I’m listening to Elsewhere
The book is also relevant to today’s debates regarding a $15/hour minimum wage. Russo is a self-described liberal Democrat who unfavorably compares Arizona in the 1970s to his hometown in Upstate New York. Arizona was growing fast and everyone who wanted one could have a job but at wages that Russo considered “crappy.” Russo’s hometown of Gloversville, New York, on the other hand provided jobs for only about half of those who wanted one but at union wages that Russo considered fair. Russo describes the abandoned houses and boarded-up shops of downtown Gloversville and generally moribund economy of the surrounding area but still preferred that to an economy in which everyone worked at a market-clearing wage.
Philip Roth also writes about Gloversville and the glove making trade in American Pastoral. It was a classic Adam Smith type industry with highly skilled and specialized workers – making the leather (itself involving various steps), cutting, sewing, putting in linings, etc. A whole ecosystem. It’s something that existed within living memory (of increasingly old people) but you might as well be writing about Pompeii because it’s so completely and totally gone. For some reason, the glove industry ended up in the Philippines (as opposed to some other low labor cost third world country) starting as early as the 1950s.