Working

In 1974, Studs Terkel published Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. An (appropriately) workmanlike title and subtitle combination, it’s hard to beat.

The book is a massive collection of over a hundred oral history interviews spanning people from a wide range of occupations: a strip miner, a switchboard operator, a sex worker, a washroom attendant, a meter reader, a football coach, a priest, a stonemason, and on and on. Some of the work is glamorous, and some of it is almost socially invisible. Some of the jobs have lasted, and others have faded away. Some people like their work, and some are fed up with it. Almost all of them open up to Terkel in meaningful ways, giving invaluable on-the-ground portraits of their labor — this book scratches my itch for process and detail like nothing else — and off-the-cuff portraits of their lives, minds, and souls.¹

What makes work satisfying? The interviews are expansive, but this is the question they circle back to time and again. Terkel’s introduction highlights the discussion of a job as “a search, too, for daily meaning as well as daily bread,” and it’s true that relatively few of his interviewees seem able to divorce themselves from their work, to skate lightly over its surface and only dig in elsewhere.² It makes them all critics of a kind, mining (sometimes unpromising) material for hints of truth. What does this say about life? What does it say about me? How do I experience it?

The negatives — the soul-suckers, the forces eating away at that daily meaning and often at the daily bread, too — are plain. Pain, of course, is a big one, from familiar sore feet—“I wear out on average about three to five pairs of shoes a year”—and stiff muscles to the specific agonies of luggage felter Grace Clements:

I have arthritis in the joints of some of my fingers. Your hands handling hot pieces perspire and you end up with rheumatism or arthritis in your fingers. Naturally in your shoulder, balancing that wet piece [of felt]. You’ve got the heat, you’ve got the moisture because there’s steam coming out. You have the possibilities of being burnt with steam when the hot die hits that wet felt. You’re just engulfed in a cloud of steam every forty seconds.

All this for, often, very little respect. A lack of recognition takes its toll³, whether it comes from society — we meet subjects who don’t like to tell people what they do for a living, or who watch people visibly lose interest in them when the truth comes out — or from employers. One of the most vivid examples of the latter may come from Maggie Holmes, a sometimes-maid whose white clients will hide their mops from her to try to convince her she “has” to clean their floors on her knees. (Maggie doesn’t fall for it.) When you spend eight hours a day, five days a week being systematically diminished, or when that diminishment, in a work-obsessed culture, follows you around even after the day is done, what does that do to you? In Working, we mostly see the people who, like Maggie, can push back, the ones who still have voices to complain. I wonder how many people brushed Terkel off because they’d been taught they weren’t interesting enough.

The most ubiquitous problem is probably monotony. Spot-welder Phil Stallings, standing in the same place — “about a two- or three-feet area”— at a Ford plant day after day, year after year, pushing the same welding gun button “thirty-two times forty-eight times eight” times a shift, dreams of being a utility man who can float between different units and tasks. Phil’s hunt for meaning in his work has been mostly exhausted, and he knows to lay the blame squarely on Ford (“First thing they try to do is break your spirit”). What, he asks, is he supposed to do? Look at what he does all day, look at how his perspective is forcibly narrowed down to the same button and the same task, over and over again. When he spots problems in the making, his foreman blows him off. It’s like a window sometimes opens up — I could make a difference here — and then gets ruthlessly closed.

“You have to have pride,” Phil says. “So you throw it off to something else. And that’s my stamp collection.” It’s a capsule summary of the value of “quiet quitting,” which is a bit of a bastardized version of an organized labor “work-to-rule” strike — which makes it unsurprising that Phil’s interview, like so many in the book, leads into the value of workers standing by each other.

That’s the meaning that erupts into Phil’s otherwise static, apathetic routine. When he tells Terkel about how they all stopped the line at Ford—protesting on behalf of a Black coworker the foreman had been hassling — it feels almost transcendent: “That’s the first time I’ve seen unity on the line. Now it’s happened once, it’ll happen again. Because everybody just sat down. Believe you me. … Everybody and his brother was down there. It was really nice to see, it really was.”

Unsurprisingly, then, when people talk about what makes a good job, one of the obvious answers is camaraderie. (In 1974, cross-racial camaraderie was a fairly new and often chancy prospect, and the success or failure of various workplaces’ integration tactics comes up often.) Sometimes, it’s as simple as liking the people you work with, but it’s notable how often that camaraderie leads to organization. If you care about the person next to you, then, as Phil shows, you organize almost by default.

And while sporadic complaints pop up even from the non-bosses — short-haul truck driver Frank Decker was so fed up with the corrupt Teamsters’ Union that he helped split his fellow workers off into the regrettably named FASH, Fraternal Association of Steel Haulers — an overwhelming majority of interviewees praise their unions. The unions insist on better pay for a more reasonable amount of work, and they can be a godsend when it comes to cutting down on a job’s pain and monotony. They may even do something about the lack of recognition: maybe, one subject says, respect today comes from how hard and well you fight for your rights.⁴

The people who get involved on more than a dues-paying level often find themselves rewarded for it, too. Grace Clements, who made the luggage factory floor seem hellish, now spends an hour every day chairing the grievance committee and even more time editing the union paper: “I do all my own work. I cut stencils, I write the articles, copy the pictures. … It takes about five hours to do a paper. Two nights.” The spillover of work into her home life is, for once, positive. It’s become a vocation and even a kind of philosophy:

Before the union came in, all I did was do my eight hours, collect my paycheck, and go home, did my housework, took care of my daughter, and went back to work. I had no outside interests. You just lived to live. Since I became active in the union, I’ve become active in politics, in the community, in legislative problems. I’ve been to Washington on one or two trips. I’ve been to Springfield. That has given more of an incentive for life.

Her passion helps make Working a corrective for something else she says—something that will only become truer with time, in today’s America: “[Before this,] I didn’t understand the labor movement at all. In school you’re shown the bad side of it.”

Jobs are also better, Terkel’s subjects believe, when you have something to show for them. One of the book’s prefaces comes from stonemason Carl Murray Bates, who says, “I can’t imagine a job where you go home and maybe go by a year later and you don’t know what you’ve done. … All my work is set right out there in the open and I can look at it as I go by. It’s something I can see the rest of my life.” A lot of the men in construction come back to this, even their contributions to a project are small. Any finished project, whatever its purpose, is a monument to their labor.

These monuments don’t have to be huge or even permanent, however. Housewife Therese Carter bemoans the sad fate of a factory worker who must concentrate only on small pieces of a whole: “That poor man doesn’t even get to see the finished product. I’ll sit here and I’ll cook a pie and I’ll get to see everyone eat it. This is my offering. I think it’s the greatest satisfaction in the world to know you’ve pleased somebody.”

It’s even enough, maybe, to know you’ve pleased yourself, to be able to take pride in execution, like the parking lot attendant — a book highlight — who’s been known to get cars into impossible spots with ease: “They call me Lovin’ Al, the Wizard, One-Swing Al — I’m known from Peking to Hong Kong, from the West Coast to Pecos.”

Lovin’ Al is getting older, though. Aren’t we all? He knows his glory days are behind him — “I was like a prize fighter, he turn in his gloves at thirty”—because his reflexes and coordination aren’t what they used to be. As vaunted a position as the white-collar job holds in society, and as usefully long an arc as it can have, Working suggests that the most satisfying work often has some grounding physical element. It has Lovin’ Al’s swing or supermarket checker Babe Secoli’s dance:

I use my three fingers [on the register] … the right hand. And my left hand is on the groceries. They put down their groceries. I got my hips pushin’ on the button and it rolls around on the counter. When I feel I have enough groceries in front of me, I let go of my hip. I’m just movin’—the hips, the hand, and the register, the hips, the hand, and the register. … You just keep goin’, one, two, one two. If you’ve got that rhythm, you’re a fast checker.

The motion causes the pain, but the motion is also a ritual that can be memorized and perfected. It’s a reward for the body as well as for the mind. I said up top that I’m a sucker for process, and I notice that Terkel often gets the best practice from the subjects who are alive to what work asks of their bodies, for good or for ill. They know what they’re doing. Abstraction creeps in more often when Terkel interviews people whose jobs have no prominent physical element: Pauline Kael doesn’t talk about being a film critic but about the world of work in the movies, jumping past her own experience completely. Kael was probably as well- or better-pleased with her job as anyone here, but the book does gradually prompt you into believing that maybe part of the glory, even for a film critic, should be in the sharpening of pencils or the hitting of keys. The awareness of a theater seat beneath you. Something needs to have the tangibility of a switchboard operator, careful of her nails, reaching up to make a connection.

It’s no surprise that the good and bad of work are so entangled, and it’s to the book’s credit that you can theorize about its subject but not boil it down. It wouldn’t be an oral history if it weren’t an irreducible polyphony of different voices, different priorities, and (especially) different stories. Really, I’ve talked so much about the book’s multitude of ideas because it wouldn’t be much of a write-up to say, about a thousand times, “Oh, there’s this one part—” But there is this one part, and it’s the cascading effect of all those “one parts” that makes Working such a necessary read if you care at all about ordinary American life in this era. I want to tell everyone how the decline of the half-dollar affected washroom attendants and the demise of apartment incinerators affected garbagemen. How a publicist promoted Iceland and saved John Jacob Astor from scandal. How Black bus drivers watched a comfortable, respected job get less comfortable and less respected once they moved into it. How there used to be a job that was an unholy combination of debt collecting and personal shopping.

Oral histories are, by Jane Smiley’s reckoning⁵, gossip as much as history and essay, or rather gossip heightened to essay and history and essay and history humanized to gossip. “People talk,” as the subtitle says. I keep coming back because that talk is irresistible, and I was glad this Year of the Month gave me an excuse to share some of it.

1. Those are a highlight even when they’re not about the work. Booker Page, a cab driver, wins my heart by talking about how his wife “gets up and dances with [him] to the bathroom” when he wakes up for a middle-of-the-night pee: “She’ll walk ahead of me and I’ll put my arms around her waist and we’d fox trot up the hallway.” That this comes in the middle of an interview where he candidly talks about all the casual affairs he had as a sailor gives you an idea of the rich and varied anecdotal texture of this book. ↩︎
2. Maybe, sadly, that’s because some of their jobs keep them too tired and sore for it. When you’re exhausted, clocking out is about finally resting, and that’s all. ↩︎
3. Sometimes, at least the interviewees can find a kind of weary humor in it, as with the hotel clerk who notes that adulterers often overtip the bellhops, who can’t cover for them, and skimp on tipping the clerks, who can. Know enough people’s occupations to find out who can help you with your torrid affairs, America! ↩︎
4. When you still feel a lack of respect, you make shit up. White cop Vincent Maher, who can’t stop imitating Black men’s voices and defending police brutality, spirals off into the most r/thathappened fantasy I’ve ever heard in my life:
    
   A few years ago there was this hippie, long-haired, slovenly. He confronted me. Don’t ever confront me when I tell you to move. That’s a no-no. To make a long story short … I cut a piece of his long hair off and I handed it back to him. With a knife. It was just a spontaneous reaction. He was screaming “brutality.” Anyway, a couple of weeks later I was confronted by this nice-looking fellow in a suit, haircut, everything. He said, “Officer, do you recognize me?” He pulled out this cellophane packet and handed it to me, and there was his hair in it. (Laughs.) I said, “That’s you?” And he said, “Yeah. You showed me one thing. You really care about people. I just had to go out and get a job and prove something to you.” That kid joined the Marine Corps.
    
   Sure he did, Vince! (Anyway, it’s hilarious how much Studs Terkel, who usually stays out of it, hates this guy and makes that clear in his editing.) ↩︎
5. Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel. ↩︎