“Farewell to Factory Towns” is an award-winning documentary directed by Maynard Seider. It focuses on the town of North Adams, Massachusetts, and explores what occurs when former factory towns try to get back on their feet after dealing with deindustrialization. Seider focuses on the impact that the closing of factories had on the economy and society of the town. The film begins in the 1970’s and shows how truly dominated the town was by large industries, mainly the Sprague Electric Company. This company, despite it’s low wages and benefits, supplied members of the community with steady work. However, as a result of World War 2, many industries, including Sprague Electric, started to go bankrupt; once operations in North Adams were closed, many individuals lost their jobs and unemployment soared. In order to try and revive the town, the former Sprague industry was turned into a museum known as MASS MoCA. The idea behind bringing art and culture into North Adams was that visitors and artists would stimulate the economy and possibly attract related businesses. The documentary views how successful MASS MoCA truly was and shows that, although the museum did help boost the economy, the town still struggles with issues such as unemployment and poverty today. Towns that intend to get back on their feet again after an economic downfall can be found across the globe and such situations can most definitely, and should most definitely, be looked at in a sociological way. One can
This documentary is written, directed and produced by Michael Moore and is about the social repercussions of capitalism as well as corporate and government issues that conflict with the basic needs of people and their families. Moore takes a liberal humanistic look at the consequences of General Motors closing down several auto plants in Flint, Michigan in the late 1980's and what can happen when a city is almost completely reliant on a single industry that shuts down or moves away. Moore also looks at the failure of Flint city officials to reverse the effects of the closures with trends like Auto World which had little effect (Moore, 1989).
The film Roger & Me shows the rise and fall of an industrial city, Flint, MI. Knowing that Sociology was born during the industrial revolution makes this movie a fascinating choice, considering it displays the fall of an industrial city. It gives a wonderful opportunity to evaluate many different sociological perspectives. Personally, before watching this video, I thought that Flint was just a dead town filled with a bunch of lazy, violent people. A couple of concepts that I would like to focus on in this paper is GM’s bureaucracy, that lead to downward social mobility, causing people to stereotype the ex-GM workers.
Henry Ford was the godfather of the automobile industry in the early 1900’s. The development of his River Rouge plant was considered a “industrial Cathedral.” Hundreds waited month after month in front of the employment building hoping to be hired. To foreign immigrants it meant hope and a successful future. The River Rouge plant
The speaker then moves to a restaurant where he picks up a chicken noodle soup and gets his want across to the staff by simply pointing at it. The stanza ends with the line “I am adjusting well to the new way”(10), showing that according to the speaker the new law is working fine for him and he is able to live a normal life. However, with the entrance into the third stanza we begin to question whether the speaker naturally only acted this way towards the phone call and the staff in the restaurant, without using any words or he was actually saving them for his lover. The second reason is more likely to be true, due to his statement in the next verse “I call my long distance lover, proudly say I only used fifty-nine today. I saved the rest for you”(11/13). Here, the second character is introduced in the poem – the long distance lover. It becomes obvious that the speaker, who is most probably a man, is in a long distance relationship with a woman and the way communicate is via phone call. The speaker tells his lover proudly he has only used fifty-nine words today and has saved the rest for her. This shows the speaker’s devotion towards his lover because he has chosen to use most of his words on her.
Most people regard industrialization as a positive development capable of generating great wealth and revitalizing run-down areas. Mention industrialization today, and it brings to mind large factories organized with the latest technologies in mass producing. Along with these visions comes the promise of more jobs for the community, higher rates of pay, and financial stability. One can only think of the positive influences on a community that the opening of a new factory could bring, but during what some have deemed the Industrial Revolution, industrialization only meant using machines and new power sources to accomplish a task formerly done by human and animal power. Our modern day conception of industrialization can greatly influence our
Audit is a poem written by editor, translator, fiction writer, and poet Tony Barnstone. He has written a collection of varied and unique poems, from topics of the Second World War to a poetry book based on material in classic pulp fiction and B-movies. Barnstone has won numerous awards and literary competitions for his diverse work, including the Pushcart Prize in Poetry and the John Ciardi Prize in Poetry. This poem offers an interesting take on relationships and love and its relation to the world of business. The poem utilizes a variety of poetic devices, some being obvious and others more obscure, which will be explored throughout this paper.
This first stanza from the poem, explains the journey of a man driving through a sawmill town and his observations. Murray describes his journey through a small sawmill town in New South Wales whilst using strong, vivid imagery and emotive language.
In the early 1900s, America’s mostly rural society was transformed into a urban manufacturing nation. This dramatic metamorphosis caused a deeper chasm between the poor and the rich, but helped form a thriving middle class. American cities overflowed with millions of European immigrants willing to provide cheap labor that was the catalyst for a thriving economy. New York City became the largest industrial powerhouse in the United States because of the garment industry. Due to the availability of affordable factory made items, American culture became preoccupied with the acquisition of goods, and the concept of consumerism was born. Sadly, the poverty stricken population who lived in slums and worked in intolerable conditions suffered tremendously. The book, The Triangle Fire by Jo Ann E. Argersinger tells the true story behind the spark of change of the exploitation of factory workers within America. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, and the key historical events that followed, there were many cultural and political changes in the United States.
American Industrialization emerged from the ruins of the Civil War and the … of the Reconstruction Period. Spurred by the new manufacturing technologies brought over from Great Britain, and the rest of Europe, factories and mills began emerging across the American landscape, slowly transforming the United States from an agrarian society to one increasingly industrialized and urbanized. From 1860-1900, the nation of rural towns, local crafts, family farms, and regional business, became dominated by sprawling cities, enormous commercial farms and powerful corporations. By the turn of the twentieth century, the United States of America, had become a major power base, with the birth of factories and mills, the burgeoning of cities, the continued westward expansion, and the creation of the transcontinental railroad. However, just as America was welcomed into her glory, the country was riddled with the evils of poverty, mass consumerism, labour disruption, and increasing political, cultural, and environmental conflicts.
For the past forty years, Ohio is believed to have gone through a process of deindustrialization. This means that Ohio experienced a decline in manufacturing jobs. While this is a simple definition, the origins of the term “deindustrialization” gives a deeper, more pejorative meaning to the term. This darker meaning to the term is perhaps more effectively conveyed through the term “rust belt.” After Ohio wen through the process of deindustrialization, the lack of industrial jobs in a once booming industrial area left many factories empty and decommissioned. As these factories became older and unused, their rusting facades became a symbol of the deindustrialization that Ohio experienced, leading someone to coin the term “rust belt” for the
Issues like downsizing and overseas relocation had always seemed distant to me until my co-workers at one factory told me that the unit I was working in would be shut down within six months and moved to Mexico, where people would work for 60 cents an hour”, in this statement he gives the readers reasons for factory work being a hard way to live. Lastly, this statement he made, “The things that factory work has taught me how lucky I am to get an education, how to work hard, how easy it is to lose that work once you have it are by no means earth-shattering” the author is giving examples of the different lessons that leads to my main claim about his purposes for writing his article.
The steel industry was the leading employer of this community because it offered great pay and stable jobs. This is why we don’t see much of an increase in bachelor's degrees because they did not need the schooling, they had jobs lined up in both the trade and industrial sector. “There was an available supply of labor and space for housing more workers.” (Seller's, 12) This idea of the workers renting cheaper nearby housing was one of the many key ideas we learned in class. Steel barrio, was the article that introduced the semester by introducing the importance of the industrial jobs in south chicago, that at one point in time was known as the largest area of steel making facilities. ( Barrio, 56) During this time, the europeans invaded the east side looking for jobs that they depended on. These steel mills offered them great opportunities which led to the migration of more
Undoubtedly work and place influence its surroundings. Youngstown, Ohio is emphasized as one in particular. As a result “steelmaking fueled the area’s economy and defined its identity” (68). The city was represented in newspapers, art work, postcards, and many texts as both “impressive and attractive” (75), as well as “imposing, confusing, and uninviting” (86). Considering the conflicting representations, steelmaking “also suggest(s) a key element of conflict in the community” that it was so clearly creating an identity for (69).
Like some diseased snake chewing and spewing filth, writhing its way through the forest’s underbelly, the murky Rouge River cuts a dark path through the greater Detroit area providing power to dusty columns of derelict factories that, admittedly, need the cheap juice no longer. Turn back the clocks half a century, however, and a different scene emerges. The year is 1957 and a chrome-clad leviathan clangs its way down the assembly line in Ford’s Detroit River Rouge Complex. A 2,000 acre sprawl of chimneys and spires, the concrete behemoth that is the Rouge was once the largest industrial facility in the world (National Park Service). At its height the Rouge employed 100,000 hardy workers who could roll a new Crown Victoria or Skyliner off the line every 49 seconds (“The Henry Ford”). I find it hard to picture the sweat-beaded factory man whose hands clang away at that metal monstrosity limbering down the line. Physically his face is obvious of course—leathery and rugged. But from my 21st century perspective, this blue-collar worker’s status in 1950s America seems bizarre. Completely integrated socially and politically. A card-carrying member of America’s middle class. In 1950 this man would have counted himself among the nearly 35 percent of Americans employed in manufacturing jobs, by far the largest sector that era (Halle and Romo). So—what happened? How did these manufacturing men die off? More importantly,
Robert Soderbery was an enterprising entrepreneur who managed the public works department of a private business in Pittsburg, California. Pittsburg was known to have undergone a serious of identities over the years. Initially, Pittsburg was known to be an industrial city encompassed mostly of farms. Pittsburg essentially became a commercial ghost town during the ‘50s and it took recreating the city and building new developments to progress as a city. However, to every positive, there’s a negative. Although Pittsburg was progressing as a city, they were still struggling due to the 1978 tax initiative—Proposition 13—which affected many of Pittsburg’s revenue.