| The dominant truism about class in American society is that everyone is (or wants to be) middle class; the U.S. doesn't have, we are told, a true working class. Bruno, a professor in the Chicago Labor Education Program at the University of Illinois, begs to differ. Growing up in Youngstown, Ohio, the son of several generations of steelworkers, and working in the mills during college summers, Bruno saw the working class firsthand. He went back to his hometown and interviewed 75 retired steelworkers (and often their spouses) to get a feeling for their sense of class. Their conversations covered the waterfront (or the open hearth furnace): all aspects of work, from management and safety to aches and pains and sense of achievement, as well as the interaction between work, union, family, and community. With an average job tenure of 31 years, Bruno's interviewees represent the same generation that inspired Tom Brokaw's best-seller: at work, as at war, their memories are powerful and involving. ((Reviewed July 1999)) Copyright 2000 Booklist Reviews |
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| Did a working-class identity exist among steelworkers who lived and worked in the Mahoning Valley of Ohio, and if so, what were its effects? Bruno answers affirmatively: social class was the major variable affecting how steelworker families lived, what they thought, and ultimately, why they did not support a community effort to buy a steel mill when Lykes shut down Youngstown Sheet & Tube in 1977. For this well-written ethnography, Bruno interviewed 75 retirees, wives, and other residents in Struthers, a working-class town near Youngstown. Readers see everyday working-class life: dirty, hot/cold, dangerous mills without bathrooms; small, carefully maintained homes; wildcat strikes to protest conditions; unions and social clubs. The workers had to act collectively; tightly knit communities prevailed. Bruno's argument dissipates when he states that class overrode race and ethnicity. He includes numerous exceptions, e.g., blacks had segregated jobs until the 1970s and "race often strained . . . the class dimensions of industrial production." This reviewer worked in Youngstown; racial, class, and educational conflicts abounded. Recommended for classes in stratification, social history, and work. All levels. Copyright 1999 American Library Association |
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| Bruno, an assistant professor in the Chicago Labor Education Program at the University of Illinois, blends personal memory, oral history, and archival research to document the social, economic, and political ties that bound Youngstown steelworkers to their fellow workers, families, communities, and class. Bruno argues that the postwar academic picture of "highly paid" manual laborers contentedly assuming middle-class values does not square with the workers' own perception of their lives. His steelworker father and friends defined themselves as working classAthey did hard physical labor, lived and socialized with other steelworkers in plant-gate neighborhoods, and had little in common with the middle-class foremen, plant managers, and owners. This book combines the immediacy of personal recollection with scholarly analysis to describe a working-class life that "unfolds on the plant floor, in the union hall, and throughout the neighborhood." Recommended for academic libraries with labor or oral history collections.ADuncan Stewart, State Historical Society of Iowa Lib., Iowa City Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information. |
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