| Sumario: | A legacy of coal mining and manufacturing work in Appalachia has linked regional working-class identity and perceptions of the region to shared experiences of dangerous and stigmatised dirty work. At the same time, manufacturing work here increasingly relies on computerised machinery, systematised practices of cleanliness, and ties to global corporations. This paper, based on 18 months of ethnographic field research explores practices of cleanliness and contamination at a multinational auto parts manufacturing plant in Appalachian Kentucky – a region whose labour history is closely intertwined with ideologies of dirt, class, and moral reform. Findings show that workers negotiate belonging and class identity through strategies of embracing or avoiding dirt and performing practices and personas of cleanliness at work. I argue that lean manufacturing ideals of cleanliness, and their negotiation, intersect with larger discourses of dirty work in Appalachia and the US South to reproduce local ideologies and symbolic categories of class difference.
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