¹ Steven, Mark, “Screening Insurrection: Marx, Cinema, Revolution,” in Lye, Colleen and Nealon, Christopher, eds., After Marx: Literature, Theory, and Value in the Twenty-First Century (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 55–59, 56Google Scholar.

² McClanahan, Annie, “Introduction: The Spirit of Capital in an Age of Deindustrialization,” Post-45 Journal, 1, 1 (10 Jan. 2019)Google Scholar, at https://post45.org/2019/01/introduction-the-spirit-of-capital-in-an-age-of-deindustrialization.

³ Walley, Christine J., “Transmedia as Experimental Ethnography: The Exit Zero Project, Deindustrialization, and the Politics of Nostalgia,” American Ethnologist, 4, 4 (Nov. 2015), 624–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 634. Walley states that her claim about this evolutionary history echoes Steven High.

⁴ Martin, Theodore, Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ In a pithy summary of this mathematical point, Graeber observes that “there was never a time most workers worked in factories.” Graeber, David, Bullshit Jobs: The Rise of Pointless Work and What We Can Do About It (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 235Google Scholar. Daniel Bell, “Labor in the Post-industrial Society,” Dissent, Winter 1972, 163–89, 164.

⁶ Bell, 165, 166.

⁷ Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), 108–9Google Scholar.

⁸ Leigh Clare La Berge, “The Effective Turn: Affect, Gender, and the Wages of the Labor Film,” Post-45 Journal, 1, 1 (10 Jan. 2019), at https://post45.org/2019/01/the-effective-turn-affect-gender-and-the-wages-of-the-labor-film.

⁹ Leigh Clare La Berge, “There Is No ‘More Commodification’: Periodizing Capitalist Transformation,” in Lye and Nealon, 86–100, 93.

¹⁰ Reed, Naomi, “The Specter of Wall Street: ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’ and the Language of Commodities,” American Literature, 76, 2 (June 2004), 247–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 259. Finch, Laura, “The Un-real Deal: Financial Fiction, Fictional Finance, and the Financial Crisis,” Journal of American Studies, 49, 4 (2015), 731–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar, made a similar point in the pages of this journal, correcting the impulse to understand financial capitalism's key issue as its abstraction in two ways: first by showing that capitalism always works via abstraction, and second by revealing how abstraction manifests only through social forms.

¹¹ For discussions of the bipartisan consensus regarding industrial labor in political messaging see Binyamin Applebaum, “Why Are Politicians So Obsessed with Manufacturing?”, New York Times, 4 Oct. 2016, at www.nytimes.com/2016/10/09/magazine/why-are-politicians-so-obsessed-with-manufacturing.html, or James Ledbetter, “What's So Great about Manufacturing?”, New Yorker, 6 Aug. 2015, at www.newyorker.com/business/currency/whats-so-great-about-manufacturing.

¹² Hamera, Judith, “The Labors of Michael Jackson: Virtuosity, Deindustrialization, and Dancing Work,” PMLA, 127, 4 (2012), 751–65Google Scholar, 757.

¹³ May, Steve and Morrison, Laura, “Making Sense of Restructuring: Narratives of Accommodation among Downsized Workers,” in Cowie, Jefferson and Heathcott, Joseph, eds., Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 259–83Google Scholar; Joy Hart and Tracy K'Meyer, “Worker Memory and Narrative: Personal Stories of Deindustrialization in Louisville, Kentucky,” in ibid., 284–304.

¹⁴ Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott, “Introduction: The Meanings of Deindustrialization,” in Cowie and Heathcott, Beyond the Ruins, 1–15, 14, 5.

¹⁵ Linkon, Sherry Lee, “Men without Work: White Working-Class Masculinity in Deindustrialization Fiction,” Contemporary Literature, 55, 1 (2014), 148–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Linkon analyzes fictional representations of males in areas devastated by industrial job loss who lack a clear method for locating and developing their masculinity.

¹⁶ Malewitz, Raymond, “Regeneration through Misuse: Rugged Consumerism in Contemporary American Culture,” PMLA, 127, 3 (2012), 526–41Google Scholar. Malewitz does not mention masculinity per se, but his emphasis on material production's loss leading to “rugged” types of self-fashioning certainly has masculine echoes.

¹⁷ See McClanahan, Annie, “TV and Tipworkification,” Post-45 Journal, 1, 1 (10 Jan. 2019)Google Scholar, at https://post45.org/2019/01/tv-and-tipworkification. McLanahan writes that the works she discusses express a nostalgia for “life under the wage,” but she also valiantly suggests that her own essay might fall into the same trap.

¹⁸ Berg, Heather, Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2021), 97Google Scholar.

¹⁹ It made New Yorker critic David Denby's Top Ten list for 2010, for instance. David Denby, “The Best (and Worst) Films of the Year,” New Yorker, 8 Dec. 2010, at www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-best-and-worst-films-of-the-year.

²⁰ See Baum, Bruce, “Hollywood's Crisis of Capitalism 2011: Inside Job, The Company Men, and the Myth of a Good Capitalism,” New Political Science, 33, 4 (Dec. 2011), 603–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kinkle, Jeff and Toscano, Alberto, “Filming the Crisis: A Survey,” Film Quarterly, 65, 1 (Winter 2011), 39–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Houssart, Mark, “The Shifting Cinematic Portrayal of Managers in the United States Post-2008,” European Journal of American Culture, 37, 3 (Fall 2018), 223–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²¹ Despite Houssart's otherwise cogent points about the character, his claim that Salinger “does not have any power over the corporation that he created” (Houssart, 230) does not hold water. He makes intentional decisions to prop up the firm's value to maintain his position as CEO, which is under threat by an activist investor.

²² John Wells, writer, dir., Company Men (The Weinstein Company, 2010).

²³ Weeks, Kathi, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 7Google Scholar.

²⁴ Ibid., 13.

²⁵ Wells.

²⁶ Ibid.

²⁷ Linkon, “Men without Work,” 148.

²⁸ See Bernes, Jasper, The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017)Google Scholar. His first chapter in Work of Art details how artistic criticisms of industrial labor were qualitive and wound up supporting the “quantitative worsening of work” in the neoliberal era. Ibid., 17.

²⁹ I thank one of the anonymous reviewers for the Journal of American Studies for this excellent observation.

³⁰ Brayton, Sean, “Working Stiff(s) on Reality Television during the Great Recession,” Societies, 2, 4 (2012), 235–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³¹ Kinkle and Toscano, “Filming the Crisis,” 44.

³² Ibid., 43.

³³ We never hear “Glouster” mentioned when the closures come up in dialogue early in the film, but we do hear the number “three thousand jobs” that Gene reiterates later in the film. I would like to thank Alissa Karl for pointing out the strange depiction of a recently closed shipyard as a ruin.

³⁴ See Robert E. Scott, “We Can Reshore Manufacturing Jobs, but Trump Hasn't Done It: Trade Rebalancing, Infrastructure, and Climate Investments Could Create 17 Million Good Jobs and Rebuild the American Economy,” Economic Policy Institute, 10 August 2020, at www.epi.org/publication/reshoring-manufacturing-jobs.

³⁵ Martín-Cabrera, Luis, “The Potentiality of the Commons: A Materialist Critique of Cognitive Capitalism from the Cyberbracer@s to the Ley Sinde,” Hispanic Review, 80, 4 (2012), 583–605CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁶ Sisk, Christina L., “Disembodied and Deportable Labor at the U.S. Mexico-Border: Representations of the Mexican Body in Film,” TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 3, 2 (2014), 41–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁷ I again have to credit Alissa Karl for making this observation.

³⁸ Mudede has written about Rivera's patterning of Memo after Luke Skywalker, another dreamer figure with a much different outcome. See Charles Mudede, “Imagining the Past and Remembering the Future in Alex Rivera's Sleep Dealer,” E-Flux Journal, 2021, at www.e-flux.com/video/401647/alex-rivera-sleep-dealer.

³⁹ Alex Rivera (writer and dir.), Sleep Dealer (Likely Story Productions, 2008). Here and throughout the essay, I will utilize Rivera's own subtitles as translations.

⁴⁰ Camacho, Alicia Schmidt, Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the US–Mexico Borderland (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 313Google Scholar.

⁴¹ Ibid., 299.

⁴² See Šesnić, Jelena, “Dreams Deferred: The Concept of the US–Mexican Borderlands between the Global North and South,” Americana: E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary, 7, 1 (Spring 2011)Google Scholar, at https://americanaejournal.hu/vol7no1/sesnic.

⁴³ Rivera, Lysa, “Future Histories and Cyborg Labor: Reading Borderlands Science Fiction after NAFTA,” Science Fiction Studies, 39, 3 (2012), 415–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁴ See Eubanks, Virginia, Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁵ Weeks, The Problem with Work, 8.

⁴⁶ I end on this note this despite Memo, Luz, and Rudy's turn toward a life resistance outside labor, which, as I mention above, offers a potentially optimistic set of possibilities that Rivera gestures toward. That these prospects are not part of the diegesis, however, makes them feel like suggestions, rather than fully worked-out potentials.

⁴⁷ Linkon, Sherry Lee, The Half-Life of Deindustrialization: Working-Class Writing about Economic Restructuring (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2018), 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁸ See Marilyn Stasio, “Broadway Review: Lynn Nottage's Timely Drama ‘Sweat’,” Variety, 26 March 2017, at variety.com/2017/legit/reviews/sweat-review-broadway-lynn-nottage-1202015575; Charles Isherwood, “Review: Lynn Nottage's ‘Sweat’ Examines Lives Unraveling by Industry's Demise,” New York Times, 16 Aug. 2015, at www.nytimes.com/2015/08/17/theater/review-lynn-nottages-sweat-examines-lives-unraveling-by-industrys-demise.html.

⁴⁹ Nottage, Lynn, Sweat (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2015), 42Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ Ibid., 36.

⁵¹ Ibid., 30.

⁵² Fişek reads this scene differently, suggesting that Jason's objections are rooted in “the implicit dichotomy between manual and intellectual labor.” See Fişek, Emine, “The Deindustrial Generation: Memory, Biography, and the Body In Lynn Nottage's Sweat,” Pamukkale University Journal of the Social Sciences Institute, 37 (2019), 97–109, 103Google Scholar.

⁵³ Nottage, 16.

⁵⁴ Ibid., 25.

⁵⁵ Ibid., 53.

⁵⁶ Ibid., 31.

⁵⁷ Ibid., 36, 30.

⁵⁸ Connell, Liam, Precarious Labor and the Contemporary Novel (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017), 96–119CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁹ Ibid., 98.

⁶⁰ Nottage, 49.

⁶¹ Ibid., 48–49.

⁶² Linkon, The Half-Life of Deindustrialization, 61.

⁶³ Nottage, 46–47.

⁶⁴ See Julie Burrell, “Postindustrial Futurities in Contemporary Black Feminist Theater: Lynn Nottage's Sweat, Dominique Morisseau's Skeleton Crew, and Lisa Langford's The Art of Longing,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 42, 1 (2021), 58–91.

⁶⁵ Burrell, 59.

⁶⁶ Nottage, 37, 31.

⁶⁷ Ibid., 77.

⁶⁸ Fişek, “The Deindustrial Generation,” 101; Nottage, 25.

⁶⁹ Nottage, 100.

⁷⁰ Ibid., 92, 91.

⁷¹ Linkon, The Half-Life of Deindustrialization, 13.

⁷² Nottage, 20, 72.

⁷³ Ibid., 82.

⁷⁴ Late in the play, Chris recalls his father's union seemingly heroic union participation: “You looked like warriors, arms linked, standing together,” also mentioning a speech where Brucie “looked like another man, bigger, like a Transformer,” when he proclaims that the union will not be struck down. Ibid., 88. The memory of union strength in this scene commits Chris and Jason to resisting the company's offers, which we eventually see is a losing strategy. Sweat's obvious leftist leanings would suggest a sympathy with unions, but the unions in the play seem unable to protect their members from their companies’ actions.

⁷⁵ Ibid., 5, 45, 65, 107.

⁷⁶ Ibid., 34, 45, 5.

⁷⁷ Mah, Alice, Industrial Ruination, Community, and Place: Landscapes and Legacies of Urban Decline (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2012), 6–9Google Scholar.

⁷⁸ Nottage, 13, 28, 50, 61, 95, 107.

⁷⁹ Ibid., 106.

⁸⁰ Ibid., 12.

⁸¹ Fişek's take on the play focusses on how Nottage utilizes the nested narrative structure “to demonstrate how the characters remember and narrate the past, and how the ironies, elisions and blindspots of this recall can shape, support but also often undermine their efforts at mobilization.” Fişek, “The Deindustrial Generation,” 98. She and Linkon go into more detail about memory and working-class identity than I have space for in this essay.

⁸² Nottage, 72.

⁸³ Mah, 8, 9.

⁸⁴ Oscar is the exception here. We find out in the play's last scene that Oscar now manages the bar where most of the play takes place and that he “takes care” of Stan.

⁸⁵ Hurley, Jessica, Infrastructures of Apocalypse: American Literature and the Nuclear Complex (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 4–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸⁶ Nottage, 95.

⁸⁷ Burrell, “Postindustrial Futurities,” 58.

⁸⁸ Weeks, The Problem with Work, 13.