Beginning in the 1970s, local boosters in the U.S. South offered lucrative incentives to attract foreign manufacturing firms, who, in turn, promised to uplift working-class southerners’ lives and modernize benighted rural areas with state-of-the-art “greenfield” plants and cutting-edge production techniques. Led by Japanese and German automotive companies, such as Nissan Motors in Smyrna, Tennessee, these “transplants” initially recruited a select group of “chosen” workers, most of whom saw themselves as middle-class “technicians” rather than as proletarianized factory workers. Despite subjecting their assembly-line workers to physically demanding conditions, the transplants’ strategy of hiring “chosen” workers thwarted organized labor’s attempts to unionize their plants. By the twenty-first century, however, foreign-owned transplants have increasingly filled positions with lower-paid temporary workers hired from third-party contractors. These “permatemps” regularly face deteriorating work conditions while lacking the employment security, benefits, and job stability enjoyed by the “chosen” workers. In effect, the South’s foreign-owned transplants have created a three-tiered industrial workforce, with “chosen” workers at the top, followed by a frustrated pro-union proletariat in the middle, and a “precariat” composed of temporary workers at the bottom.