Explores broad questions through a narrow lens, focusing on the recent experiences of workers from a single factory: the General Motors (GM) automobile assembly plant in Linden, New Jersey. GM struggled to meet the challenge of intensified international competition. Management introduced robots and other new technologies at Linden, and began reorganizing the work process as well. The pages that follow assess these unsettling developments from the perspective of the workers involved-both those who accepted the buyout and left the plant, and those who are still employed there. Their stories reveal a great deal about the dilemmas industrial workers face in the postindustrial age. Ruth MilkmanÂ’s impressive study probes the contemporary meaning of work, freedom, dignity in a fashion both sociologically rigorous and culturally evocative. Avoiding liberal nostalgia over the demise of industrial America, Milkman deploys a magnificently textured set of interviews to demonstrate that auto workers hated the chronic stress and humiliation of factory work even as they clung to its high pay and good benefits.