The US South’s manufacturing renaissance comes with a heavy price
&gt; The team had a quota of 420 dashboard frames per shift but seldom made more than 350<p>For me, one of the most thought-provoking expressions of the perspective of the factory worker came from the Studs Terkel book, <i>Working</i>, where he interviewed a factory worker and UAW local president named Gary Bryner in the early 1970s or late 1960s. Bryner:<p><i>&quot;In that little book of quotes I have: &#x27;The workingman has but one thing to sell, his labor. Once he loses control of that, he loses everything.&#x27;&quot; ...<p>&quot;They use time, stopwatches. They say ... We know it takes so many seconds to shoot a screw. We know the gun turns so fast, the screw&#x27;s so long, the hole&#x27;s so deep. Our argument has always been: That&#x27;s mechanical; that&#x27;s not human.&quot;<p>&quot;The workers said, We perspire, we sweat, we have hangovers, we have upset stomachs, we have feelings and emotions, and we&#x27;re not about to be placed in a category of a machine. When you talk about that watch, you talk about it for a minute. We talk about a lifetime. We&#x27;re gonna do what&#x27;s normal and we&#x27;re gonna tell you what&#x27;s normal. We&#x27;ll negotiate from there. ...&quot;<p>&quot;If the guys didn&#x27;t stand up and fight, they&#x27;d become robots too. They&#x27;re interested in being able to smoke a cigarette, bullshit a little bit with the guy next to &#x27;em, open a book, look at something, just daydream if nothing else. You can&#x27;t do that if you become a machine. &#x2F; Thirty-five, thirty-six seconds to do your job - that includes the walking, the picking up of the parts, the assembly. Go to the next job, with never a letup, never a second to stand and think. The guys at our plant fought like hell to keep that right.&quot;</i><p>...<p>I&#x27;m not sure how much factory work is still like that, but imagine if that was your job today ... or for 8 hours per day, for the rest of your life.