- Dudley, Kathryn Marie. The End of the Line: Lost Jobs, New Lives in Postindustrial America. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press; 1994. 224 p. (Wolfe, Alan. Morality and Society Series. Notes: An anthropologist looks at the difficult 1988 closing of the large Chrysler automobile assembly plant in Kenosha, Wisconsin and explores the various strategies utilized on all sides affected by this corporate decision–the company, local government, and the approximately six thousand employees laid off from the plant. Dudley, with family ties to Kenosha, explores the struggles of the plant’s workers in their confrontation with the long-term, national trend of the deindustrialization of the United States and the conflicting ideas in the community about what the city needed to do next to re-build, in the face of the loss of the city’s major industrial employer.The first union representing the workers at the Kenosha automobile assembly plant had begun in September 1933 as Federal Labor Union No. 19008 with a charter from the American Federation of Labor (A.F.L.), but was re-chartered in November 1935 as United Automobile Workers Local 72, shortly after formation by the AFL of the United Auto Workers union. The Kenosha assembly plant had begun as the Jeffery Company in 1902 until Charles Nash purchased the company in 1916 and changed the name to Nash Motors. In 1954, Nash Motors merged with the Hudson Motor Car Company to form the American Motors Corporation (A.M.C.). A partnership made in 1978 with the French automaker, Renault, lasted until August 1987, when Renault was bought out by the Chrysler corporation. Then, despite having received many millions of dollars in financial assistance from the state and local government to upgrade the production facility, Chrysler announced on January 27, 1988 that the workforce at the Kenosha plant would be slashed by June 1988 from 6,400 employees to only 900 and that the plant would be completely closed by July 1988. Because of an extension of a few months, however, car production in Kenosha did continue until two days before Christmas in 1988.Another edition: Dudley, Kathryn Marie. The End of the Line: Lost Jobs, New Lives in Postindustrial America. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1997. 224 p. ISBN: 0226169103 (pbk.)