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Jacobin Radio

The Vast Majority: Blood on the Factory Floor

Jacobin Radio

Jacobin

Socialism, History, News, Left, Jacobin, Alternative, Socialist, Politics

4.71.5K Ratings

🗓️ 5 October 2020

⏱️ 53 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Postwar American auto work in its heyday is often remembered nostalgically. But in his book Blood Sweat and Fear: Violence at Work in the North American Auto Industry, 1960-1980, historian Jeremy Milloy emphasizes how truly brutal it was, and how the violence of the production process produced violence between workers and managers.


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Transcript

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0:00.0

Hello friends. Welcome to another episode of the vast majority. I'm Jackaman Deputy Editor Micah Eutricht.

0:08.0

To talk about work in America and any country under capitalism, is to talk about violence.

0:17.0

And the way we typically remember industrial work of the post-World War II era is thinking of it as maybe monotonous,

0:27.5

maybe unpleasant at times, but a stable and well-paying position that made a decent life possible for enormous

0:35.5

numbers of working-class people in the United States. That idea is definitely

0:39.8

challenged from an excellent new book by the labor historian Jeremy Maloy, blood, sweat and fear,

0:48.0

violence at work in the North American Auto Industry 1960 to 1980. It's an academic history but Jeremy is to be

0:56.0

commended for writing a book that is extremely readable. He chronicles

1:00.1

violence in American and Canadian auto factories from 1960 to 1980 in ways that totally

1:09.4

blew my mind that were about a regular pervasive violence on the factory floor that I had no idea

1:20.9

was the case before reading this book and he has some reflections

1:26.0

both in the book and in our conversation about what his research on this

1:30.8

violence in auto factories has to say about the violence of work generally

1:36.1

under capitalism. Jeremy Malloy is a scholar who researches, writes, and teaches about work,

1:42.2

violence, addiction in and capitalism in Canada

1:44.6

and the United States.

1:46.4

He's the author of Blood Sweat and Fear, as well as to forthcoming books, one collection

1:51.7

of writings about violence at work, and another about addiction in the American

1:58.0

workplace.

2:00.0

Here's my conversation with Jeremy Maloy.

2:05.6

Jeremy, welcome. Micah, thank you very much.

2:07.3

So before I read this book, I think I had the view of auto work in sort of mid century America that is very similar to what

...

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