“The Dangers of Some of the Jobs Was Unreal”

Abstract

“Can you tell me about your job?” In response to this general and on the surface simple question, the former employees of International Harvester and Johnson Controls launched into detailed, vivid accounts of the tasks involved in producing iron machine parts and automotive batteries. Their answers to this question demonstrated a contradiction in assumptions and imperatives; the narrators assumed a familiarity with the nature of heavy industry on the part of the interviewers and did not stop to give the full name of equipment or job titles or to explain a step in a process. But at the same time, the urgency of their tone and repetition of particular images revealed a need to make the interviewer, an outsider to industrial work, grasp the severity of the conditions under which they worked. Indeed, the primary theme that arose from this section of the narratives was the health and safety challenges in both plants, detailed accounts of which are woven through every aspect of the description of the jobs there. The narrators insist, explicitly at times but also by suggestion, that the physically demanding nature of their jobs required a high level of skill that only a certain kind of person—intelligent, resourceful, and with a strong work ethic—could succeed in these conditions and, foreshadowing later arguments, that these traits ought to have been, but were not always, recognized by management.