This study exposes the human side of the decline of the US auto industry, tracing the experience 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. In includes extensive interviews and surveys of workers from the Linden, New Jersey General Motors plant, which reveal their profound hatred for the factory regime, a longstanding discontent made worse by the decline of the auto workers union in the 1980s. It offers both a workers' perspective and a historical perspective to the study of this topic. The text finds that 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 had any regrets about their decision five years later.
Auflage
Sprache
Verlagsort
Zielgruppe
Produkt-Hinweis
Illustrationen
Maße
Höhe: 229 mm
Breite: 152 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-0-520-20677-9 (9780520206779)
Copyright in bibliographic data is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or its licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Klassifikation
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).
List of Figures and Tables
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
2. Prisoners of Prosperity: Auto Workers in the
Postwar Period
3? Adversarialism and Beyond: The UAW in
Uncertain Times
4? Farewell to the Factory: The Buyout Experience
5? The "New Linden": Rhetoric and Reality
Appendix 1: Selected Data on Linden-GM
Production Workers, 1985
Appendix 2: Auto Workers' Hourly
Earnings, 1958-1992
Appendix 3: A Note on Methodology
Notes
Index
