This article focuses on the contents and transformations that, with the crisis of the industrial system, have characterized the working class, its constitutive rules, behaviors and social practices of blue-collar workers in and out of the factory. The analysis is based on a longitudinal survey that has touched several aspects of the process of de-industrialization that has affected Piombino, one of the main Italian steel areas. The study here proposed is based biographical interviews, realized among three different groups of steel workers selected according to the period in which they were hired into the factory.
Keywords: Working class, working and living conditions, economic and social regulation of work, steel industry, Piombino