Negotiating Risk, Seeking Security, Eroding Solidarity

Through a series of interviews with workers in the automotive parts industry, this study argues that the restructuring of labor markets and welfare states, paired with firm-level work and management reorganization, has exposed working-class families to greater levels of job risk and insecurity. Focusing on workers in Canada and Mexico and using a gender and race analysis, this book paints a bleak portrait of the lives of working people, where workers and their families continually renegotiate the effects of neo-liberal economic and social change. These changes see individuals working harder, longer and travelling further from home to keep their jobs, while straining familial and community relations and eroding the basis for worker solidarity and collective action.