A01=Ruth Milkman
american dream
american industry
american labor
american workers
Author_Ruth Milkman
auto industry
auto workers
auto workers union
automated factories
Category=JHBL
Category=KCF
Category=KNDR
Category=KNX
Category=KNXN
Category=KNXU
contemporary labor
deindustrialization
eq_bestseller
eq_business-finance-law
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
factories
factory conditions
general motors
gm plant
industrial america
industrial relations
industry
labor
labor industrial relations
labor studies
linden plant
manufacturing
new jersey
robotics
unions
us auto industry
us labor movement
workers
working conditions
working families
working women
Product details
- ISBN 9780520206786
- Weight: 363g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 May 1997
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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This study exposes the human side of the decline of the U.S. auto industry, tracing the experiences of two key groups of General Motors workers: those who took a cash buyout and left the factory, and those who remained and felt the effects of new technology and other workplace changes. Milkman's extensive interviews and surveys of workers from the Linden, New Jersey, GM plant reveal their profound hatred for the factory regime - a longstanding discontent made worse by the decline of the auto workers' union in the 1980s. One of the leading social historians of the auto industry, Ruth Milkman moves between changes in the wider industry and those in the Linden plant, bringing both a workers' perspective and a historical perspective to the study. Milkman finds that, contrary to the assumption in much of the literature on deindustrialization, the Linden buyout-takers express no nostalgia for the high-paying manufacturing jobs they left behind. Given the chance to make a new start in the late 1980s, they were eager to leave the plant with its authoritarian, prison-like conditions, and few have any regrets about their decision five years later.
Despite the fact that the factory was retooled for robotics and that the management hoped to introduce a new participatory system of industrial relations, workers who remained express much less satisfaction with their lives and jobs. Milkman is adamant about allowing the workers to speak for themselves, and their hopes, frustrations, and insights add fresh and powerful perspectives to a debate that is often carried out over the heads of those whose lives are most affected by changes in the industry.
Ruth Milkman is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex during World War II (1987).
