Living and Dying on the Factory Floor : From the Outside In and the Inside Out.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ranney, David.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Manufacturing industries.

Middle class.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (161 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Oakland : PM Press, 2019.

Summary:

David Ranney's vivid memoir describes his work experiences between 1976 and 1982 in the factories of southeast Chicago and northwest Indiana, one of the heaviest industrial concentrations in the world. The author takes the reader on a walk through the heart of Chicago's South Side, observing the noise, heavy traffic, the 24-hour restaurants and bars, the rich diversity of people on the streets at all hours of the day and night, and the smell of the highly polluted air. Factory life includes stints at a machine shop, a shortening factory, a railroad car factory, a structural steel shop, a box factory, a chemical plant, and a paper cup factory. Along the way there is a wildcat strike, an immigration raid, shop-floor actions protesting supervisor abuses, serious injuries, a failed effort to unionise, and a murder. Ranney's emphasis is on race and class relations, working conditions, environmental issues, and broader social issues in the 1970s that impacted the shop floor. Forty years later, the narrator returns to Chicago's South Side to reveal what happened to the communities, buildings, and the companies that had inhabited them. Living and Dying on the Factory Floor concludes with discussions on the nature of work; racism, race, and class; the use of immigration policy for social control; and our ability to create a just society.

Contents:

Front Cover

Praise for Living and Dying on the Factory Floor

Title Page

Copyright

Contents

Preface

1976-1977: You'll Get Used to It

1977-1978: There Ain't No Justice . . . Just Us

1978-1979: We Are All Children of God

1979-1980: This Is What We Do!

1981-1982: We Aren't Dogs, Cabrón

2015: Thirty-Five Years Later

2019: Reflections

Bring Back Middle-Class Jobs?

Racism, Race, and Class

Human Nature and the Fight for a New Society

Lawyers and the Courts

Immigration

Left-Wing Intellectuals in the Workplace

Outside In and Inside Out

Acknowledgments

About the Author.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9781629636573

1629636576

OCLC:

1076543422