The Half-Life of the Deindustrialization: Working Class Writing about Economic Restructuring
Sherry Lee Linkon (2018) University of Michigan Press
As a sociologist, and a researcher I have been undertaking research in Ex- Nottinghamshire coalfields since the 2016 EU referendum was called. My interest has been how deindustrialized people, and spaces are represented in the public imagination, but also through the political and media lens. However as a working class woman the daughter and granddaughter of Nottinghamshire coal miners, and having worked in a factory making tights when I left school in 1984 with my mother and the rest of my female family members, the deindustrialization of people and space has an emotional and embodied connection. My granddad died from the pit dust on his lungs, my aunties have industrial deafness from the machines they worked at, Britain’s industrial past is not in my past, but haunts my present, as it does for millions of working class de-industrialized people all over the world.
Sherry Lee Linkon’s book ‘The Half-Life of Deindustrialization’ puts into words that emotionality that has been too often misunderstood, and misrepresented about those communities that were stalked by industrialization and then dropped when it was no longer profitable. Linkon uses the term ‘Half-Life’ to describe this process in the USA and in particular in a Donald Trump society, that has taken full advantage of the precarity and the fear that surrounds working class deindustrialized communities.
Linkon Professor of English and American Studies at Georgetown University, and has researched and written previously about American steel workers in Youngstown Ohio and has been working on the concept of ‘the half life’ in previous work, but in this book she connects this to the deindustrialized communities, but also a deindustrialized United States economy. A period defined in the book from the 1980s and continuing well into the 21stcentury because that time period foregrounds ‘the struggle with loss and change that has been so central for working class people’ (p.5).
Linkon takes cues from physics in her concept ‘the half life’: the time it takes for a substance to lose half of its activity, this term in physics has been used mostly to talk about the decay of radioactive materials. Consequently the ‘half-life’ measures the decline of toxicity, a simile that is not lost in Linkon’s use of this term as a social statement. Although social scientists have worked on the industrial and deindustrialized workforce for decades using survey, and qualitative interviews, Linkon uses literature what she terms ‘deindustrialized literature’ texts that reveal how economic forces affect the lived daily experiences and social interactions of working class life. By focusing upon literature Linkon captures the emotionality and embodied nature that sociologist Richard Sennett named as the hidden injuries of class.
However ‘The Half-Life of Deindustrialization’ is not all doom and gloom, and only connected and referenced to a past, in Chapter 4 ‘Rust Belt Chic’ (p.131) Linkon introduces ‘an attitude and lifestyle’ that is performed by second generation deindustrialized people a reflective nostalgia and a romanticized clean memory of an industrial past, but removed of the industrial accident, disease, and trade union membership. Linkon identifies a literary and artistic genre of ‘Rust Belt Chic’ and cites Lowell Boileau’s ‘Fabulous Ruins of Detroit’ an arts project she names as ‘ruin porn’ which includes a guided tour around the abandoned living and working spaces in Detroit.
‘The Half Life of Deindustrialization’ focuses upon the USA and the American working class, but speaks to a deindustrialized and post Brexit Europe, equally insecure, while flailing around trying to understand the possible consequences of a new social and economic future, while the past is still not fully in the past and haunts those that cannot feel safe with a future it has no control over. The ‘half-life’ gets to the heart and soul of why once heavily industrialized societies that have now become deindustrialized appear to be in the midst of a nervous breakdown, yet the ‘half-life’ heeds a warning that the process of deindustrialization and the outcomes for those that once connected their identities, communities and value systems to those industries are far too often bleak. My own research shows clearly that well paid unionized jobs in the Nottinghamshire coalfields have been replaced by ‘picking and packing’ in mega warehouses at minimum wage and on zero hours contracts, these workers in Nottinghamshire are also living ‘the half-life’, the warning that Linkon’s work brings to the UK and to wider Europe is how easy it appears for charismatic protectionist and populist leaders to prey on those half lives.