"The Spread of Historically White Southern Values to Northern Republican Politicians"

"THERE'S NOTHING NEW ABOUT Northern manufacturers moving south to lower their labor costs. Textile factories, which had been located chiefly in New England, began to pop up in the South as early as the 1880s. In 1922, the average hourly wage in Massachusetts mills was 41 cents while in Alabama, it was 21 cents. Over the next six years, 40 percent of the Massachusetts factories shuttered their gates, and by the mid-1960s, the Southern textile industry was out-producing its Northern counterpart by a 24-to-1 margin.
"But the shift of higher-value manufacturing to the South since the 1960s, once the South was air-conditioned and its Jim Crow laws nullified, has had a more profound effect on the American economy. Workers at the unionized auto, steel, aerospace, and other durable-goods factories in the Northern and Western states during the three decades following World War II attained a standard of living and of employment stability all but unknown to earlier generations of workers. Since the 1970s, however, that standard—and with it, the American middle class—has been eroded by the emergence of lower-wage competition from both the Global South and the domestic South."


Harold Meyerson in The American Prospect looks at the impact of the South's economy and politics on the nation's workers.