Jeremy Milloy is a scholar who researches, writes, and teaches about work, violence, addiction, and capitalism in Canada and the United States.
The 1978 film Blue Collar, starring Richard Pryor, is far from pleasant. But its riveting portrait of the brutality of life and work for American autoworkers still makes for essential viewing today.
Auto work is typically remembered as one of the best industrial jobs a worker could get in postwar America. Less remembered, however, is how absolutely brutal and violent life on the auto factory floor was — and still is.