Wages, Work, and the Industrial Past in Three Contemporary Labor Market Narratives

Abstract

This article analyzes Alex Rivera's Sleep Dealer (2008), John Wells's Company Men (2011), and Lynn Nottage's Sweat (2015) to limn the place of manufacturing labor in recent US cultural memory. Timelines that focus on labor forms (i.e. “postindustrial”) often reproduce elements of the persistent US mythologizing of industrial labor's virtues. Nottage's and Rivera's works puncture this ideological figuration by showing the dangers and precarity of industrial work, while Company Men presents industrial labor as a means for masculine, moral renewal. I compare these takes on economic restructuring across the last several decades to scrutinize a crucial element of American self-mythologizing.