Common to failing and fallen empires is a nostalgia for a golden age that never existed. Americans like to believe that we miss working on assembly lines in auto factories.

The fantasy that “good jobs” are inherently and automatically generated by factories, or even that unionization magically converts working on an assembly line into the kind of job that workers would want their children to aspire to, motivates much of Donald Trump’s trade war. Likewise, the mixture of domestic tax incentives and narrowly tailored tariffs that comprised his Democratic predecessor Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better”, aimed to “create good jobs that give working families and the middle class a fair shot and the chance to get ahead”. Biden frequently waxed nostalgic about his 1950s’ childhood in Scranton, PA, and a work ethic instilled by his dad: “A job is a lot more than a paycheck. It’s about your dignity. It’s about your place in the community”.Footnote ¹

Crucially, missing from the conversation are the actual lifestyle, dignity, and community fostered by mass production jobs in the 1950s. What did the workers who participated in that supposedly halcyon era have to say about it? Listening to Workers is precisely what Daniel J. Clark does in his collection of oral history interviews of Detroit area retirees who worked in the auto industry in the post-war years. It’s a sobering portrait of precarity and promise.

Seven years ago, Clark’s Disruption in Detroit: Autoworkers and the Elusive Postwar Boom (Champaign, IL, 2018) married some of these contemporary interviews with 1950s’ autoworkers with contemporaneous newspaper accounts of routine layoffs in the auto industry. Tens of thousands of Chrysler, Ford, and GM workers in Detroit, Flint, Pontiac, and other Michigan communities that relied on steady work from the industry were laid off annually. Some of this stemmed from planned retooling for each new model year; some from unplanned overproduction that forced companies to halt production when sales lots overflowed with unsold vehicles. Clark showed that while 1950s autoworkers could afford the down payment on a middle-class lifestyle, prolonged periods of idleness could lead to repossession of washing machines and family cars, and even, in some cases, foreclosure and eviction from their homes.

Disruption paired well with the publication of Jeremy Milloy’s Blood, Sweat and Fear: Violence at Work in the North American Auto Industry, 1960–80 (Champaign, IL, 2017). Basically, as soon as the United Auto Workers union (UAW) helped stabilize auto employment with layoff protections that amounted to a “guaranteed annual wage”, the industry began a slow disinvestment in Detroit and its surrounding areas, allowing factories like Dodge Main to crumble while shifting production to regions more hostile to union organizing, such as Mexico and the US South. Over-work, corporate indifference to health and safety, the general feeling that companies were squeezing the last few pennies of profitability out of communities they were abandoning, combined with the evergreen problem of American racism, resulted in an environment of shocking and disgusting workplace violence (fistfights on the line, gunfights in the parking lot). Together, these books posed the pointed question, “Were auto jobs ever ‘good’?”

It turns out that Disruption in Detroit was an unplanned digression from Clark’s years-long oral history project. The prevalence of stories about layoffs and hardships that his interview subjects told convinced Clark of the need to single out that aspect of the stories and shine a new light on an era we thought we knew from his prior book. Listening to Workers, by contrast, lets the factory veterans’ stories meander. A few of these workers were veterans of the sit-down strikes and World War II, but most were the children or younger siblings of that storied generation of pioneers. Korea was their war, pulling the men off the line and re-opening the factories to the women. The women, each in her own way, fought for respect from the bosses and co-workers with laudable assistance from male UAW reps. Black workers, too, had to defend their dignity from both racist and racially insensitive co-workers. (Tellingly, many of the book’s participants – after decades of union-sponsored and HR antidiscrimination trainings – make throwaway comments like “Not that I have anything about Black people”, when gratuitously explaining that someone in a story is not white.) Many of the workers interviewed – black and white – were southern migrants, often following relatives who moved to Detroit during World War II. Disparaged as “hillbillies”, they too faced discrimination.

As fascinating as these accounts of social adjustment and personal striving are, the narratives reliably return to periods of layoff and economic struggle. Consider Elwin Brown. His dad participated in the organizing drive at GM in the 1930s. When jobs opened up at Pontiac in 1951, Brown’s dad told him, “Get your ass over there and get yourself a job!” That first stint at Pontiac was interrupted by a draft notice. Brown was not discharged from Korea until May 1954. Although he explored moving to Indiana, and re-entering his preferred craft of printing pressman, the ninety days that the UAW contract afforded him to hire back onto his old job without a loss in seniority forced a quick decision. His first layoff notice accompanied the news of his wife’s first pregnancy. Brown was able to transfer to a new plant in 1955, and his employment briefly stabilized. Another slowdown in production forced Brown’s transfer to a different facility in mid-1956. Martin’s longest layoff began in March 1958 and lasted until November that year. Unemployment insurance helped, as did UAW-negotiated benefits, but money remained tight and the Brown family lost their rented home. Acceptance into GM’s in-house training programme for skilled machinists, and a boom economy in the 1960s, finally provided Brown with a stable, middle-class lifestyle: home ownership (with an attached rental property), the ability to pay for his kids’ college education, and a secure retirement that began in 1985.

Others loathed the assembly line, and full-time work was more of a threat than a promise. Emerald Neal confesses that boredom drove him to “maybe take off from work two or three times a month or whatever, go back to West Virginia” when workers were in short supply during the Korean War. Intermittent absenteeism and lusting for farm life was a common form of 1970s worker protest when the labour market was tight and the lines were sped up, during the Vietnam War at the notorious Lordstown, OH, factory. Joe Woods managed to avoid layoffs because, as a black man, he started out as a custodian in 1947 (work that was needed even when assembly lines were idled), enjoyed extra seniority from his Korean service, and eventually worked his way into a more in-demand skilled trade. His story is an interesting first-person account of a southern migrant who followed his dad into auto work and faced the racism of his co-workers head-on, begrudgingly winning their respect. Margaret Beaudrey also demanded respect. “And if you didn’t give me no respect”, she told Clark, “I made a big deal out of it”, taking on sexist foremen and co-workers, as well as bucking her husband’s preference that she stay at home with the kids. Beaudrey would return to domestic duties during economic slumps but would hire back on during boom times to earn extra money and independence.

Clark interviewed sixteen auto work veterans. In his concluding chapter, he summarizes a few themes that emerge in the book: family traumas; employment – much of it farmwork – that preceded the workers’ entry into the auto workforce; formal schooling; religion and church involvement; marriage and children; interests and hobbies; race and women’s issues. It is a helpful breakdown, since oral histories like these often find even more utility as a source for other historians’ works, as the subjects of Studs Terkel’s and Alice and Staughton Lynd’s well-known volumes became touchstones in other historians’ stories. Where Terkel and Lynd constructed their chapters to read as an uninterrupted first-person narrative in each worker’s voice, Clark hesitated to take such liberties. Clark’s oral histories still contain large blocks of text, in quotations, from his interview subjects, but he often narratively interjects to explain transitions from, say, a worker’s life on the farm, to time at Pontiac 6, to service in Korea. It works, even if it does not quite achieve the seamless storytelling flair that Studs Terkel could pull off.

Clark notes the dearth of any kind of documentation of the lived experience of rank-and-file workers for historians to tap into, as well as most historians’ shyness around conducting oral history interviews. I, for one, take great comfort in confirming that everyone I am researching for a potential book is long dead. Yet, there are thousands of writers with brilliant interviewing skills who are basically unemployed in their chosen field: journalists. I will just put a pin in this: a sane US opposition party would make it part of its 10,000-point plan to reverse the deleterious effects of Trumpism to create a robust National Endowment for the Humanities grant programme to fund a small army of journalists/historians to document the country’s living past.