ABSTRACT
The author attempt to understand economic globalization dates back to 1980. As his collaborators and he were interviewing, videoing, and writing about the history of brass workers in Connecticut's Naugatuck Valley, the brass industry was collapsing around them. Employers were threatening to shut down local plants and move the work elsewhere even to foreign countries unless workers gave radical concessions on wages and working conditions. The workers had a radically different perspective, indeed a different paradigm, which was certainly not understood by and was perhaps incomprehensible to their critics. It was expressed by a rank-and-file worker they interviewed on the picket line. Local media, failing to understand that local workers were part of a larger system, were unable to anticipate the side effects and interaction effects to which competitive wage cutting would lead. And they did not grasp that workers were expressing a long-established and hard-won strategy of common preservation.
