front cover of Disruption in Detroit
Disruption in Detroit
Autoworkers and the Elusive Postwar Boom
Daniel J. Clark
University of Illinois Press, 2018
It is a bedrock American belief: the 1950s were a golden age of prosperity for autoworkers. Flush with high wages and enjoying the benefits of generous union contracts, these workers became the backbone of a thriving blue-collar middle class. It is also a myth. Daniel J. Clark began by interviewing dozens of former autoworkers in the Detroit area and found a different story--one of economic insecurity caused by frequent layoffs, unrealized contract provisions, and indispensable second jobs. Disruption in Detroit is a vivid portrait of workers and an industry that experienced anything but stable prosperity. As Clark reveals, the myths--whether of rising incomes or hard-nosed union bargaining success--came later. In the 1950s, ordinary autoworkers, union leaders, and auto company executives recognized that although jobs in their industry paid high wages, they were far from steady and often impossible to find.
[more]
logo for University of Illinois Press
Listening to Workers
Oral Histories of Metro Detroit Autoworkers in the 1950s
Daniel J. Clark
University of Illinois Press, 2024

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.

[more]

Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter