About Lordstown Syndrome

Lordstown Syndrome was the name given by journalists to a particular kind of discontent among auto workers at General Motors’ Lordstown Assembly plant in Ohio in the early 1970s. These workers were reacting to a newly built, fast-paced assembly line which took away much of the control they had over their own work, and forced them to work at a greatly increased speed. The term became a catchword for workers sick of their jobs and ready to let their bosses know how they felt, be it through striking, or through more physical means. In a sense, this “syndrome” is characteristic of many of the changes in American manufacturing in the 1970s, and the workplaces forged out of this back and forth between workers and management are the factories and offices of the twenty-first century American economy. The wages, benefits, pensions, workplace rules, union representation, and management styles of today have all been shaped by the politics and economics of the few years that followed the outbreak of Lordstown Syndrome in northeast Ohio in 1972.

Between October 2010 and September 2011 I was an MPhil candidate at the University of Sussex. I didn’t complete my thesis, but I learnt a lot in the process of researching recent American labor history. My research explored the history of the West Virginian coal mining industry since 1968, focusing on mine safety from the Farmington disaster to the Upper Big Branch disaster in April 2010. Lordstown Syndrome, as a blog, intends to put that research into the context of a larger history of work and employment in America since 1945.

Many of the sources I used for my research are available online, so I’ll try to write about them and link to them here as often as possible. I’m interested in digital history, so occasionally I might post about sites or projects that I find interesting, even if they’re not directly related to labor history or the late twentieth century.

I’ll try to be as objective as possible in writing about my research. If I have a bias toward writing about organized labor or from workers’ points of view it’s because those are the issues I find interesting. I am also a worker, so it needs to be said that all views published here are my own, and in no way represent the views of my employer, or anyone else.