242–52.

  28. See “A Semi-Tough Policy on Illegal Workers,” Washington Post, July 13, 1998, 22. And for increased figures, see “A Temporary Force to Be Reckoned With,” NYT, May 20, 1996, D1; “Temp Firms Expected to Post Gains,” October 14, 1996, B8; and Parker, Flesh Peddlers, p. 30.

  29. Parker, Flesh Peddlers, p. 30.

  30. “Temporary-Help Industry Now Features Battle of Giants,” WSJ, November 6, 1997, B4.

  31. “Big Companies Hire More Lawyer Temps,” WSJ, September 23, 1994, B1; “The Newest Temps in Law Firms: Lawyers,” NYT, February 24, 1998, B7; and, on biologists, chemists, and accountants, see “These Temps Don’t Type But They’re Handy in the Lab,” BusinessWeek, May 24, 1993, 68; “Brains for Rent,” Forbes, July 13, 1995, 99–100; and “Temp Tycoon Steers Jobseekers,” WSJ, October 4, 1994, A19. On earlier use of temps, see Bennet Harrison, Lean and Mean (New York: Basic Books, 1994), pp. 201–9; and Richard Barnett, Global Dreams (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), p. 340.

  32. Helene Cooper and Thomas Kamm, “Much of Europe Eases Its Rigid Labor Laws, and Temps Proliferate,” WSJ, June 5, 1998, A1.

  33. Among the corporations to draw on these foreign reserves were the fashion industry, which recruited well over 7,000 fashion models from around the world between 1990 and 1994, including the Italian male model Fabio, a definite rarity who recently obtained his green card under the H-1B program. Big accounting firms and related businesses reaped their bounty, too, for a total of 12,500 H-1B accountants and auditors; industrial and pharmaceuticals firms boasted a total of 14,000 foreign temps for the same period. Figures from “H-1B Progam—Survey Data—1992–1994—U.S. Department of Labor. On Fabio, see WSJ, September 3, 1996, 1.