Oral histories of the mill
Forty-one interviews with former mill workers, and what they remember that the payroll does not.
Abstract
We collected forty-one oral histories from former employees of a textile mill that closed in 1998, and compared their accounts of shift patterns, injuries, and informal childcare with the mill’s surviving payroll and incident records. Workers consistently described a second economy of swapped shifts and shared childcare that the records do not register, and dated their memories to the mill’s own calendar of layoffs rather than to years. We argue that oral history in industrial settings recovers not only missing events but a missing unit of time, and we propose a coding scheme for handling calendar mismatches between testimony and record.