Double Shifts

“If that machine breaks down, there’s someone out there to fix it right away. If I break down, I’m just pushed over to the other side till another man takes my place. The only thing they have on their mind is to keep that line running.”

—FACTORY WORKER PHIL STALLINGS, SPEAKING TO STUDS TERKEL, WORKING (1974)

EW PLACES ARE AS SIMULTANEOUSLY PROFANE AND SACRED, DIGNIFIED AND degrading, empowering and subjugating as the factory floor. There can be an intimacy, physical and otherwise, among workers, coterminous with alienation between workers and supervisors, blue and white collars. Some recent films have documented the contentious and seemingly futile state of affairs inside today’s factories, such as (Rahul Jain, 2016), Of (Charlotte Pouch, 2017), and (Lech Kowalski, 2019), which premiered at this past Cannes in the Directors’ Fortnight. Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s (2015) might be