The temporal timeline summoned by the often used terms “deindustrialization” or “postindustrialization” both marks contemporary life as beyond a point defined by the hegemony of industrial labor, and, however, implicitly posit that manufacturing labor's decreasing significance nevertheless still matters in the present. These terms circulate in academic and mainstream circles despite the obvious fact that industrial labor continues in the present, though of course with a different geographic dispersal than we saw in the last century. Besides the fallout from this economic reordering, industrial labor also lingers in the present as a two-sided mythology: for those on the political right, a romanticized image of predominantly white males working with their hands to make real, material things; for those with a more leftist bent, Marx assigned the industrial worker “revolutionary agency,” as Mark Steven writes, as a result of the “discipline, unity, and organization associated with industrial labor.”Footnote 1 One vision harkens back to a sanitized heyday, the other to an unrealized potential. The presence of these pasts in determinations of the present is the subject of this article, as I analyze the temporal framing of the economic contemporary in three post-2000 labor-market narratives: John Wells's 2010 film Company Men, Alex Rivera's 2008 film Sleep Dealer, and Lynn Nottage's 2015 play Sweat. All three feature plots about getting, losing, or seeking jobs while also invoking industrial or manufacturing labor as a temporal marker. In two, the good middle-class jobs were in industrial work; in the other, they seem to still be, but only because they look like the future when they are in fact a dead end. In what follows, I argue that Sleep Dealer and Sweat utilize narrative strategies that usefully exemplify the complicated temporality of contemporary capitalism. They do so by consistently balancing displays of capitalism's transformations with a recognition of its axiomatic reliance on labor exploitation. These strategies emerge more sharply when these texts are compared to Company Men, which I argue deploys a bad-faith timeline of recent industrial history to prop up a fantasy of masculine regeneration that obscures capitalism's resistance to moral revision. Before turning to my analysis of these narratives, I review ways in which periodizing terms like “deindustrialization” can unintentionally deflect attention from the violence of abstraction central to wage labor itself. In my readings, I articulate each narrative's relation to recent labor history, indicating what beliefs about economic shifts the text embeds or criticizes. Finally, I advocate for narratives that can illustrate changes within capitalism while maintaining a critique of the economic system as a whole and, imperatively, address painful changes in labor for vulnerable populations without valorizing any specific form of wage labor.
Deindustrialization, Annie McClanahan writes, is “a historical process” that led the dominance of finance capital and “a weakened labor movement.” She contrasts the connotations of “deindustrialization” with those of “postindustrialization,” averring that the latter seems to suggest that “factories magically disappear rather than moving to places where labor is cheap.”Footnote 2 Despite the advantages that McClanahan notes for “deindustrial,” however, Christine J. Walley argues that “deindustrialization in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s was often understood in evolutionary … discursive terms, in which industry was portrayed as an outmoded, obsolete economic orientation.”Footnote 3 Both terms, then, can be seen to overshadow the systemic logic that drives economic shifts by emphasizing those shifts themselves, specifically in the cultural significance of labor forms. They each, then, emphasize change (what form of labor is now most visible or recognizable in the West?) over consistency (what underscores the precarity of life for workers?) in ways that recall Theodore Martin's pithy statement about all periodizing terms: periodizing, for Martin, always privileges “connection over causation.”Footnote 4 This correlative thinking is on display, for instance, in two different, well-known periodizing claims that center labor form in historiography.
Daniel Bell, who famously coined the term “postindustrial society,” acknowledges that the actual industrial heyday was short; he notes, for instance, that the manufacturing sector was not the biggest one in France until after World War II.Footnote 5 The number of industrial workers, however, is less important for Bell than the subsidiary effects of industrial centrality. Life in this era takes place in “fabricated nature,” and the world “has become technical and rationalized. The machine predominates, and the rhythms of life are mechanically paced.” Meanwhile, “post-industrial society is based on services. Hence, it is a game between persons. What counts is not raw muscle power, or energy, but information.”Footnote 6 Bell's framework here accords with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's, who write that, in any given society, “one form of labor … exerts hegemony over others,” acting as “a vortex that gradually transforms other figures to adopt its central qualities.”Footnote 7 Hardt and Negri see different forms of labor beginning to resemble a hegemon, rather than elements of life shifting to resemble a form of labor. Still, these very different thinkers concur that labor forms matter primarily in labor history because of their impact on other spheres of life, with Hardt and Negri giving labor forms themselves a type of agency (exerting, transforming).
Leigh Clare La Berge has written that we should simply do away with the Bell and Hardt–Negri emphasis on tying forms of work to periodization. Referring to “immaterial labor” or “affective labor” as well as a host of once trendy titles for the work people do, La Berge notes that in following “the proliferation of various new terminologies for naming labor, we can sometimes lose sight of the stagnant wages underpinning their emergence.”Footnote 8 While La Berge here locates another way to periodize the last few decades, she places emphasis on the wage relation that is central to capitalism regardless of the predominant labor form. Such a recognition, La Berge asserts elsewhere, acknowledges that “the repetitive, stubborn nature of [capitalist] logics is as analytically important as the transformations they unfurl.”Footnote 9 What Naomi Reed calls “the relentless movement of the logic of capital to homogenize the heterogeneous – to produce relations of equivalence” – makes up the violence of abstraction that capitalism normalizes.Footnote 10 Regardless of the form of a worker's labor, capital relies upon extracting profit from the worker's labor power, abstracting human energy and time into exchange value.
Recalling both the changes in labor and the ways capitalism has always worked allows us to avoid imagining the turn away from industrial work in the northern West as itself an object of mourning or a driver of change. Substituting the form of work, rather than the loss of the secure wages and benefits that came with unionized industrial labor, has been a useful tool for both liberal and conservative American politicians, who regularly evoke “bringing back manufacturing” on the campaign trail.Footnote 11 This rhetoric makes sense during the instability of the neoliberal era, which, as Judith Hamera has argued, can easily make the past look “retrospectively simpler, more desirable, and more egalitarian” than it was.Footnote 12 Interviews with downsized Pennsylvania and Kentucky industrial workers conducted by Joy Hart and Tracy K'Meyer and Steve May and Laura Morrison tend to cast the past in more glowing terms, despite the precarity that always undergirded their subjects’ employment.Footnote 13 Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott warn against a “smokestack nostalgia” that threatens to obscure the real problems that existed in factory labor, as they also note that the solid monuments to the industrial past can “mask a fundamental impermanence” for any laborer in a capitalist system.Footnote 14
As Sherry Lee Linkon's work reminds us, smokestack nostalgia is not only tied to a memory of a time when things felt more permanent; it also links to a conservative longing for old foundations of masculinity and the patriarchal family structure.Footnote 15 This ideological fallout of the shift in wage-earning structures undoubtedly fuels much of the American political rhetoric surrounding industrial labor, which often mixes masculinity with the manufacturing of “real” products. Compelling and acclaimed academic work on postindustrial literature or culture, such as Raymond Malewitz's analysis of new forms of self-fashioning in the aftermath of deindustrialization, can sometimes operate within this mythological picture, rather than questioning these connections.Footnote 16 My point here is that positioning shifts in industrial or manufacturing labor as a temporal marker invites a comparison that tends to paint the past fondly and efface the contradictions and inequalities that are always a component of capitalist societies. Even cultural criticism that does discuss the very real problems of impoverished or absent wages that come with gig or other new forms of work has to concede that writing about the new economic norm's negative fallout unintentionally seems to produce the image of a better past.Footnote 17 Heather Berg has noted that only a “backward-looking politics” would “seek a return to systems that were comparatively stable but also stifling,” and notes, as have many others, that the majority of benefits of industrial-labor norms were spread among white males.Footnote 18
A narrative attempting to capture this complicated moment in labor history, where labor norms have shifted but the underlying logic of capitalism stays the same, can do so through temporal play of the sort we see in Sweat and The Sleep Dealer. I draw Company Men into comparison with these texts because its temporal gambit serves only to support its full-throated articulation of the importance of manufacturing labor itself, emphasizing the romanticized elements I have outlined above. Sleep Dealer, on the other hand, focusses on the outsourcing of jobs in the United States to Mexican border cities using a dystopian frame. Its protagonist, a young Mexican male named Memo, strongly desires one of these outsourced jobs to escape his family's failing farm. Memo considers outsourced American manufacturing work a move into a desirable future, while the film's complicated chronology reveals it to be a regrettable part of the character's timeline. Lastly, Nottage's highly acclaimed play treats its manufacturing-employed characters as strangely out of time, aligning them with a set of lost possibilities in a plot that signals its tragic end from the start – in a play that was described as timely when it came out in 2015 (though it is set in 2000 and 2008). If Company Men is invested in a fantasy of US industrial reinvigoration, Sweat presents a related but more complex image of deindustrialization as a recursive process of deepening marginalization; Sleep Dealer satirizes the impulse to label forms of labor by noting their consistent relation to exploitation. My readings trace what each narrative has to say about the economic restructuring of recent decades and evaluates how the changes in capitalism and its consistent logic manifest (or fail to manifest) in each.
John Wells's Company Men is a 2010 film that was initially received positively.Footnote 19 Academic discussions of Company Men have grouped it with other post-2008-economic-crisis films, and these responses tend to pinpoint a set of criticisms that dovetail with its favoring of the nostalgic picture of labor I outline above.Footnote 20 Company Men focusses on three main characters who begin the film working for Global Transportation Systems or GTX, a major joint-stock corporation that was originally a small shipbuilding company. When the film begins, GTX has grown to a share price of over n inety dollars, with health-care and investment divisions. The company's CEO is its founder, John Salinger, played by Craig T. Nelson; we learn that his character and Gene McClary, played by Tommy Lee Jones, are best friends and have worked together since the firm's humble start. Over the course of the film, all three of the main characters are fired from GTX. Ben Affleck's Bobby Walker, Jones's Gene, and Chris Cooper's Phil Woodward lose their jobs as part of downsizing purges that Salinger uses to prop up the company's stock price.
Salinger's characterization is one-dimensional, intended to personify the systemic ills of shareholder capitalism in a single figure. Salinger spouts neoliberal ideology without any sense that logics can exists outside it – in fact, as Mark Houssart notes, writer–director Wells based Salinger's dialogue, especially his justifications for downsizing, on his conversations with actual CEO's.Footnote 21 After closing two of the three shipyards that McClary runs without informing him, Salinger shrugs off the pain of his fired employees by telling McClary that the workers “are not our responsibility. We work for the stockholders now.”Footnote 22 Villainizing Salinger's obsession with shareholder value represents a somewhat clear-eyed assessment of the way contemporary corporations drive their value and of how CEOs justify their very high salaries. To make the film's investment in this critique plain, one of several Kai Risdal clips from his NPR show Marketplace that play in the film suggest the possibility that Congress will investigate CEO salaries; Bobby Walker's blue-collar brother-in-law Jack (played by Kevin Costner) asks Bobby whether he thinks Salinger works seven hundred times as hard as the average worker at GTO. Salinger's attempt to keep the stock price high is the central cause of the dominant narrative in Company Men – the film's empathic energy follows the humiliated Bobby (Affleck) and Phil (Cooper) as they search for similar-paying white-collar jobs after being downsized. The representation of unemployment follows a liberal take on the difficulties of the job market, for Bobby and Phil do not remain unemployed for lack of effort, contacts, education, or experience. The labor market simply has nothing like their old jobs available to them: their unemployment appears to be the result of systemic problems, rather than their personal failings.
This emphasis on unemployment seems at first to condemn “a social system that ensures that working is the only way that most of us can meet our basic needs,” as Kathi Weeks has written.Footnote 23 Weeks's well-known The Problem with Work traces how even leftist thinking often valorizes employment rather than criticizing a system wherein “work dominates our lives” even when we are not doing it and provides most people's only means of meeting their needs.Footnote 24 Yet Company Men ceases to challenge these associations when it turns to a feel-good storyline about manufacturing work's redemptive potential.
Affleck's Bobby is one of two characters who access redemption. Early in the film, Bobby drives a fancy car and brags about his golf game. He will not give up his expensive golf club membership even after he is fired. This type of consumption is criticized throughout the film; to be rehabilitated, Bobby has to humble himself by taking a job with Costner's Jack, who owns a small construction company. He has to take the least-respectable elements of the job, take ribbing for his poor carpentry, and trade his suit for flannels and jeans. Bobby ceases his conspicuous consumption and instead becomes a modest manual laborer reliant upon a paternalistic employer: one of Bobby's coworkers explains that Jack is taking a loss by keeping Bobby on the payroll.
Jack's empathetic relationship to men who need wages is visually linked to his business building something physical and tangible: the job site we see him on is a house getting refurbished, so we see wood planks and hear nail guns. It's imperative that the home is getting rebuilt and that Jack doesn't own the building, and he in fact underbids on the project in order to get the work. The film implicitly sets up a comparison between Jack and Salinger; while Salinger actively separates GTX from his company's old basis in manufacturing, Jack rebuilds weakened foundations. Here we see Wells associate material work with morality, presenting the owner who is invested in rebuilding rather than tearing down as more likely to care for the people who work for him: Salinger fires people to prop up the stock price and maintain control of the company, while Jack underbids on projects to create wages for his employees.
The older, grayer Phil cannot be rehabilitated. Descending into heavy drinking, Phil's eventual suicide seems inevitable. He chases jobs whenever he can, though he finds none; these painful rejections appear alongside his family's inability or unwillingness to cut back on spending, exemplified when his off-screen daughter asks if she can go on the senior trip to Italy after Phil faces another setback. His suicide comes as little surprise after his hopes dwindle. Rather than indict the economic system that led to Phil's despair, Jones's Gene, the last of the main characters to be fired, offers the unlikely hypothesis that Phil's death was the by-product their ascension to comfortable white-collar work and GTX's turn away from manufacturing.
After Phil's funeral, Gene takes Bobby to the Gloucester Shipyards, where GTX began. Wells introduces the shipyard with seven shots: the first is the bottom of a rusting smokestack with weeds growing high around it; the second is of rusting metal piping; the third is of a fading brick building littered with cracked windows. The camera starts to move for the next four images – two angles from walkways around an empty dock, then the inside of a giant hangar. All the images combine to give viewers a heavy dose of “smokestack nostalgia,” with ruined manufacturing infrastructure acting as a reminder of lost past.
During that last tracking shot we see Gene and Bobby emerge as very small figures against that giant hangar as the older man begins a monologue: “We used to make something here. Before we got lost in the paperwork.”Footnote 25 He then proceeds to describe the deceased Phil working as a welder in a dangerous position within the hangar. Gene continues to eulogize not Phil specifically but the past of that shipyard:
Two thousand men per shift, three shifts a day. Six thousand men earned a fair wage in this room, fed their families, bought homes. Made enough to send their kids to college and buy a second car. Building something they could see. A ship you could see and smell and touch. Men knew their worth, knew who they were.Footnote 26
Gene's comments echo an earlier claim by Jack that paperwork is not “work” in the honorific sense the film leans into. Paperwork, in Gene's logic, does not make anything, or not anything “you could see and smell and touch.” Such claims overlook the obvious fact that there must have been paperwork when those ships were bought and sold, and there must have been paperwork upon which the contracts that created “the fair wage” were written. But, as Linkon has suggested, the mythologized manufacturing laborer offers “real social, economic, and psychological resources for constructing masculinity” that run through Gene's set of memories here.Footnote 27 Materiality is tied into masculinity is tied into morality, as it is “men” who provide for “families” through the production of items they could “see and smell and touch.” What Jasper Bernes has called the qualitative critique of industrial labor utterly disappears here: surely Phil preferred his suit and his office to dangling from a ceiling holding a welding gun.Footnote 28 In Gene's framing, however, this older form of employment offers older models for self-making that, once lost, mean the loss of old values. He also papers over the racial, gender, and other forms of strife common within manufacturing labor, which, as I will detail below, is an important component of Nottage's Sweat. Footnote 29
In the scenes that follow, Gene takes his stock options, maxes out his credit cards, and looks for investors in his “McClary Maritime Associates,” and he tells another character that he plans on bidding for the shipyards he walked through with Bobby. Thus Gene and Bobby (who is hired at a lower pay rate) become engaged in resuscitating American manufacturing, realigning themselves with the values that Salinger loses sight of. In this film that lionizes manufacturing, however, Sean Brayton notes that “working-class bodies are an absent presence.”Footnote 30 The lack of these figures within the film suggests their mythological position in its ultimate politics, for the film isn't ultimately concerned with capitalism's endemic creation of marginalized populations. Instead, it is driven by a desire to present the system's redemption by moral white males.
Indeed, even the film's commitment to the wages Gene invokes is shaky, for he tells an old colleague that his business plan starts with “renegotiat[ing] with the unions.” The plan, then, is to undermine the contracts that connected GTX's employees to the middle-class comfort Gene idealizes. Jeff Kinkle and Alberto Toscano correctly note, then, that the film's “nostalgia for the Fordist compact relies on imagining … that the concessions offered to workers during this period were driven by managerial altruism rather than the struggles of organized labor.”Footnote 31 It is as if, they suggest, “the making of real things will tame the rules of finance.”Footnote 32 Malewitz's suggestion that links to materiality begin to emerge as an ideological response to deindustrialization feel fitting here – as if Phil's death could be traced to the loss of this form of production rather than to the system that requires most people to work for wages.
In that climactic conversation between Gene and Bobby, the hangar they're in seems like it is from another era, with serious signs of decay on each of the establishing shots, but the plot suggests that the hangar was closed early in the diegetic frame of the film, perhaps three or four months before.Footnote 33 This visual sleight of hand reinforces the problem of the de- or post- before “industrial” in either of the periodizing terms I've invoked. Industrial and manufacturing jobs are being gained and lost in the present and immediate past, as EPI findings reveal that the COVID-19 pandemic wiped out half the manufacturing jobs that appeared in the US between 2010 and 2019.Footnote 34 The film's tricky visual distancing does important mystifying work: the film's purchase of a regeneration climax necessitates this imaginary stretched timeline to stage the courageousness of its male, white heroes. This play with time runs across the two examples to follow and becomes an important barometer in assessing how these texts relate to the economic transformations with which they engage, operating outside ahistorical thinking that enables Gene's nostalgia and props up the film's own.
Set in the near future, Rivera's American-made but Spanish-language Sleep Dealer concerns a young man from Santa Ana del Rio, in rural Oaxaca, Mexico, who dreams of leaving his family's farm to enter more modern life. For him, outsourced work from the United States is a step forward, progress over the doldrums of agriculture. The film ultimately denounces the protagonist's beliefs about the preferability of certain forms of labor and his laying of them on a progress curve, which are the positions we see Company Men take.
Over the course of the film, Memo Cruz, played by Luis Fernando Peña, moves to urban Tijuana hoping to locate a better job than he can find in his rural home. He succeeds in becoming a “sleep dealer,” which requires having nodes implanted into his body that can digitally link his movements to drones in the United States (in addition to other potential digital connections). His entry into what he thinks of as desirable work is both immaterial – he is using remote technology – and material – the drone appears on a construction site in San Diego, and the technology is connected to his body's fibers and sinews. Other sleep dealers do different sorts of tasks, but their work relies upon serious industrial machinery, digital connections, and their actual physical movements. We thus see, as Luis Martín-Cabrera has also observed, a scrambling of the distinctions in labor forms that were so significant in Company Men and in the Bell and Hardt–Negri positions outlined above.Footnote 35
On this note, and as Christina L. Sisk has argued, the giant maquiladora factories built in border cities in the aftermath of NAFTA can be classed as industrial labor, but since the products of that labor are not owned by Mexican companies, the real export for Mexico is labor itself.Footnote 36 The parallel that Rivera develops between actual maquiladoras and the cybermaquiladoras wherein Memo and the sleep dealers work deepens the sense that what we call this type of work matters much less than the political and labor relations that shape its place in late capitalism (and Rivera's extension of it into the future).
Memo's work in the factory is almost hyperbolically dehumanizing. Sleep dealer work is difficult, anonymous, deadly: it is as if Rivera wants to ensure that we recall the “qualitative critique” (to recall Bernes again) of the Fordist and Taylorist regimes. Rivera makes remote work not simply the pushing of buttons but standing for twelve hours at a time. Sleep dealers wear eye-changing contact lenses along with multiple connections to systems that, should they malfunction, can destroy the worker's nervous system.Footnote 37 The film's analeptic structure means that viewers see Memo in his cyborg-like sleep-dealer getup and hear him describe the horrors of the work in its very first moments, before we see Memo desiring entry into this kind of labor.
This temporal play – showing the outcome of Memo's narrative before it begins – becomes especially interesting relative to Rivera's characterization of his protagonist. Memo is costumed, shot, and played as a dreamer, utilizing many of the tropes of a coming-of-age story.Footnote 38 Memo's backward cap and sleeveless shirt clearly delineate him from his father Miguel, played by Jose Concepcion Macias, who wears overalls and a cowboy hat. We see Memo's copy of Hackear para Pricipiantes (Hacking for Dummies), which teaches him how to hack into calls from sleep dealers to their homes.Footnote 39 When Memo listens to these calls, he hears the sleep dealers mention their work and their locations with excited voices. These calls and Memo's face as he listens to them neatly fit him into a recognizable character type, one who longs to escape his rural roots and enter an exciting modern world. In so doing, Rivera connects Memo not only to other cinematic dreamers but also to what Alicia Schmidt Camacho has called “the tale of the enterprising migrant ‘seeking a better life.’”Footnote 40 Camacho's Migrant Imaginaries decries the commonality of this narrative, as it suggests that the financial benefits offered in the US offset the pitfalls that come with migration – exclusion from full citizenship, social marginalization, and the dangers that accompany each. She instead emphasizes “the melancholic aspect” of the migrant experience that emerges from “the social upheaval and deformations of kinship” that large-scale migration sets into motion.Footnote 41 This popular narrative of the plucky migrant taking advantage of American economic opportunity fails to recognize these consistent affective responses to migration as well as excusing the conditions that motivate economic migration.
Before the viewer can fit Memo into the enterprising-migrant narrative, however, we encounter the film's first scene, which indicates that Memo becomes disillusioned with the work he eventually finds. In the next scene, however, we see him hoping for a chain of events that will lead to this unhappy conclusion. Audiences are thus positioned to question how realistic the enterprising-migrant narrative is: how believable is it that Latinx migrants want to uproot their lives to access the lowest-prestige jobs in the United States, rather than being desperate for the comparatively good wages that come with that work? Via this positioning, Rivera foregrounds questions about the broader ideology of work and its relation to the liberal sense that allowing migrants to work low-prestige, low-wage jobs is consistent with treating their situation ethically. The film also connects international corporate resource extraction to the need for migration in the first place. If his family's farm were not threatened by the international Del Rio Water Company's ownership of a nearby river, the primary water source in the area, Memo might not have wanted to leave Santa Ana.
Most of the critical commentary on Sleep Dealer has focussed on the implications of the wall built between the US and Mexico, another component of the film's imagination of the future. Despite the presence of the wall, Mexican labor is still “migrated” into the US via the aforementioned nodes and the drones they connect to. This virtual migration of labor actualizes the unspoken desires of the historical Bracero program or of advocates of “guest workers”: welcome the labor, not the person performing it, a point made by Martin-Cabrera, Jelena Šesnić, and others.Footnote 42 The wall suggests that political rhetoric like that of the forty-fifth American President has won out, limiting bodies crossing into the US, while capital, products, and labor power move across the border easily. Rivera's dystopian future is, as Lysa Rivera suggests, a short jump from our present: more privatization of natural resources, more nativism in the face of international capital's imperatives, more (presumably Anglo) exploitation of brown-skinned people.Footnote 43
The film suggests via Memo's hacking that large numbers of prospective sleep dealers move from rural areas to border cities to find work in cybermaquiladoras. Early in the film, we hear examples of calls that Memo hacks into: one male voice says he is a busboy in New York or Los Angeles; a female voice says she quickly got a job. But as we learn and as Memo must know, these individuals are not actually in the United States; they're operating drones in northern Mexico. Only on a second viewing can audiences know that these individuals are in the exact position we hear Memo narrate at the film's beginning – jobs that are dangerous and exhausting. But despite this difficulty, the narrative implies that the trip up to (not across) the border offers social legitimacy or mobility, even if that mobility fails to be a major change.
What the border cities have that the more rural areas do not is remote technology. Rivera subtly critiques another prominent neoliberal myth via this framing. Virginia Eubanks has argued that the “digital divide” often used to explain ongoing economic inequality simply obfuscates the social relations that organize late capitalism: access to technology is no guarantor of meaningful economic opportunities.Footnote 44 Rivera literalizes the flaws in the digital-divide narrative via the giant wall between the US and Mexico. Virtual access for those willing to insert nodes in their body is not full inclusion in a cosmopolitan ideal, nor is it bringing them what viewers would understand as good jobs.
Not long after Memo arrives in the border city, Luz (Leonor Valera), a composer of digital stories and Memo's love interest, installs his nodes. Rivera composes this scene as an intimate one: close-up shots of these attractive actors’ faces (who are physically close together) switch with ones of the installing tool, which makes a loud puncturing sound. Rivera connects Memo's physical change to narratives of border crossing by naming those who know how to insert nodes coyotes, the same name applied to couriers of undocumented individuals across the US border. Luz acts as Memo's coyote, bringing him across a metaphorical border, giving him access to remote work. The scene follows up each sharp snap of Luz's tool with CGI imagery meant to be Memo's nervous system. He winces as the nodes are implanted in his body, but he slowly explains his satisfaction about what the nodes mean: “por fin, pueda conectar mi system nervous ala otra system: la economia global,” which Rivera subtitles as: “Finally, I could connect my nervous system, to that other system: the global economy.”
Memo's statement asks audiences to believe that Memo has understood himself as outside the global economy until getting his nodes. When we see Memo's life at home, we see his father Miguel buy access to water from the neighboring river after an interaction with an English-speaking, gun-wielding machine, looking at the company's sign in English (Del Rio Water Company); as indicated above, Miguel tells Memo they used to take and use water for free. The water his family requires, then, has become part of the global economy. Right before Memo heads north, it's the digital trace of Memo's hacking that leads the water company to determine he is part of a terrorist cell. The drone sent to address the unauthorized activity kills Miguel. Memo views the approach of the drone on an American television program that dramatizes killings of this sort in real time, making the violence protecting an international company into international entertainment. In other words, Memo's family has been ruined by la economia global and arguably was inseparable from it throughout his life. Such circumstances mean that we must read Memo's line about “finally” joining the global economy ironically.
After his father's murder, Memo heads north to support his family financially as well as to escape the guilt that comes from his unintentional role in his Miguel's death. In this convoluted way, Memo gets his excuse to leave his rural Mexican home, which his brother cynically reminds him is what he always wanted. Even before he leaves, then, his move is shaded negatively, not the easy move toward modern legitimacy that Memo once imagined. After joining la economia global, Memo's life in Tijuana is almost entirely empty of pleasures; he finds lodging in an empty plot within a tent village near the border without any obvious comforts, and his emotional pain distracts him even during his limited time with Luz. The rest of his time is spent working.
Yet during a videoconference with his brother – the one in which his brother deepens Memo's guilt by reminding him that he'd wanted to leave their home – Memo shows an excitement about working virtually in California similar to that we heard on the phone calls earlier, if more muted. This alignment maintains the cultural sense that movement toward the center of global capital is enabling and satisfying: it's as though Memo and the other sleep dealers feel a pressure to maintain the narratives that have driven them to the difficult position they're in, all the while feeling the melancholy that Camacho diagnoses. Meanwhile the most significant component of Memo's job for his brother (as it might logically be for Memo) is, of course, the wage. During the call, Memo is able to send money home, and his brother is surprised at the amount coming through the machine and asks him to send more. In another video call, his mother expresses concern over how he looks but explains that they need the money he sends. Here we see the much more common driver of immigration rear its head in this film for the first time; it's Memo's wages that really count. The “relation of equivalence” on display here, to borrow Reed's phrase, is that Memo trades his time, health, and well-being for a wage that brings him nothing like the experience of liberation or legitimacy he expected. Thus his work for an international corporation has not transformed him into “the independent individual of the liberal imaginary,” undermining the stance about work that he seems to espouse in the film's early scenes.Footnote 45
While the primary reason why Memo changes his body is to work remotely, we see that connecting nodes during the act of sex seems to intensify the experience, and “node bars” show customers using their implants to mind-alter. This double-sidedness becomes significant, too, in the film's denouement: Rudy Ramirez, played by Jacob Vargas, was the drone pilot who killed Miguel. He tracks down Memo by buying Luz's digital stories of her romance with Memo. Rudy, a Spanish-speaking American citizen who is also brown-skinned, feels manipulated by the system he was a cog within. He jacks into his plane with help from Luz and Memo using the technology at Memo's cybermaquiladora. He uses the plane to destroy the dam that dried up the water in Memo's hometown, a symbol of globalization's privatization of necessary, shared resources. That the very technology used by systems of domination enables resistance against that domination is the theme of Empire and Multitude, the first two volumes of Hardt and Negri's influential trilogy. As a result of this alignment with Hardt and Negri's thesis, we might see Sleep Dealer authorizing a similar diagnosis – that what immaterial labor gives to power it can take away.
In the framing I've established above, however, we might instead see the film's rejection of labor as liberation, offering a complimentary but perhaps more pragmatic and compelling takeaway. Rudy rejects the narrative of uplift that military service often offers American people of color; Memo and Luz commit to a life of struggle against the system rather than negotiating labor within it. Reading the film this way allows the emergence of its criticisms of social-mobility narratives, which often associate proximity to the US with a superior quality of life and to forms of labor as fundamentally enabling. As I have already shown, also, Rivera uses irony and chronological play to undermine timelines that imagine that changes in technology and labor form significantly alter basic labor relations.
Despite its nominal setting in the future, Rivera includes playful moments to undermine the gap between its setting and the present. Before Memo leaves his hometown, he attends a neighborhood party where elderly women dance to contemporary sounding hip-hop, and Memo and his brother laugh at music they call “old-school.” The technology in the film is sometimes seemingly intentionally old-fashioned: Memo sticks actual dollars into the video-calling machine he uses to communicate with home, rather than using a credit or debit card. Memo's hacking is done with a ham radio, rather than a computer. Luz, Memo, Rudy and the other characters are all costumed in clothing associated with the 2000s. Other futuristic elements of the story arguably extend or intensify, rather than shifting, labor norms. Luz uses her nodes to connect to an application on her computer, and she uploads memories that she shapes as visual narratives – and the app corrects her if she narrates her feelings or reflections inaccurately. While this technology does not currently exist, it has obvious parallels with demands that memoirs, first-personal journalism, or personal essays be authentic, and, as with other working storytellers, Luz is drawing on her experiences to create commodities she needs someone to buy: we hear a threatening voicemail from her student loan servicer before she starts shaping her story of meeting Memo. Like Memo's work as a sleep dealer, Luz's digital labor is a change in degree, not kind, from the world of 2008, when the film was made. Thus, beyond the flashback that undermines Memo's desire for the work he eventually gets, Rivera uses temporal play to consistently remind us that the film is not really about the future, as its critique is set firmly on the capitalist operations it depicts (resource extraction, racial hyper-exploitation, outsourcing) that have long been part of the economic present. And to reiterate, it proposes that technology that might actually change labor – Memo's sleep-dealer outfit, Luz's uploaded memories – nevertheless retain the axiomatic logic of capitalism, to abstract human energy and human time into exchange value. More poignantly, perhaps, we can see a verbal instance of this chronological complexity in an early scene in the film. Memo asks Miguel why he stays on the farm, and Miguel replies, “¿Es nuestro futuro una cosa del pasado?” (“Is our future a thing of the past?”) Their consignment to further marginalization by the American water company's seizure of resources is, for Miguel, a fixing of their family's position outside progress curves. Miguel distills the film's temporal play in his comments: its characters are strangely out of any clear historical timeline, not in a present or future where technology or globalization has leveled playing fields, nor in a postindustrial era clearly distinguishable from previous ones. Instead they are in a recursive capitalist modernity, painfully shorn of any hopeful, liberating teleology.Footnote 46
This sense of the economically dispossessed as somehow out of historical time also manifests in Sweat, Nottage's 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning play. Set in Reading, Pennsylvania, where Nottage did research regarding the city's economic decline, Sweat presents a series of manufacturing job losses, lockouts, and strikes; these disruptions produce economic problems, damage relationships, and compromise deeply held identifications. Her presentation of a set of employer actions that yield negative consequences beyond simple job loss itself evokes Linkon's phrase “the half-life of deindustrialization” from her 2018 book. Linkon borrows the term “half-life” from physics, where it “refers to the time it takes for a substance to lose half of its activity.” It thus points to “the slow decline of toxicity, highlighting its persistence as well as its dangers.”Footnote 47 In this framing, deindustrialization names the introduction of long-acting poison into the social ecosystem; Sweat explores the impact of this symbolic toxification, while never pretending that industrial jobs fit the mythic picture I describe above.
If deindustrialization refers to a timeline of economic restructuring that's both historical (beginning in the 1970s) and contemporary (American factories still close today), Nottage attempts to capture that timeline's complexity by setting her play at two points in the recent past that often blur together. This temporal complexity involves the audience as well: readers or viewers farther along in the postindustrial era watch as shifts in employment lead characters from stable work to the surplus population. Nottage clearly anticipates that audiences will be interested in these characters because they are out of time: they will lose the jobs that they hoped would secure a middle-class life and, or perhaps because, they are relics relative to the postindustrial framework.
Written in 2015, the play begins in 2008 but is set primarily in the year 2000. In 2000, five central characters learn that their employer, Olstead Metal Tubing, is threatening to move its production from Reading unless the union renegotiates its contract; management creates the crisis by sending important machinery away over a holiday weekend without notifying their employees. These characters are either in significantly worse economic shape in 2008 or do not appear onstage again. Another key character, Brucie, has already been locked out for ninety-three months by another local business, Dixon's Hosieries, when the play's earliest diegetic action starts, and his job's fate presages the problems for the Olstead workers and ones that occur, we hear, at nearby Clemmons Technologies. Nottage's picture of the recent past, then, connects economic restructuring to increasing marginalization for her characters in an uninterrupted chain.
Reviews of Nottage's play consistently called it “timely.”Footnote 48 Often linking the timeliness of the play to Donald Trump's support among white middle- and working-class voters, whom readers might see reflected in embittered white characters in the play, these reviewers highlight that deindustrialization is aligned to a broader process of economic dispossession. In keeping with this point, Nottage carefully emphasizes that it was the economic benefits of the work, rather than the form of the work, that were primarily significant to these characters. In fact, part of the reason characters deny the vulnerability of their employment is related to their fear of losing their standard of living. We hear about several other Olstead workers or community members who have gone on to nice retirements, which is why Brucie decries his son Chris's plans to become a teacher: “walk away from that steady money at the [Olstead] plant? Ask me, he'd be a damn fool to.”Footnote 49 Yet just moments before, Brucie explains that he has begun to lose hope that his own unionized job's perks will ever return. He tells another character that Dixon wants the workers to give up their retirement package and accept a 50 percent pay cut, and whatever payout he might get after settling still means “I gotta do this for the next, what? Fifteen–twenty years?”Footnote 50 Brucie's despair at his own situation fails to register the likelihood of the same fate befalling Chris, who sees the writing on the wall regarding factory work in Reading. On hearing that Chris desires to become a teacher, Chris's best friend Jason tells him, “Dude, that don't pay jack-shit, you'll have to take a second job just to keep your lights on.”Footnote 51 While masculinity and identity play a role in their objections (Jason takes pride in being able to handle the demands of the job; Chris remembers Brucie's heroic actions in an earlier period of labor strife), Jason and Brucie focus on the pay differential between teaching and working at Olstead. In addition, then, to masculinity and tradition, the pay is obviously an important element in what keeps them in their jobs despite the ominous changes around them.Footnote 52
As in Sleep Dealer, the work's physical demands and dangers are a consistent focus. Brucie's estranged wife Cynthia, who works at Olstead, often voices the physical damage that comes with working at a factory: her friend Tracey urges her to have one more drink late at the bar where most of the play's action occurs, and Cynthia says, “if I lose a finger in the mill, it'll be your fault.”Footnote 53 Defending her desire to apply for a management job, she responds, “you wanna be fifty and standing on our [sic] feet for ten hours a day? Titties sagging into the machines. I got bunions the size of damn apples. My back … I go home and my hands are frozen.”Footnote 54 Later, after receiving the promotion, she describes being at work and not having “to worry about my fingers cramping or the blood blister on my left foot.”Footnote 55 Chris says that “the machines are so fucking loud I can't even think.”Footnote 56 Former Olstead worker and current bartender Stan, the last of three generations to work at the company, was disabled by a machine that he said everyone knew “was trouble”; still, Stan tells Chris that “not many people walk away from Olstead's, cuz you're not gonna find better money out there.”Footnote 57
Liam Connell has written that white-collar workers in recent American narratives long for more materially legitimate work, as we saw in Company Men.Footnote 58 Yet if Connell's figures think about “the character of the product” as related to the value of the work that they do, then no one in Sweat seems to believe that the manufacturing of steel is a particularly noble end.Footnote 59 The only defense of this sort that emerges in the play has little to do with the product of manufacturing textiles, hosieries, or steel tubes, but instead a hazy, nostalgic sense that manual labor has fallen in prestige. Olstead employee Tracey, Jason's mother and the closest the play has to an onstage villain (and the figure we might most expect to be a Trump voter), tells bar employee Oscar about her childhood memories:
my family's been here a long time, since the twenties … They built the house I live in. They built this town. My grandfather was German, and he could build anything … My grandfather was the real thing. A craftsman … Downtown was real nice back then. You'd get dressed up to go shopping … It was back when if you worked with your hands people respected you for it. It was a gift. But now, there's nothing on Penn.Footnote 60
This complicated, meandering story comes after Colombian-descended Oscar shows Tracey a flyer written in Spanish advertising for positions at Olstead's, which is a closed shop. Tracy begins her story after Oscar states that he was born in the United States, as are all the characters in the play. He offers this point to counter Tracey's stereotyping claim that “you guys coming over here, you can get a job”: she assumes he is an immigrant because, presumably, of his name and features.Footnote 61 Tracey's response in the quote above blends together her personal history with nostalgia and racial resentment. For her, the labor of her grandfather and her esteem for it is associated with Reading's happier past; her knowledge of this generational past undergirds her claim to legitimate ownership of a job at Olstead. As Linkon puts it, she is one of many disenfranchised white workers who “view industrial jobs as property,” and for whom “the loss of those jobs [is] a betrayal, one sometimes framed in terms of race, gender, and nationality.”Footnote 62 To imagine that Oscar could have a legitimate place in the factory would be hard to reconcile with Tracey's racialized historical perspective.
Tracey is not an entirely unsympathetic character, but Nottage's inclusion of her flaws makes it clear that, in this play, being an industrial laborer does not have automatic character-building qualities. Tracey refers to the Colombian-descended, American-born Oscar as Puerto Rican and assumes that he knows people who will burn down houses; she attributes her best friend Cynthia being promoted to Cynthia's black identity, but claims “I'm not prejudice” [sic];Footnote 63 she goads her son Jason into an act of racialized violence at the play's most critical juncture. Instead of a firm set of admirable values, we instead recognize a character ready to turn to nativism and racism to protect what she perceives as her birthright.
Both Linkon and Julie Burrell assert that Sweat's key political insight is connecting diversity in race, ethnicity, and gender in manufacturing work yet showing this diversity's uneasy relationship to white Anglo norms.Footnote 64 In Sweat, the three longest-tenured, actively working industrial laborers in the 2000 segment of the play are all women (Tracey, Cynthia, and their alcoholic friend Jessie), countering the representational norm that links white males to manufacturing work.Footnote 65 That Brucie, Chris, and Cynthia are black and encounter both subtle and outright racism despite their labor-based alliances with people around them indicates that the lengthy presence of black bodies of the industrial workforce has not necessarily canceled ongoing racism within this community (and contrasts meaningfully with the blissful picture painted in Company Men). Brucie encounters race-based aggression at his union office; Jason makes light of Chris's teaching ambitions by questioning the need for Black History Month, stating that “it should be called ‘Make White People Feel Guilty Month.’”Footnote 66 Tracy, as mentioned above, complains that Cynthia's race played a role in her promotion; Cynthia narrates her isolation as a black worker when she first began at Olstead.Footnote 67 Nottage does not leave gender discrimination out of the picture, either. Emine Fişek points out that when Stan praises an older Olstead's stewardship of the company, Tracy recalls his sexual harassment.Footnote 68
Tracy, as mentioned above, talks to Oscar in a condescending and often racist way, and her son Jason calls him “that fucking spic” near the end of the play.Footnote 69 Jason's aggression towards Oscar begins when Oscar takes a replacement or “scab” position at Olstead after Olstead begins a prolonged fight with the union. Oscar's job at the bar involves lifting endless crates of beer, cleaning gum from the bottoms of tables, helping the about-to-vomit Jessie to the bathroom; each task lacks the local prestige of manufacturing work as well as its higher wage. Nottage justifies his decision to become a scab through Oscar's dialogue: he tells Stan that his father “swept a floor in a factory like Olstead's” for decades, but “those fuckas wouldn't even give him a union card” and that he gets three dollars an hour more at Olstead than he does barbacking.Footnote 70 Tracy's sense that Oscar is an illegitimate presence in the county begets Jason's racializing of Oscar's decision to seek better-paying work. Egged on by his mother, Jason confronts Oscar violently, and Chris reluctantly joins the fracas. They accidentally hit Stan with a baseball bat after they hit Oscar with it twice. The 2008 scenes reflect Jason's and Chris's remorse after their long prison sentences and the fraying of formerly strong ties: Stan is significantly disabled, Jessie and Brucie do not appear again, Tracey shows signs of opiate addiction, and Cynthia has lost her house despite still having two jobs. The older adults, close friends in the 2000 scenes, never appear onstage together in 2008.
Linkon observes that many narratives about deindustrialization “only rarely acknowledge directly the larger economic and political forces shaping these places and their economic and social struggles.”Footnote 71 Sweat is an exception, and Stan is the character who does the most to invoke those forces. He tells Tracey to fear free-trade agreements: “You could wake up tomorrow and all your jobs are in Mexico, whatever, it's this NAFTA bullshit,” a vague-sounding reference no doubt meant to resonate with audiences and reiterated by Cynthia later on.Footnote 72 He has the 2000 Republican national convention playing in the background of his conversation with Brucie in Act I, scene iii. He evokes the history of working-class struggle when he warns Oscar about crossing the picket line: “My dad put forty-two years into building that plant, those benefits, those wages, that vacation time you're so hungry for.”Footnote 73 Rather than Tracey's more romanticized picture of automatic respect for manual labor, Stan points to the actual labor struggles that produced decent contracts.Footnote 74
Nottage supplements the context that Stan periodically mentions with news items that she lists with stage directions at the start of each scene. Nottage's organization of these real-life references changes from scene to scene, but she often layers a national event with ones happening in Reading. Nottage mentions Wall Street or Dow Jones surges or plunges four times;Footnote 75 politics show up, with Barack Obama, John McCain, George Bush Jr., Al Gore, Janet Reno, Hillary Clinton, and Steve Forbes making appearances. Locally, we hear about personal disasters (“an overnight fire leaves a mother with five children homeless”), crimes (“A 26-year-old man is shot leaving a bar on Woodward Street in Reading”), and traditions (“Reading residents sample fresh apple cider at the Annual Fall Festival on Old Dry Road Farm”).Footnote 76 One theme across these last references is Reading's municipal leaders attempting to gentrify Reading, a desire Alice Mah has explained is a common outcome of deindustrialization, while they also push austerity measures.Footnote 77 Here are the relevant examples:
“Reading passes an aggressive dog ordinance to regulate ownership of certain pet breeds including pit bulls”
“Work begins on the Downtown Civic Convention Center in Reading”
“The City of Reading fires a dozen employees, fearing a deficit of $10,000,000”
“The City of Reading purchases a number of run-down buildings with plans to demolish them in an effort to combat urban blight”
“The Mayor of Reading proposes a budget to increase earned income tax”
“Federal prosecutors convict a multimillion-dollar drug ring that converted several Reading houses into indoor marijuana farms”Footnote 78
These sentences connect the labor concerns facing the characters to a larger neoliberal story of failed urban renewal in Reading that exists alongside shrinking state budgets. It is not simply job loss that we see here; instead, we see the bigger context surrounding the specific job losses that hurt Nottage's characters and their community.
Beyond these notes, Nottage's dedication to context, and in turn to historical thinking, emerge most clearly in two moments: first, she includes a section marked only as “transition,” between scenes vi and vii of Act II. The section involves no diegetic action. Instead, we get two sentences about President George W. Bush's 24 September 2008 speech proclaiming the need for a “$700,000,000 bailout for Wall Street” to avoid “ominous consequences for the entire U.S. economy and for millions of Americans.”Footnote 79 Here Nottage makes the banal point that the state is concerned primarily with large capital interests rather than its citizens more broadly. She makes us realize that all the 2008 scenes occur after Bush's speech, and neither the bailout nor the bounce in the Dow Jones that comes after Congress approved them matters at all to Tracey, addicted to opiates; to Cynthia, working two jobs after losing her house; to Chris, who cannot find a job; or to Jason, who is making pretzels at the mall.
The other, more Benjaminan treatment of history occurs at the end of Act I, scene i. The stage directions call for a “loud blast of music: Santana's ‘Smooth.’ The past rips through 2008.”Footnote 80 In one way, this line merely marks a transition: we learn that Chris's and Jason's probations, the subject of the first scene, have their roots in the past, which may feel like another obvious point. The phrasing, however, insists that the past can emphatically, painfully assert itself in the present. Tracey's story of her grandfather in Reading's downtown or Cynthia's pride at getting her union card or Oscar's father never getting his are references to the ways white privilege, black post-civil rights progress, and anti-Latinx discrimination emerge as forces in everyday life. These historical elements not only have subjective meaning but mobilize behavior and direct outcomes.Footnote 81 History, however, does not always matter. The workers from Olstead are mystified by the company's refusal to acknowledge the years they've invested, the opportunities they never had, or the damage to their bodies. Even the company's present is less significant than projected profitability: Jessie calls out “our plant is making money!” when Cynthia first reveals Olstead's plan to squeeze concessions out of the union.Footnote 82 The company's ownership of capital and its post-globalization mobility enable it to map the future it desires, which is not the case for the characters. Of course, companies plan poorly and fail all the time. Nottage focusses on the ones that can maneuver their future while their employees cannot.
Mah reminds us that “capitalism produces an inherently uneven geography of development, whereby industries, people, and places are constantly abandoned in capital's search for new sites and cheaper inputs”; this “geographical manifestation of creative destruction” means that any chronology of change or progress will distribute places on that plotline that look backward or out of time.Footnote 83 Again, Reading's municipal and business leaders may want to move toward rebirth and rejuvenation, but 2008 sees the characters as further devastated rather than renewed.Footnote 84 From the moment they appear onstage, we can envision their futurelessness, to adapt Jessica Hurley's term: imagining the present as postindustrial inevitably condemns those still in the industrial paradigm as outside a progressive timeline.Footnote 85 Such a depiction eviscerates any romanticism about industrial labor. Nottage's play aligns with Sleep Dealer, in that neither imagine industrialization to be over (someone's still making steel tubes), satisfying or ennobling.
Like Sleep Dealer, Sweat is mostly a flashback. It starts with a scene showing Chris and Jason in 2008 talking to their probation officer before moving back to 2000. Despite the movement in time, the play's switching between 2000 and 2008 and its “timely” appearance in 2015 presents these years as more or less indistinguishable from the economic purview of its characters. Lives that depend on wage labor are always precarious, even when union contracts seem like ways to assure one's security. Both 2000 and 2008 are linked to financial crashes (which make things worse) and elections (which seem to change little): history in the play is both cyclical and static. Seen in this way, Nottage's anachronistic error of having Beyoncé's wildly famous song “Single Ladies” play in the background of a 2000 scene (it came out in 2008) might be seen as revelatory.Footnote 86 If the characters are outside time, chronology is understandably slippery.
Thus Nottage may not “consign industrial laborers to a murky and derelict past,” as Julie Burrell claims about Sweat, yet they are consigned to a hazily defined present.Footnote 87 The 2008 versions of Jason, Chris, Cynthia, and Tracey (and presumably Jessie and Brucie) exist in the vulnerable space where no jobs will emerge to provide the same wages they counted on; all that's left to Chris and Jason is affective reconciliation with Oscar at the end. The retirements that characters dreamed of have disappeared. Like Rivera's Miguel, the future they imagined is a thing of the past.
In summary, Sweat and Sleep Dealer criticize the simple timeline conjured by the terms post- or deindustrial by reminding us that manufacturing work still gets done or is not relegated to a distant past. Contrasting these two with Company Men's purchase of the mythology of manufacturing labor (despite its actual undermining of the contracts so central to mid-century social mobility) helps us see the latter's rosy nostalgia. This article has attempted to link the ways Sleep Dealer and Sweat undermine the valorization of manufacturing labor by playing with narrative temporality, which enables each to illustrate commonalities across differing periods and thus indict a labor history that focusses on difference rather than similarity. The chronological sleight of hand in these texts differs from the move Company Men makes to relegate industrial labor to a distant past in need of resurrection. In so doing, Sleep Dealer and Sweat focus on the centrality and precarity of wage labor itself in capitalism as a historical consistency. Rather than presenting any kind of waged work as an automatic good beyond its ability to provide wages, Rivera's film and Nottage's play enable critical reflections on how we narrativize labor history and how that storytelling can unintentionally valorize wage labor. Finally, Rivera and Nottage concur on capitalism's diffidence towards these historical narratives as well as its willingness to leave surplus populations out of progressive timelines.
I have called all three of the texts in this article “labor-market narratives,” where the central question in each is finding, keeping, or losing a job. Often stories of this sort end with someone getting satisfying work, as happens in Company Men, and these endings provide a sense of uplift. Yet any person getting a job remains inside a society where work “dominates our lives.”Footnote 88 Nottage and Rivera recognize this important reality, and each shows how narratives around changes in labor and labor forms ignore capitalism's recursive subsuming of changes into its central logic. In drawing my attention to and applauding these two narratives, I hope to open a space for economically driven narrative criticism that balances an awareness of the wage's primary significance and the flaws of the system that structures that significance and to advocate for representations of work that do the same.
