Employee rights and capital mobility

In this article I analyze the impact that capital mobility has on employee rights in the workplace by studying the effects of the relocation of General Motor’s Corvette plant from St. Louis to Bowling Green, Kentucky. This relocation not only afforded GM an opportunity to increase its control over its hourly work force, but it also set in motion a process in which the rights’ claims of management and workers were redefined. Through a number of planned and unplanned mechanisms, management invaded spaces created by workers, and, as a result, workers’ ability to pursue their interests was diminished. In the concluding section, I discuss the implications of this for research on employee rights and for combining the concern for rights with labor process theory.