Steelworker Alley: How Class Works in Youngstown
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The son of a Youngstown steelworker, Bruno returned to his hometown seeking to understand the formation of his own working-class consciousness and the place of labor in the larger capitalist society. Drawing on interviews with dozens of former steelworkers and on research in local archives, Bruno explores the culture of the community, including such subjects as relations among coworkers, class antagonism, and attitudes toward authority. He describes how, because workers are often neighbors, the workplace takes on a feeling of neighborhood. He also demonstrates that to understand class consciousness one must look beyond the workplace, in this instance from Youngstown's front porches to its bowling alleys and voting booths.Written with a deeply personal approach, Steelworker Alley is a richly detailed look at workers which reveals the continuing strength of class relationships in America. Library Journal 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 class--they 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.--Duncan Stewart, State Historical Society of Iowa Lib., Iowa City Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
