I Saw It Coming: Worker Narratives of Plant Closings and Job Loss (review)

I Saw It Coming is an edited collection of oral histories conducted with people who lost their jobs at International Harvester and Johnson Controls in Louisville, Kentucky, when those two factories closed in 1985 and 1995, respectively. These plant closures are part of a broader story of decline of manufacturing in the “rust belt” of the United States, an economic downturn that began in the 1970s but accelerated in the 1990s with the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

K’Meyer and Hart interviewed twenty-four people, sixteen of whose stories are included in this book. The authors had also intended to interview former employees of garment manufacturer M. Fine and Sons, which closed in the early twenty-first century, but were unable to obtain sufficient participants. Narrators were located through personal contacts and the snowball method. Only one of the narrators is female, and the book does not include any African American narrators. Palgrave Studies in Oral History series editors Bruce Stave and Linda Shopes note that the authors “pursued an unusual approach” to oral history methodology: open-ended interviews by communications expert Hart were followed two weeks later by more directed interviews by oral historian K’Meyer (ix). The result was four to five hours of recorded interviews with each participant.

Selections from these interviews are grouped by theme: securing employment; the work process and its hazards; worker explanations for the plants’ closures; emotional responses to job loss; and workers’ reflections on their experiences. Each theme is addressed in a separate chapter consisting primarily of lengthy excerpts from the interviews with the interviewers’ voices removed. The initial and follow-up interviews are blended together in these edited excerpts. Chapters are introduced by a brief (usually one to three pages) analysis of the interview excerpts by the authors. K’Meyer and Hart explain that they deliberately chose to restrict their analysis largely to the book’s eight-page conclusion “in order to avoid overly predetermining the reader’s encounter with the narratives” (12).

Chapter 1 on securing employment concludes that workers saw themselves as “having options and the ability to make a choice in their career” (13). Howard Etherton, for example, comments that his decision to leave his better paying job at General Electric for work at International Harvester was made because he thought he “would be better satisfied building tractors than . . . refrigerators” (19). Marilyn Reed (Johnson Controls) is the only one to discuss how her gender influenced her occupational choices. With the elimination of the interviewers’ voices from these excerpts, it is unclear whether the interviews delved into the question of whether gender or class position played a role in these workers’ understanding of their own agency, as when Danny Mann (Johnson Controls) describes himself as a blue-collar worker, while his former fellow employee Ron Phillips saw himself as “middle class” (21, 25). How did these identities shape their choices?

In Chapter 2 on the labor process, we receive some fascinating glimpses into worker agency, as in Danny Mann’s ability to use deferential self-deprecation to convince management to rehire his friends after a lay-off (42). K’Meyer and Hart note that, to assist “the reader’s immersion in the story and in the perspective of the people who were in the plant every day,” they avoid explaining specialist terms used by the interview participants (37). The reader’s understanding of the labor process would have been improved, however, without impeding the flow of the narration, by the inclusion of explanatory footnotes for such terms as “cast on strap machine” (41–44, 52, 55). Likewise, workers’ discussion of injuries would have been most helpful if accompanied by a footnote reviewing Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) records: Was the injury rate at these plants as high and as unusual as these workers suggest?

Chapter 3 addresses workers...