Abstract

The Downside of "Development"

It is informed that like many Southern states, North Carolina successfully enticed businesses from the North with fat tax breaks, land-bedamned development schemes, "right to work" laws and averted-gaze regulatory policies. North Carolina boasts manufacturing wages that are among the nation's lowest, and with only 4.5 percent of its manufacturing work force unionized, has just about the fewest work stoppages of any state. By the mid-1980s it contained sixty-six of America's seventy-five most industrialized counties and sixty-one of its seventy-five poorest. Since then the state has opened enterprise offices in Japan and Germany, the luxury golf courses have multiplied and in the Research Triangle area, especially, the cubic density of Ph.D.s is on the rise. But now North Carolina is ironically falling victim to the logic of its own development, becoming a stopping point on the road to an even less demanding, lower-wage labor market farther south.