Listening to Workers : Oral Histories of Metro Detroit Autoworkers in the 1950s (Working Class in American History)

Clark, Daniel J.

University of Illinois Press（2025/04発売）

• 製本 Hardcover:ハードカバー版／ページ数 230 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9780252045998
• DDC分類 331.7629220977434

Full Description

Historians and readers alike often overlook the everyday experiences of workers. Drawing on years of interviews and archival research, Daniel J. Clark presents the rich, interesting, and sometimes confounding lives of men and women who worked in Detroit-area automotive plants in the 1950s.

In their own words, the interviewees frankly discuss personal matters like divorce and poverty alongside recollections of childhood and first jobs, marriage and working women, church and hobbies, and support systems and workplace dangers. Their frequent struggles with unstable jobs and economic insecurity upend notions of the 1950s as a golden age of prosperity while stories of domestic violence and infidelity open a door to intimate aspects of their lives. Taken together, the narratives offer seldom-seen accounts of autoworkers as complex and multidimensional human beings.

Compelling and surprising, Listening to Workers foregoes the union-focused strain of labor history to provide ground-level snapshots of a blue-collar world.

Contents

Introduction

Acknowledgments

Alternate Groupings of Narratives

Emerald Neal
Elwin Brown
Paul Ross
Margaret Beaudry
Joe Woods
Les "Lucky" Coleman
Gene Johnson
Dorothy Sackle
L.J. Scott
Thomas Nowak
James McGuire
Edith Arnold
James Franklin
Ernie Liles
Paul Ish
Katie Neumann

Conclusion

Notes

Interview List

Index