This project examines the ways working-class people have been represented in the public relations literature and photography of the Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation. It focuses on company representations of workers during the height of union power, investigating how J&L coped with the changing dynamic brought by the union era. It goes on to question whether, as the steel industry declined, these representations had lasting consequences for the way people remember the days of powerful organized labor.

As the rise of unionism in the steel industry changed the way corporations dealt with their workforces, the arena of culture and representation became more and more important. Companies employed diverse means to foster a culture of individualism in workers and their communities that opposed the culture of solidarity upon which the union depended. In the case of J&L, this effort reflects a complex contest of meaning in which workers were not only consumers, but producers of the cultural texts that were mobilized. Chapter one shows how the company magazine evolved into a collaborative project of representation as workers began contributing their own photographs and stories. Corporate images and workers' snapshots came together, mixing images of industry and domesticity, production and consumption. Chapter two investigates employees' participation in a company history, showing how the company used workers' keepsakes to replace a long history of struggle with a progress narrative in which the company appears as the heroic benefactor of labor. Chapter three recounts the PR department's hiring of Roy Stryker, famed director of the Farm Security Administration photography project of the 193o's, to create a documentary file that focused especially on workers. All of these corporate endeavors sought to strengthen workers' bonds with the company at the expense of traditional labor solidarity.

The final chapter describes how people in former steelmaking communities remain connected to a history of industrial production. Three J&L-related memory projects exemplify various ways of commemorating steelmaking and suggest the extent to which a memory of past labor struggle could be mobilized to face new challenges to economic justice in the present.