Working Class

Working Class

Author: Jeff Torlina

Publisher:

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781588267566

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Jeff Torlina challenges the conventional wisdom about the attitudes of blue-collar men toward their work. Torlina highlights the voices of pipe fitters, welders, carpenters, painters, locomotive assemblers, and factory workers to reveal the complexities, and advantages, of working-class life. These men see blue-collar labor as a desirable alternative to white-collar occupations; their work involves integrity, character, pride, and a connection with being a real man; values that they perceive as lost in white-collar office jobs. The result is a penetrating critique of many commonly held assumptions, and a compelling case for a new understanding of our social class system. -- Book Description.


The Big Rig

The Big Rig

Author: Steve Viscelli

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2016-04-12

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 0520962710

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Long-haul trucks have been described as sweatshops on wheels. The typical long-haul trucker works the equivalent of two full-time jobs, often for little more than minimum wage. But it wasn’t always this way. Trucking used to be one of the best working-class jobs in the United States. The Big Rig explains how this massive degradation in the quality of work has occurred, and how companies achieve a compliant and dedicated workforce despite it. Drawing on more than 100 in-depth interviews and years of extensive observation, including six months training and working as a long-haul trucker, Viscelli explains in detail how labor is recruited, trained, and used in the industry. He then shows how inexperienced workers are convinced to lease a truck and to work as independent contractors. He explains how deregulation and collective action by employers transformed trucking’s labor markets--once dominated by the largest and most powerful union in US history--into an important example of the costs of contemporary labor markets for workers and the general public.


America's Working Man

America's Working Man

Author: David Halle

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1987-07-15

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 9780226313665

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Over a period of six years, at factory and warehouse, at the tavern across the road, in their homes and union meetings, on fishing trips and social outings, David Halle talked and listened to workers of an automated chemical plant in New Jersey's industrial heartland. He has emerged with an unusually comprehensive and convincingly realistic picture of blue-collar life in America. Throughout the book, Halle illustrates his analysis with excerpts of workers' views on everything from strikes, class consciousness, politics, job security, and toxic chemicals to marriage, betting on horses, God, home-ownership, drinking, adultery, the Super Bowl, and life after death. Halle challenges the stereotypes of the blue-collar mentality and argues that to understand American class consciousness we must shift our focus from the "working class" to be the "working man."


Buttoned Up

Buttoned Up

Author: Erynn Masi de Casanova

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2015-12-18

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1501700952

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Who is today's white-collar man? The world of work has changed radically since The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and other mid-twentieth-century investigations of corporate life and identity. Contemporary jobs are more precarious, casual Friday has become an institution, and telecommuting blurs the divide between workplace and home. Gender expectations have changed, too, with men's bodies increasingly exposed in the media and scrutinized in everyday interactions. In Buttoned Up, based on interviews with dozens of men in three U.S. cities with distinct local dress cultures—New York, San Francisco, and Cincinnati—Erynn Masi de Casanova asks what it means to wear the white collar now.Despite the expansion of men’s fashion and grooming practices, the decrease in formal dress codes, and the relaxing of traditional ideas about masculinity, white-collar men feel constrained in their choices about how to embody professionalism. They strategically embrace conformity in clothing as a way of maintaining their gender and class privilege. Across categories of race, sexual orientation and occupation, men talk about "blending in" and "looking the part" as they aim to keep their jobs or pursue better ones. These white-collar workers’ accounts show that greater freedom in work dress codes can, ironically, increase men’s anxiety about getting it wrong and discourage them from experimenting with their dress and appearance.


Limbo

Limbo

Author: Alfred Lubrano

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2010-12-22

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 1118039726

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In Limbo, award-winning journalist Alfred Lubrano identifies and describes an overlooked cultural phenomenon: the internal conflict within individuals raised in blue-collar homes, now living white-collar lives. These people often find that the values of the working class are not sufficient guidance to navigate the white-collar world, where unspoken rules reflect primarily upper-class values. Torn between the world they were raised in and the life they aspire too, they hover between worlds, not quite accepted in either. Himself the son of a Brooklyn bricklayer, Lubrano informs his account with personal experience and interviews with other professionals living in limbo. For millions of Americans, these stories will serve as familiar reminders of the struggles of achieving the American Dream.


The Power of the Past

The Power of the Past

Author: Jessi Streib

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0199364435

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Drawing upon interviews with adults married to a partner of a different class background, The Power of the Past reveals the intimate connections between love and class and how enduring class attributes shape who they love and how their marriage unfolds.


Language, Global Mobilities, Blue-Collar Workers and Blue-collar Workplaces

Language, Global Mobilities, Blue-Collar Workers and Blue-collar Workplaces

Author: Kellie Gonçalves

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-11-26

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 1000281043

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This collection brings together global perspectives which critically examine the ways in which language as a resource is used and managed in myriad ways in various blue-collar workplace settings in today’s globalized economy. In focusing on blue-collar work environments, the book sheds further light on the informal processes through which top down language policies take place in different multilingual settings and the resultant asymmetrical power relations which emerge among employees and employers in such settings. Taking into account the latest debates on poststructuralist theories of language, the volume also extends its conceptualization of language to demonstrate the ways in which it extends to a wider range of multilingual and multimodal resources and communicative practices, all of which combine in unique and different ways toward constructing meaning in the workplace. The volume’s unique focus on such workplaces also showcases domains of work which have generally until now been less visible within existing research on language in the workplace and the subsequent methodological challenges that arise from studying them. Integrating a range of theoretical and methodological approaches, along with empirical data from a diverse range of blue-collar workplaces, this book will be of particular interest to students and researchers in critical sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, sociology, and linguistic anthropology.


America's Working Man

America's Working Man

Author: David Halle

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2014-12-10

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 022622936X

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“An unusually deep and wide-ranging study” by a sociologist who spent years listening to and living among workers at a New Jersey chemical plant (Journal of American Studies). Over a period of six years during the late 1970s, at factory and warehouse, at the tavern across the road, in their homes and union meetings, on fishing trips and social outings, David Halle talked and listened to workers of an automated chemical plant in New Jersey’s industrial heartland—white, male, and mostly Catholic. He has emerged with an unusually comprehensive and convincingly realistic picture of blue-collar life in America during this era. Throughout the book, Halle illustrates his analysis with excerpts of workers’ views on everything from strikes, class consciousness, politics, job security, and toxic chemicals to marriage, betting on horses, God, home-ownership, drinking, adultery, the Super Bowl, and life after death. Halle challenges the stereotypes of the blue-collar mentality and provides a detailed, in-depth portrait of one community of workers at a time when it was relatively affluent and secure. “Absorbing reading.”—Business Week