Instability defined Detroit autoworkers’ lives, not just in the early years of the industry but also in the “golden age” of the 1950s. Daniel J. Clark’s Disruption in Detroit, a close study of workers’ lived experiences, challenges the myth of a prosperous postwar industrial working class in the auto capital. With evidence drawn from oral histories and local newspapers, Clark shows how workers rode boom and bust cycles in an auto-manufacturing economy inundated by material shortages, production backlogs, stockpiles of unsold cars, and labor conflict. Laid-off workers and their families sought jobs outside auto plants, moved to cheaper lodgings, and put off paying debts. The retired workers interviewed for this book remembered disruption and conflict in the 1950s, rather than growth and labor peace, as the rule.
Clark organizes the book to “view events as workers experienced them” (14). He begins just after World War II, documenting the economic...
