Chapter 4 opens by investigating the ways in which working-class communities and workers had traditionally understood disability: as an anticipated, if feared, outcome of working life, but not as a cause for stigma. While bodily modifications such as missing fingers, crushed limbs, blinded eyes, or weakened lungs often brought a loss of skill and income, injured workers continued to work, often in the informal labor market. Mechanization and the drive for efficiency, however, provided employers with new notions of what made a good worker. With the striking exception of the Ford Motor Company, almost all major industrial employers began to believe that a modern, mechanized, and efficient workplace required employees with intact, interchangeable bodies. Henry Ford, however, demonstrated that, if carefully handled, mechanization could actually expand the range of employable bodies.
Not Quite Formal: Theorizing the Informal Labor Market Experiences of “Documented” Immigrant Workers
