“We’re Gonna Shut This Place Down”
David Ranney was part of the wave of US revolutionaries who went into factories in the 1970s to organize workers. In an interview, he discusses his new book about those explosive years — and the pitched battles his coworkers waged against both their corrupt union and the company.
A vacant factory in Chicago, IL, June 2018.Atomicdragon136 / Wikimedia
In 1976, David Ranney gave up his tenured academic job to organize on the South Side of Chicago. He ended up working in a number of factories in Chicago and Northwest Indiana — home at the time to roughly one and a half million industrial jobs, one of the largest concentrations of heavy industry in the world — while also providing pro bono legal assistance at the Workers’ Rights Center and organizing with socialist groups like the Sojourner Truth Organization and News and Letters.
Ranney writes about those years in his new book, Living and Dying on the Factory Floor: From the Outside In and the Inside Out. Jacobin contributor Jarrod Shanahan recently interviewed Ranney about factory life in the early days of deindustrialization, the highs and lows of a strike he and his coworkers waged against the company and their corrupt union, and strategies for organizing under global capitalism today.
Jarrod Shanahan
While the Chicago region was at this time synonymous with metal production, as you point out, steel mills themselves only accounted for about one-seventh of a diverse industrial landscape. What kind of shops did you work in?
David Ranney
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