Conclusion

Abstract

As listeners, readers, fellow citizens, and scholars, what are the most important lessons we can learn from these narrators? When we began recording the stories of former Harvester and Johnson Controls employees, our primary questions were what caused the closings and how were the workers’ lives affected. These concerns grew out of our reading of the literature on plant closings, which documented both the national phenomenon of deindustrialization and case studies of the process in specific industries or communities. We sought to augment this scholarship by presenting fuller stories from the workers in their own words. We anticipated filling in the “other side of the story” of the causes of the closings and conveying a more detailed and personal picture of the results.