Blood, Sweat, and Fear

Blood, Sweat, and Fear explores workplace violence through the prism of autoworkers’ experience, tracing the influences of capitalism, class conflict, race, and gender in the North American auto industry.

The first full-length historical exploration of individual violence in the automotive industry, Blood, Sweat, and Fear taps the class, race, and gendered roots of the workplace as battleground.

Going postal. We think of the rogue employee who snaps. But in Blood, Sweat, and Fear, Jeremy Milloy demonstrates that workplace violence never occurs in isolation. Using violence as a lens, he provides fresh and original insights into the everyday workings of capitalism, class conflict, race, and gender in the United States and Canada of the late twentieth century, bringing historical perspective to contemporary debates about North American violence.

Milloy has produced the first full-length historical exploration of the origins and effects of individual violence in the automotive industry. His gripping analysis spans 1960 to 1980, when North American auto plants were routinely the sites of fights, assaults, and even murders, and argues that violence resulted primarily from workplace conditions including on-the-job exploitation, racial tension, bureaucratization, and hypermasculinity.

This explosive book reveals that workplace violence has been a constant aspect of class conflict – and that our understanding needs to go deeper.