Deindustrialization is a global phenomenon. Factories and mines have opened and closed in many places as changing technologies and policies enabled capital to keep moving in pursuit of profit. Deindustrialization in one location may create new jobs somewhere else, but those new factories may subsequently close as companies seek even cheaper labor and fewer regulations. But within this global flow, workers and communities struggle to adapt locally. The effects of deindustrialization always feel local and personal.

This is why the community study has become a central genre in deindustrialization studies. While each addresses the industrial history and decline of a specific place, they share some common elements: attention to structures of work in one industry or company; stories of how workers forged collective working-class identities within and through those structures; memories of once-thriving local economies; and analysis of how closings harmed individuals and the community, economically but also socially and psychologically. The details may vary, but the basic narrative remains familiar.

These studies matter for local and scholarly audiences. For local readers, they can validate community memories and attachments, foster strategic and reflective conversations, and help heal some of the lingering wounds from the economic violence of deindustrialization. For scholars, each iteration reinforces but also expands our understanding of common patterns. Jill A. Schennum’s ethnographic and historical community study, As Goes Bethlehem: Steelworkers and the Restructuring of the Industrial Working Class, succeeds on both levels. It will surely engage local readers and prompt thoughtful conversations about how Bethlehem has changed and what lies ahead, and it offers an especially rich description and thoughtful analysis of a local iteration of working-class labor culture.

Schennum combines historical research with insights from ethnographic interviews with a cohort of workers hired between 1963 and 1979 at Bethlehem Steel, the period leading up to the company’s three-decade-long decline before it closed in 2003. By tracing the history of that cohort’s experience, Schennum illustrates a model of the relationship between economic and culture change that sociologist Tim Strangleman identifies as key to understanding the effects deindustrialization. As he explains, deindustrialization is “retarded, slowed and redirected by pre-existing industrial cultures”.Footnote ¹ Schennum’s analysis of working-class culture in Bethlehem moves from a thoughtful, layered analysis of the working-class culture developed in the steel mill to a discussion of how that culture limited workers’ ability to resist shutdowns and shaped their responses when layoffs hit.

As Goes Bethlehem unpacks the practices, structures, and ideas embedded in steelwork, highlighting how workplace culture at once facilitated and limited workers’ power. Much of this echoes insights that have emerged in studies of other communities and workplaces, and Schennum at times draws on and makes comparisons with what other scholars have found in other places. That said, I wish Schennum had more clearly positioned the story of Bethlehem in the context of similar studies of other communities. Positioning As Goes Bethlehem as a contribution to this well-established genre might have emphasized the significance of some of its themes while also making a stronger case for the significance of this particular example. That said, as a contributor to and reader of the genre of deindustrialization community studies, I appreciate how Schennum’s work complements and complicates established patterns, expanding our shared frameworks for understanding deindustrialization.

Her analysis is especially strong in highlighting how intersectionality at once helped create a strong and effective white masculine working-class collectivity at Bethlehem Steel and undermined that collective’s ability to respond to change. In two chapters that form the heart of the book, Schennum traces how the intertwined elements of race, gender, and place both helped to create shared identity and reinforced divisions and conflicts. The mill functioned as a “masculine world, separated from mainstream society”, yet those boundaries blurred when workers left separate space and returned to suburban neighborhoods, where “union workers and middle managers often lived next door to each other […] and where workers nurtured identities as homeowners, petty entrepreneurs, husbands, fathers, and volunteers in their communities” (p. 85). Despite this complication in workers’ experiences of class, Schennum shows, the white-dominated masculine world of the mill created its own “moral economy” that “codified, built on, and validated” some aspects of American culture of the mid-twentieth-century but “ignored” others (p. 131). Central to this separate world were expectations about the roles but also the rights of workers and managers. Workers developed a sense of ownership of the mill, respect for the hierarchies and interdependence of labor, and some real, if limited, power. These ideas lent meaning and stability to workers’ lives within the steel mill, and it led to a strong sense of betrayal when layoffs came.

At the same time, that “moral economy” was explicitly white and masculine, and its investment in seniority limited opportunities for the few women and the Black and Latino workers at Bethlehem Steel. The 1974 consent decree disrupted that established order. It required mills to hire more women, enabled workers of color to move into better jobs, and provided back pay as compensation for earlier patterns of discrimination. As Schennum suggests, the decree generated resistance not only because it improved opportunities for women and people of color, but also because its provisions violated the ideas that lay at the heart of the “moral economy”. Many white men viewed the “rights-based discourse and civil rights legal structure” that shaped the consent decree as “threatening and immoral” (p. 145). Thus, while the decree improved opportunities for some workers, Schennum argues, it also reinforced divisions that kept workers “from effectively building broader alliances”. That, in turn, “handicapped the unions in resisting restructuring and plant closings, leaving workers to instead manage the effects of these on their own” (p. 159). While the narrative of identity-based conflicts undermining worker solidarity is familiar, Schennum develops her analysis carefully, giving equal attention to the values and practices of a collective working-class identity and to the differences and ideological shifts that undermined its power.

Schennum presents the slow process of downsizing and closing of Bethlehem Steel as a case of slow deindustrialization, a significant contrast with the more familiar narrative of sudden closures, such as the “Black Monday” shutdown of the Youngstown Sheet and Tube company, which displaced thousands of workers in a single day. Bethlehem steel jobs dwindled over time, starting with cuts in 1976, followed by more layoffs over time, before the mill finally closed in 2003. That timeline helped the community adapt and diversity its economy. While the contrast is significant, Schennum’s narrative reminds us that deindustrialization is often not complete, at least not immediately. Even in Youngstown, where the steel industry collapsed in just a few years, steel remains part of the economic landscape: a few thousand people work in steel production in the area today, mostly in scrap and specialty metals. If, as Strangleman argues, industrial culture continues to influence a community long after industrial closures, one reason might be the continuing presence of smaller-scale industries. Further, Schennum argues, although slow deindustrialization may help explain Bethlehem’s economic resilience, its success “was constructed through the displacement and devaluing of the industrial working class” (p. 201). The city’s “diverse, postindustrial economy” (198) does not solve the problem of displacement for workers, because new jobs pay far less and offer workers fewer opportunities to build social connections or proud work-based identities. Discourses of entrepreneurship or “knowledge industry” jobs too often ignore the costs to workers of newer models of employment and exploitation. Low-wage service work is a poor a replacement for unionized industrial jobs.

Bethlehem’s story of the loss of working-class solidarity and the rise of a low-wage service economy is not unique. Rather, it is yet another painful, frustrating reminder of the contradictions of deindustrialization. The steel mill was a difficult and dangerous worksite, but it was also a source of identity and meaning for many workers. It fostered a strong working-class culture whose power was ultimately limited by its internal divisions but also, in some ways, by it sense of its own strength. The loss of those jobs and the collective identities they facilitated remains significant even as the local community seems to have moved on. In As Goes Bethlehem, Schennum helps us understand all of this and helps us see why it matters.