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.

Introduction

Acknowledgments

Alternate Groupings of Narratives

1. Emerald Neal
2. Elwin Brown
3. Paul Ross
4. Margaret Beaudry
5. Joe Woods
6. Les “Lucky” Coleman
7. Gene Johnson
8. Dorothy Sackle
9. L.J. Scott
10. Thomas Nowak
11. James McGuire
12. Edith Arnold
13. James Franklin
14. Ernie Liles
15. Paul Ish
16. Katie Neumann

Conclusion

Notes

Interview List

Index