TEAMSTER METROPOLIS: Book event with author Ryan Murphy

ESFL’s Labor Advisory Committee invites you to a special author event with Ryan Murphy, and his new book, TEAMSTERS METROPOLIS.  A native of the Twin Cities and a graduate of Macalester College, Ryan is Associate Professor of History at Earlham College in Indiana and President of the faculty union (American Association of University Professors) there.  In the early 2000s, Ryan was President of a San Francisco-based local of the Association of Flight Attendants.  His experiences were the basis for his first book, DEREGULATING DESIRE: FLIGHT ATTENDANT ACTIVISM, FAMILY POLITICS, AND WORKPLACE JUSTICE.

His new book, TEAMSTERS METROPOLIS, analyzes how, in the 1950s, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters empowered poor immigrants who had grown up in the crowded blocks of the central city to move upward and outward to comfortable suburbs. It delivered unprecedented benefits to workers—especially to those in retail, services, and light manufacturing—locking in hourly pay that bought the patio furniture sets, the pontoon boats, and the station wagons that defined the consumer culture of the decade. Yet suburban comfort came with strict, new institutions that defined the middle-class culture of the era: the nuclear family, heterosexual monogamy, the husband breadwinner, and the dependent wife. Many workers yearned for the pleasures they left behind in the core of the industrial city, even as poor people, people of color, and queer people were locked out of the suburbs.

Ryan will be joined in conversation by several current activists in the Teamsters Union, based in Twin Cities locals.  We expect our audience — you — to also play an active part in the conversation.  Copies of TEAMSTERS METROPOLIS will be available for purchase.