Editor’s note: This is an article from the Summer 1998 issue of UCLA Magazine.
Fresh out of high school, Edward Salerno took a job on the assembly line at General Motors in Linden, N.J. There was nowhere else that an unskilled worker like Salerno (not his real name) could find such good pay and benefits. But after eight years, he traded his economic security for a measure of dignity and accepted a buyout offer from GM.
“Working there was very belittling,” he told UCLA sociologist Ruth Milkman, who studies labor trends. “It seemed like they were always trying to play games with you, always trying to degrade you.” Among the complaints: Workers had to ask permission before going to the bathroom. Supervisors were verbally abusive. One employee, who hadn’t missed a day in more than six years, was discouraged from visiting his baby niece in the hospital after she was hurt in an accident.
In Farewell to the Factory: Auto Workers in the Late Twentieth Century (University of California Press), Milkman paints a disturbing portrait of the plight of industrial workers in a postindustrial society. The combination of unrelenting regimentation, inhumane supervision and a lack of interest in their input left even the well-paid workers in Milkman’s study comparing the factory to a prison, a yearning to escape.
To compile her case study, Milkman was given access to the GM-Linden plant in the mid-1980s. It was a tumultuous period for labor: The American auto industry was struggling to cope with international competition, while unions, including the once-powerful United Auto Workers, were starting a precipitous decline.
Faced with overcapacity, GM negotiated in 1987 to offer some 4,000 employees roughly a year’s wage — $30,000 — to leave the plant. For those who stayed, GM promised a “new Linden” that, after a year-long overhaul, would be technologically state-of-the-art. The refurbished plant also would offer workers an expanded role in decision-making and problem-solving, patterned after the much-touted Japanese management system. For five years, Milkman tracked both workers who stayed and those who opted out.
Among employees who remained, enthusiasm for the changes quickly soured as it became apparent that the “new Linden” barely differed from the old. “By promising workers opportunities for participation and then not following through, GM raised workers’ expectations, only to smash them by returning to the old practices,” Milkman says.
But among the approximately one-quarter of employees who accepted the buyout, the vast majority expressed no regrets five years later — in the recession year of 1991 — even though many lacked the security of a high-wage, unionized job. One ex-Linden worker, self-employed as a chimney sweep, reflected that even though a fall from a roof might put an end to his business, his post-GM situation was “utopia” when compared with life in the plant.
Social commentators have expressed concern about workers displaced by capital mobility and technological change. Yet, few GM-Linden workers voiced nostalgia for the industrial system that was collapsing around them.
“Many features of the factory jobs fully deserve to be dead and buried,” Milkman says. “We should direct our nostalgia at the high wages, fringe benefits and union protection that industrial workers once enjoyed.”
