This is a much better exploration of class and snobbery than Snobbery, although that is scarcely what it's about. De Santis was a successful journalist and the child of white-collar parents, but was so curious about what it would be like to work in a factory that she went to work at a doomed GM truck-assembly plant for more than a year. Life... is pretty close to just describing what that was like, although, since social and economic issues have a lot to do with plant-closings, she does describe some of those.
Mostly it was godawful hard painful work, among people who were often kind to each other and often interesting but mostly tired. De Santis' motives and results are a little like those from an essay on extreme sports or mountain climbing; it was really hard, and she did it anyway, and now she's tougher. Like good essays on mountain-climbing, she's nervous of what the people doing it with less choice will think of her - porters on the mountain, immigrants from the Balkans or Prince Edward Island in the factory. At the beginning, she keeps her mouth shut and they think she's trying. She doesn't have to pretend to be less literate than she is; one of the points she makes without belaboring it is that all sorts of people wind up on the line. As the plant closes, she's more open about why she's there, and is not apparently disliked for it. Maybe she didn't notice, or didn't mention, but it seems plausible that her coworkers both liked her well enough and were pleased to think that a book would be published describing their lives.
She's a business journalist; some of her throwaway comments contrast
things she notices about the factory to abstract beliefs held by
pro-unionists and pro-unfettered-marketists alike. By her description,
the union is an imperfect and sometimes unpleasant power; but it also
seemed to be a reasonable belief of autoworkers that almost all the
physical and legal protections the company offered them had been won
through the union, which explains why the union can get away with
flaws. I would really like De Santis to research fixes to this
stalemate, and others that are accused of driving decently-paid
uneducated labor out of North America, and write a book on what she
thinks about those.
So wrote clew in
History (20th c.).