Listening to Workers
Oral Histories of Metro Detroit Autoworkers in the 1950s
- 230 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Only available on web
About This Book
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.
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Alternate Groupings of Narratives
- Introduction
- 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
- Back Cover