But really there was less to global value chains than met the eye. They were not symphonies of specialist craftsmanship conducted by some boardroom maestro of industrial organization. The new operation was usually some company’s old operation, spirited somewhere else with a lot of bad faith and hocus-pocus. The main purpose of these chains was not industrial (seeking out value in the earth’s far corners) but political (getting across the border to someplace, anyplace, where the obligations to workers that American companies had accumulated since the New Deal could be repudiated).
