Deindustrialization refers to the long-term economic and political shift whereby the United States has been steadily transformed from a manufacturing economy into a service economy Where once manufacturing made up over a quarter of all employment in the nation, by the mid-1990s it made up just over 15 percent. In the place of these jobs, once the bedrock of a unionized, middleclass workforce, there has emerged a massive increase in the “service sector” (approximately three-quarters of the workforce today), whose jobs tend to be non-union, low-paid and unstable.

While deindustrialization has been almost wholly naturalized in the mainstream press and media, an inevitable product of an equally “natural” globalization, in fact it has been the product of political decisions as well as workings of economic markets. The resurgence of Europe and Asia—in part funded by the United States—after the Second World War ultimately created competitors to America’s industrial dominance.

Technology also made labor-intensive industries such as steel—a foundry of America’s industrial might—more “efficient” with the use of automated machinery and computers.

But this process has also been encouraged in recent years as politicians on both the Left and Right have embraced free trade as the answer to America’s declining economic dominance. In the 1980s and 1990s, NAFTA—the North American Free Trade Agreement—galvanized both those who saw free trade as a way to spur American exports and those—led by the AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labor/Congress of Industrial Organization)—who saw the legislation as paving the way for further flight of industry to cheap-labor countries. While America remains the leading industrial power, jobs in traditional manufacturing bases continue to flee to Asia and to Central and South America.

The results of deindustrialization transformed the social and cultural landscape of urban America in the last quarter of the twentieth century. One could stand on Broad Street in the midst of North Philadelphia, PA, to take just one example, turn around 360 degrees, and see where 100,000 wellpaid, and unionized, jobs had once been. Empty shells are all that remain. The economic power and associated political power have fled downtown to the financial and legal enterprises housed in skyscrapers and to the suburbs and exurbs, where those who could fled.

Artists and writers of all types have necessarily responded to a powerful new landscape. Where once the bustling factory complexes and unworldly machinery was a staple of American art—in, for example, the paintings of Ford’s River Rouge plant in Detroit, MI by Charles Scheeler—now the empty factory and its declining neighborhood define the urban views of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The wonder at America’s industrial might has been replaced by the more troubled views of urban America in a state of apparently steady decline. The works of writers such as Nelson Algren and Claude Brown, and later, John Edgar Wideman, to name just a few, take as their setting and theme the declining fate of the industrial American city. Perhaps the most powerful recent portrait of deindustrialization was Michael Moore’s tragicomedy of the decline of Flint, Michigan, once a bastion of General Motors. Roger and Me (1989) portrays the social upheaval and physical collapse—from eviction to demolition of factories to the return of grass and trees—of a once-thriving industrial city.