The Chicken Trail

The book is packed with information and insights. For once, the tables are an integral and important complement to the text, a rigorous support for the author's arguments. In the panoramic and and at the same time meticulously detailed vision of the globalisation of capital and the myriad plagues it is inflicting on our world, it is a triumph - compelling, clear and irrefutable. -Frances Webber,Race & Class(April 2014) Kathleen Schwartzman's lean and intelligent book,The Chicken Trail, is essentially aboutmovement and about linking together seemingly unconnected sites, people and developments... Schwartzman has written a tight, readable, and persuasive book, one that clearly captures and illustrates the push and pull of globalization on labor markets, workers, and business flows. Anyone interested in globalization, trade, labor, and food chains will benefit from understanding the trail or loop that chicken has taken in the last twenty years. -Bryant Simon,Comparative Labor Law and Policy Journal(Fall 2013) The Chicken Trail is a fascinating account of the serious negative impacts of globalization on workers on both sides of the U.S./Mexico border. Kathleen C. Schwartzman shows how globalization, particularly NAFTA, and changes in the poultry industry have caused the displacement of rural subsistence farmers from Mexico, who in turn migrate to the United States, where they have displaced African American workers. Schwartzman argues that for corporations, hiring undocumented workers was a union-busting strategy and a solution to the profit crisis. -Carolina Bank Munoz, Brooklyn College, author of Transnational Tortillas: Race, Gender, and Shop-Floor Politics in Mexico and the United States When Americans gather to devour a meal of scrumptious chicken, they are unaware of the geographical and social journey along which that chicken traveled before landing on the dinner table. In her new book The Chicken Trail, Kathleen C. Schwartzman does a masterful job of illuminating the important role played by the chicken industry in shaping America's labor market, patterns of immigration, race relations, international trade, and globalization. Schwartzman uses sophisticated social theory and multiple methodologies to construct a riveting narrative that sheds new light on how the processing of a single commodity-the chicken-can explain complex social processes. By dissecting the processing of chickens from birth to human consumption, Schwartzman helps us to rethink important issues of our time including immigration, high black unemployment, labor strife, corporate behavior, and international relations between rich and poor countries. -Aldon D. Morris, Northwestern University, author of The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement