Working-Class Disillusionment Theme Analysis

Sweat is preceded by an excerpt from Langston Hughes’s “Let America Be America Again,” a poem that critiques the false promise of the American Dream and encourages poor and working-class Americans (among other marginalized groups) to rise up and “make America again”—essentially to “redeem” the oppression they’ve faced and the opportunities they’ve been cheated out of. However, Sweat’s cast of characters is anything but empowered: rather than resist the hand they’ve been dealt, they have little choice but to make ends meet by laboring in Olstead’s Steel Tubing plant and to weather the early-2000s downturn of the U.S. manufacturing industry. Under these conditions, the play’s main characters rapidly fall into personal decline that mirrors the economic decline affecting their hometown of Reading, Pennsylvania, and the rest of the Rust Belt. Whereas news coverage (such as the headlines included at the beginning of each act) tends to focus on how corporate leaders and stockholders are affected by shifts in the economy, Sweat serves as a case study in how working-class individuals are those most hurt by economic decline. The play argues that in such situations, communities like Reading bear the worst burden, as they’re left financially destitute, outraged, and steeped in disillusionment.

The rise of industry that Reading, Pennsylvania, has experienced over the years has left the town largely unrecognizable to residents who were born and raised there. Tracey, a longtime employee at Olstead’s Steel Tubing plant, bittersweetly recalls how Reading used to be when she was a child. She’s adamant that her German immigrant family “built this town,” and that her grandfather was a talented woodworker—back then, she says, “if you worked with your hands people respected you for it.” However, now that large-scale industrial manufacturing has taken over Reading, Tracey and the rest of the working-class population are left longing for the former reverence that manual laborers and craftsmen enjoyed. Indeed, this feeling of underappreciation is a common sentiment in Reading. Stan, a local bartender and former Olstead’s worker, is embittered by the new management at the plant. The clean-cut young men with MBAs who now oversee Olstead’s refuse to “understand the real cost, the human cost” of labor, leaving floor workers feeling overlooked, exploited, and replaceable. Notably, many employees have essentially put their aspirations on hold to start at Olstead’s straight out of high school—Tracey’s friend Jessie, for instance, gave up on her dreams of backpacking in Alaska and Asia to start at the plant at 18. By 2000, when most of the play takes place, steel manufacturing is so ingrained in Reading’s culture that people’s very identities are defined by their roles in the industry.

However, the fall of industry is even more impactful than the rise: when Olstead’s and other local mills begin cutting costs and instituting lockouts, workers turn to self-destructive behavior as they’re left feeling distraught and alienated in their own hometown. When Olstead’s begins relocating its equipment and transferring management, it’s rumored that the company is taking advantage of NAFTA by outsourcing its labor to Mexico. This is never directly confirmed, but regardless, pay and benefits are cut—and the employees are locked out of the plant until they agree to these concessions. Literally overnight, Olstead’s floor workers are left with no jobs and no answers, a situation that exemplifies how working-class communities are devastated by such downturns in the manufacturing sector. Olstead’s is only one of multiple local plants that has locked out its employees, and in the wake of this mass unemployment, Reading’s working-class community falls into despair. Brucie, who works at a textile mill that has been locked out for nearly two years, becomes dependent on drugs to numb the desperation and sense of hopelessness that comes with unemployment. His son Chris and Tracey’s son Jason, who are locked out of Olstead’s, alternate between protesting on the union line and seething with rage as they drink at the bar where Stan works. Tracey and Jessie—lost, aimless, and embittered—similarly turn to alcohol. Essentially, the community undergoes a kind of collective existential crisis when the industry to which they’ve dedicated their lives begins to crumble, resulting in their own self-destruction.

Ultimately, this community-wide sense of despair culminates in violence—a trajectory that exemplifies the negative chain reaction that economic downturn can have on working-class people. When Jason and Chris’s wrath over losing their jobs finally reaches its breaking point, they lash out and physically attack Oscar, a busboy at the bar who’s begun working at Olstead’s for a lower wage while the regular employees are locked out. Oscar is, of course, not to blame for the lockout, but the fact that he has a job at the plant is too much for the other men to bear—a clear example of how economic strife can lead otherwise reasonable, hardworking people to desperately and senselessly lash out. However, Stan is the one who ends up injured in this altercation: Jason grabs a baseball bat from behind the bar and accidentally hits Stan in the head instead of Oscar, leaving Stan with a traumatic brain injury and landing Jason and Chris with eight-year prison sentences for the assault. This tragic chain of events shows just how devastating economic decline can be on working-class people, resulting not only in self-destructive behavior but in the ruining of an innocent man’s life. The effects of downturn and job-loss radiate outward to affect not only businesses, but the psychological wellbeing of laborers and the integrity of the communities to which they belong.

Sweat doesn’t end on an entirely pessimistic note, however. In 2008, after Chris and Jason are released from prison, Chris reveals his intentions to complete his bachelor’s degree in lieu of the Albright College teaching program he dreamed of attending before his sentencing. Oscar, meanwhile, has worked his way up to become the manager of the bar. Years after the initial decline of the manufacturing industry, the play plants these seeds of hope to send the message that although economic changes and failing industries are inevitable, there are still other avenues by which ordinary, working-class people can “make America again.”