Blue-Collar Aristocrats? General Motors Autoworkers and Oppositional Class Consciousness

Abstract

Postwar social theorists (Goldthorpe, Lipset, Giddens, Hout, Brooks and Manza) have typically portrayed members of the Western industrial working-class as accommodative and suggest that an affluent proletariat has seen its oppositional working-class consciousness subverted and transformed by the ‘cash nexus’ into various forms of social integration. With reference to Mann's (1973) measures of class-consciousness I explore expressions of proletarian consciousness among organized workers at one of Canada's largest industrial union locals, the Canadian Auto Workers Local 222 of General Motors, Oshawa, Canada. Here I tested for the existence and degree of working-class imagery, proletarian identity and oppositional working-class consciousness using a survey questionnaire (N=102), in-depth interviews and participant observation. I found a shared view of class relations as primarily characterized by conflict, a clear working-class self-identification and measurable forms of oppositional working-class consciousness among this group. My findings confirm the hypothesis that Oshawa autoworkers' relative material advantage is insufficient to completely transform their proletarian consciousness. In this context I discuss the 1996 Oshawa plant occupation as an example of elevated oppositional class consciousness among Oshawa autoworkers.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.