Studs Terkel’s Working is possibly the most depressing book I’ve read. It was also one of the hardest books I’ve read too. The book is a collection of interviews Terkel did over the years talking to a variety of people across the country about their jobs. The difficulty in reading the book is not the prose, but it’s because the interview subjects in the book dislike their job with such fervent passion it was bleak to read. Working made me assess both my own employment situation and the 21st century’s.
I’ve always had good jobs, but Working cuts to the bone about problems in the workforce. Quotes like this just hit me as raw:
I think a lot of places don’t want people to be people. I think they want you to almost be the machines they’re working with. They just want to dehumanize you. Just like when you walk in in the morning, you put the switch on and here you are: “I am a robot. This is what I do. Good morning. How are you? May I help you?” I hate having to deal with people like that.
Even though it was written in the 1970s, I can’t help but think that there are still places out there where employees are seen as commoditized machines, creating revenue. I wonder, perhaps am I one too? I know I’m valued, and I don’t feel like a cog. However, I used to charge clients a lot of money per hour for providing services where I often felt like I was the robot described above; “Yes, I can help you” – because when you’re a consultant, you almost always say Yes.
The most fascinating part of Working were the interviews with the employees at the Ford City Ford Plant. From line workers, foreman, to shift managers, to union bosses it’s a great series because in interview after interview the subjects contradict the previous subject. But there’s one constant through these interviews: their dislike of their jobs. Several talk about dreaming during work. Seeing work as a sleep-state is something I never imagined, but if it “reduce[s] the chances of friction with the foreman or with the next guy” then dream away!
The modern gig economy came to mind a lot when reading this book. Several of the subjects are transient workers, part-time, or set their own hours. The struggles are still the same today: a living wage and benefits.
One interviewee said, “the [employer doesn’t] recognize us as persons. That’s the worst thing, the way they treat you. Like we have no brains. Now we see they have no brains. They have only a wallet in their head. The more you squeeze it, the more they cry out.”
Replace persons with employees. It’s basically contract work versus W2. Not taking sick days or being able to see a doctor, or having a guaranteed minimum salary, may sound unfathomable to those of us with benefits, but it’s sobering to read that this was an issue about 40 years ago, and still there are many out there working their hardest who are reaping very little because the system is unfair to so many.
It seems automation is a perpetual and perhaps eternal concern in the workforce. Terkel writes, that “it is this specter that most haunts working men and women: the planned obsolescence of people that is of a piece with the planned obsolescence of the things they make. Or sell. It is perhaps this fear of no longer being needed in a world of needless things that most clearly spells out the unnaturalness, the surreality of much that is called work today.”
After the 2016 election there was a lot of praise heaped on Hillbilly Elegy. I believe that that book is in some ways a spiritual successor to Working. Working should be re-evaluated now because in the wake of the gig economy and recent union court loses, as an interview subject said best “The workingman has but one thing to sell, his labor. Once he loses control of that, he loses everything.”