Working
by Studs Terkel
Americans talk about their jobs. All of them. No filter.
For you if
you want to understand what work actually does to people through the people it does it to — in their own words, without anyone explaining what they mean
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Terkel spent years with a tape recorder interviewing Americans about their jobs — not economists or executives but the people actually doing the work: gravediggers, waitresses, firefighters, farm workers, parking lot attendants, copy editors, steel workers, and everyone in between. He gave the microphone to people the official culture had decided were not worth listening to and stepped back entirely — no narration, no interpretation, just voices. The result is the most democratic portrait of American labor ever assembled and an implicit indictment of a system that extracts human beings' most productive hours and returns so little of meaning in exchange. Terkel was blacklisted during McCarthyism and kept working anyway. His methodology is the argument: that the people who do the work are the authorities on what the work does to a person, and that a culture that ignores those voices is lying to itself about what it is. The companion to Nickel and Dimed — Ehrenreich works the jobs for a few weeks and reports from outside; Terkel gives the microphone to people who have worked those jobs their entire lives and lets them speak for themselves.
Where This Book Lives
- Topics
- mccarthyism
Related Viewing
Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.
Salt of the Earth(1954)
dir. Herbert J. Biberman
The labor film blacklisted filmmakers made anyway.
A 1950 New Mexico zinc miners' strike, reenacted by the real Mexican-American families who lived it, made by a blacklisted writer, producer, and director during the height of the Red Scare.
Why it’s here: Made by three men the Hollywood blacklist had already ended the careers of, using real miners and their families as the cast — the labor politics on screen and the circumstances of the film's own making are the same argument, not two separate things.
Same event, different angle
The same history — told by someone who saw it differently.
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For the family bookshelf
Same idea, written for a younger reader. Good for reading together.
