For example, suburbanization has clearly had an impact on community life: when you are spending a significant part of your day traveling to and from work, and when home is isolated from community centers where communal activities could go on, there are effects.
Would that the labor movement had the power to so significantly shape, by itself, the consciousness of working people...
I sez:
My aim is not to bash post-war bureaucratic unionism, but as a matter of empirical fact, the UAW, the USW, the rubber workers' union, the construction trades, etc., were all part and parcel of the post-war "Fordist" capital-labor compromise in which rising levels of material well-being (measured quantitatively) for privileged sectors of the working class (as well as job security and perks for union bureaucrats) were swapped for a ripping apart of the _gemeinschaft_ (measured qualitiatively) of urban ethnic working-class community.
This also relates to threads on "global warming" and "transit and the spatial form of capitalist cities" ...
John Gulick