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This study exposes the human side of the decline of the US auto industry, tracing the experience of two key groups of General Motors workers: those who took a cash buyout and left the factory, and those who remained and felt the effects of new technology and other workplace changes. In includes extensive interviews and surveys of workers from the Linden, New Jersey General Motors plant, which reveal their profound hatred for the factory regime, a longstanding discontent made worse by the decline of the auto workers union in the 1980s. It offers both a workers' perspective and a historical perspective to the study of this topic. The text finds that the Linden buyout-takers express no nostalgia for the high-paying manufacturing jobs they left behind. Given the chance to make a new start in the late 1980s, they were eager to leave the plant with its authoritarian, prison-like conditions, and few had any regrets about their decision five years later.