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Description of  Building a Social Contract: Modern Workers' Houses in Early-Twentieth Century Detroit (Urban Life, Landscape and Policy)

The dream of the modern workers house emerged in early twentieth-century America as wage earners gained access to new, larger, and better-equipped dwellings. Building a Social Contract is a cogent history of the houses those workers dreamed of and labored for. Michael McCulloch chronicles the efforts of employers, government agencies, and the building industry who, along with workers themselves, produced an unprecedented boom in housing construction that peaked in the mid-1920s. Through oral histories, letters, photographs, and period fiction, McCulloch traces wage earners agency in negotiating a new implicit social contract, one that rewarded hard work with upward mobility in modern houses. This promise reflected workers increased bargaining power but, at the same time, left them increasingly vulnerable to layoffs. Read more