Paper Short Abstract:

Based on an ethnography with former industrial workers in a de-industrialised town on the outskirts of Lisbon, the paper discusses their at once realistic and nostalgic memories of their lost industrial work and life, taking into account the transient industrialisation they experienced and the inherent complexities of the waged labour relationship.

Paper Abstract:

In a Portuguese town north-west of Lisbon that has experienced a transient industrialisation – where manufacturing and industrial work as a dominant way of life materialised and then disappeared in the space of four decades – women create complex memories of their time as industrial workers.

While they are quite vocal about the material and relational hardships of factory work and the difficulties of their dual role as wage earners and family mothers, they nonetheless remember themselves fondly as stable, skilled, competent and well-paid industrial workers.

I will argue that this realistic nostalgia for lost industrial work is reinforced by the transitory nature of the industrialisation process that these women experienced and were part of, inviting them to evaluate their condition as industrial workers against both earlier periods of poverty and contemporary job (and hence life) precarity.

Theirs is also a realist perspective in the sense that it implicitly captures deindustrialisation (in the various forms it can take) as a political and class project that devalues labour (High 2020; Strangelman 2017) and pushes working people into low‑cost ways of life.

Moreover, these women’s complex memories of industrial work and life also capture the complex experience of waged work itself: its many, often conflicting sides, where hardship and exploitation, on the one hand, and the struggle for a subjective sense of value and purpose, on the other, typically coexist.