Esther Kaplan wins the July Sidney Award for “Losing Sparta:The Bitter Truth About the Gospel of Productivity,” a feature in the Virginia Quarterly Review about a Philips fluorescent lighting plant in Sparta, TN, which the company offshored to Mexico, even though Philips had rated it the top plant in the company’s entire global lighting division. Politicans and economists promise that productivity will save American jobs, but Kaplan’s analysis shows that even the most productive workers aren’t safe from offshoring, because the decision to ship jobs overseas rarely results from a rational economic calculus. Companies aren’t accountable to their shareholders or government regulators to justify these decisions, and typically, little attempt is made to defend the move on economic grounds.

For many multinationals, offshoring has become a performance to impress shareholders, and a reflexive union-avoidance tactic, rather than a strategic decision. Companies think nothing of shutting down highly-efficient, conveniently located plants in the United States and relocating to less-efficient, lower-performing facilities far from suppliers and clients. Wages may be lower overseas, but the savings don’t necessarily offset the costs of the move, including the loss of the human capital of an experienced and dedicated workforce, like the staff of the Sparta plant. 

“Kaplan’s account – at once deeply moving and brilliantly analytical – of how a multinational conglomerate shuttered a lighting factory, taking the work to Mexico and destroying the economy of a small Tennessee county in the process, is one of the best articles anywhere on what’s befallen American workers in recent decades,” said Hillman Judge Harold Meyerson.

Learn more about the reporting of “Losing Sparta” in our Backstory interview with Esther Kaplan.