Over the past half-century, deindustrialization has transformed the lives of people across much of the North Atlantic littoral, and beyond. Factory closures and job loss devastated families and hurled many a mill town into catastrophic decline. Cascading effects went further still: deindustrialization brought enormous changes in labor organization, governance structures, settlement patterns, gender relations, political movements, cultural attitudes, and the ethnoracial composition of workforces. It changed how people came to think about their pasts and their futures.

Deindustrialization is also a phenomenon that begs for comparative and transnational analysis. Forces that drove it were global, and the pain of experiencing it was common to people across continents. But the disruption caused by the globalization of capitalism also differed by nation and locality. Deindustrialization and its politics were not the same everywhere, yet most scholarship on the subject has focused on single countries or locales. This panel takes a comparative approach by analyzing the Rust Belt regions of the United States and France—two countries that faced similar economic challenges with deindustrialization but differed in governance structures, policy traditions, company cultures, trade union organization, and much else. In the U.S. we focus on two areas: the industrial conurbation between Youngstown and Pittsburgh; and the industrial cities of eastern Pennsylvania that stretch from the Lehigh Valley south and west. In France, the focus is on the Nord and Lorraine. We are particularly interested in how cities were affected by the departure of industry, especially in terms of race and ethnicity. Steel was the dominant industry in all three locations, which will help make the cases comparable.

Lizabeth Cohen will argue that the stereotype of the displaced steel or auto worker as a White working-class man who shared similar employment and family impacts with most of his co-workers belies the reality of a workforce that was much more diverse racially and ethnically. She will investigate what we can learn about the more complex fate of workers and their communities by examining the impact of deindustrialization in the area from Youngstown to Pittsburgh.

Andrew Sandoval-Strausz will probe how, in eastern Pennsylvania, steel declined at the same time as urban populations declined, then the latter recovered, going from predominantly White to heavily Hispanic—with once-heavily-unionized cities like Allentown and Reading making the transition to a Latino majority with a weaker labor movement. This deindustrialization was accompanied by a persistent (but mostly unsuccessful) anti-immigrant politics.

Herrick Chapman will explore how workers of North African origin coped with deindustrialization in the towns of northeastern France where they had come to reside, many for over a generation. He will focus on strategies of family and community survival, with the aim of drawing comparisons with how African Americans and Hispanics grappled with similar challenges in Rust Belt America.