Working-class Suburb : A Study of Auto Workers in Suburbia

Working-Class Suburb: A Study of Auto Workers in Suburbia by Bennett M. Berger is a landmark sociological inquiry into the lived realities of industrial workers transplanted from urban centers to the postwar suburban frontier. Triggered by the 1955 relocation of Ford’s Richmond, California, assembly plant to Milpitas in the Santa Clara Valley, Berger set out to explore whether better-paid assembly line families would absorb the styles, aspirations, and status practices then associated with the emergent middle-class suburb. Drawing on intensive interviews with one hundred Ford households, he demonstrates that suburban tracts did not automatically transform working-class identities. Despite homeownership and new neighborhoods, the respondents’ rural origins, limited educational attainment, and occupational experiences anchored them to durable working-class cultures. Berger’s work challenges the midcentury assumption that geography alone reshaped class, arguing instead for the persistence of cultural and structural determinants in shaping social life.

The book situates the Milpitas tract as both particular and emblematic—one among many new communities in booming Western industrial regions. Berger details the backgrounds of Ford families, their migration histories, and the generational continuities of class and culture. His methods—household interviews, comparative questions contrasting pre- and post-move experiences, and careful attention to the voices of wives and children—offer an unusually rich composite portrait. In probing suburban life as lived by working people rather than idealized by media caricature, Berger opens a critical perspective on how class persists amid economic mobility, housing policy, and rapid urban change. Working-Class Suburb remains an essential reference for scholars of labor, urban sociology, and postwar American culture, illuminating how the promise of suburbia intersected with the realities of class formation.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1960.