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Mollie's Job: A Story of Life and Work on the Global Assembly Line. By William Adler. New York: Scribner, 2000. 350 pp. Notes and index. Cloth, $27. 50. ISBN 0-684-83779-X.
Reviewed by Steve Babson
By concentrating on the history of a single company, Universal Manufacturing, and the job of a single employee, Mollie James, author William Adler attempts the most difficult of tasks: projecting the broad sweep of economic history through the narrow prism of lived experience. His biographical sketches of Mollie, her employers, and many other welldrawn characters produce a compelling picture of the historical forces transforming our economy over the last century.
In Part I, "Paterson," Adler describes the context and early history of Universal's founding: from Alexander Hamilton's promotion of Paterson, New Jersey, as an early center of American industry; to the mass immigration of East European peoples that, in 1910, brought Archie Sergy's Lithuanian-Jewish parents to Paterson; to Sergy's hustling, grind-it-out entrepreneurship as he founded Universal and, from the 1940s onward, expanded the company into the manufacturing of parts for fluorescent lighting; to the mass migration of southern blacks that, in the 1950s, brought Mollie northward from Virginia to Universal's Paterson plant, where she became a coil-winder and a union steward.
Part II, "Mississippi," chronicles the opening of Universal's whitesonly, nonunion factories in the South during the 1960s, and the complex process that finally brought unionization and racial integration to these plants. In Part III, "Mexico," the focus shifts further south as Universal, now a division of Magnetek, opens a factory in Matamoros and closes the Paterson plant, forcing Mollie into retirement on Social Security and a Teamster pension of $73 a month. With the closing of Universal's southern plants in the 1990s, Adler's story turns to the Matamoros factory and a workforce that...