Last week I confessed my gradual loss of enthusiasm over Anna Karenina, a novel whose last sections I mostly skipped. This week I confess that I had a similar problem with Studs Terkel’s Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (1974). This is a collection of over a hundred testimonials from US workers of all descriptions that Terkel, a non-academic oral historian, interviewed. The book is subdivided into nine sections, and if you’re curious about the long list of occupations covered, you may check the details in the corresponding Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_(Terkel_book)).
Although I find Terkel’s book fascinating, at 700 pages it feels overlong, particularly because some of the testimonials are quite repetitive and/or or could have been better introduced and edited. Some readers complain in GoodReads that Working is dated, but I didn’t find it so; actually, I find this type of comment presentist and disrespectful of the persons Terkel interviewed. In fact, a striking feature of Terkel’s non-fiction classic is that some occupations, such as waitressing or working on an assembly line, have changed very little in the last fifty years. Other jobs, of course, have been swept away by new technology (think of telephone operators); some of the inevitable changes, mostly caused by the introduction of computers, are accurately forecast in the testimonial of a some white-collar workers.
Terkel is one of those larger-than-life US personalities that are not so well known outside the USA, in this case because his main medium was radio. There is an online archive with more than 2000 records of his conversations with guests at https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/. Working was a highly acclaimed book which followed on the heels of Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (1970). Both volumes were written with the same method, which recalls to me what Victorian journalist Henry Mayhew did in London Labour and the London Poor (serialized in the 1840s and published in three volumes in 1851), with the difference that Terkel wanted to demonstrate the value of work rather than criticize its conditions. Terkel received a Pulitzer award in 1985 for ‘The Good War’: An Oral History of World War Two(1984). His list of published work extends to many more volumes, including diverse books of memoirs. A man to (re)discover, then, for many in or outside the USA.
I’ll start my reflection on the meaning of work with a quote from Steven Simonyi-Gindele, a Canadian entrepreneur and self-made man. When Terkel interviewed him, Simonyi-Gindele was the editor, together with founder Pat Garrard, of the magazine The Capitalist Reporter (later known as Free Enterprise), a publication aiming at giving readers tips to invest and develop their own businesses. In his LinkedIn page (https://ca.linkedin.com/in/steven-simonyi-gindele-8aa410), Simonyi-Gindele claims that when Terkel showed up at the magazines offices to interview him he had no idea who the man was. Simonyi-Gindele was then 26, a young man born in Hungary who had migrated with his parents to Canada after the 1956 revolution. Apparently, he started working aged nine doing a paper round; he soon abandoned school and by 21 was already a successful entrepreneur. Those were other times indeed.
Here’s a key quotation from Simonyi-Gindele’s interview: “This is a lie about meaningful work. It comes from teachers. Ph.D.’s who’ve never really worked. They feel they have a special knowledge to impose upon a lower being, who goes to work when he’s thirteen or fifteen and settles down, and goes forward… If I’ve done my best, I find my work meaningful. If I haven’t done as well as I could, I don’t find it meaningful. I don’t think my work is any more important than a man sweeping the streets. It’s important to me only because it provides my livelihood. Whether it’s important to society only time will tell” (original ellipsis). I see here two points of tension. On the one hand, Simonyi-Gindele wants to stress that those with an academic education do not understand the meaning of work, while he does; on the other hand, though he claims that his job and that of the street sweeper have the same importance, he does want society to consider his job more important.
Now consider the following. On 28th June, Montserrat A., a 51-year-old employee of Barcelona’s street cleaning services, died of a suspected heatstroke in the middle of the worst heatwave ever registered in the city (she worked that day sweeping the tourist-full streets of the Gothic Quarter, from 14:30 to 21:30). Apparently, she warned her supervisor that she was feeling poorly, but was told to take a cold drink and continue working. She died shortly at home. The town council reacted, not too quickly, forcing the four companies under contract to apply cautionary measures at 34º degrees (yellow alert) rather than 37º (orange alert). Workers will be finally allowed to take a five-minute break every hour to drink. This means that up to Montserrat’s death, workers were expected to work, without stopping to hydrate themselves, in temperatures which, considering Barcelona’s very high humidity, are totally inadequate to walk the streets, never mind working in them.
I think we all agree that the workers who clean our streets do fundamental work, as we see when they go on strike (or, sadly, die). The difference between ‘meaningful’ and ‘non-meaningful’ employment is not, however, the importance of each occupation, but the degree of bodily and mental harm to which each worker is subjected. And this is connected with the opportunity for choice. Simonyi-Gindele is a classic example: he has had a few very humble jobs and because he had the talent for self-promotion, he pulled himself by the bootstraps to eventually become a successful man, and an employer. Persons like him are still subjected to disease (many executives die of heart attacks, as we know) but they will not pass away after sweeping the city streets in the middle of a heatwave. The persons subjected to that kind of danger, or similar, in this and many other occupations simply have no choice.
I myself could choose, not without important conflicts about the meaning of work. My mother had been employed between 14 and 22 in diverse companies doing basic admin work; she wanted to pursue professional training, and perhaps, a secondary education, but my grandparents decided to invest their scant resources on my uncle. I vowed to myself this would not happen to me, though I could not imagine at 14 that I would attend university. At that point I just wanted to attend secondary school. My father was employed in diverse printing companies, between the ages of 14 and 57, when he was made redundant and offered early retirement. He used to work from 7:00 to 15:00 in a noisy printer’s shop, and never reconciled himself with his schedule or the need to work. He would play the football pools (the ‘quiniela’) and every Sunday afternoon he would tear the betting slip, for he never won anything, and bemoan he had to go to work the following morning.
My siblings and I grew up thinking that work was a terrible thing, until we made our own choices. My father’s negative attitude to work (he was dutiful but grouchy) was a great incentive to build our own careers. My two brothers are self-employed, and I am, as you know well, a tenured academic. My father never accepted that our jobs are work because, unlike him, we don’t have to wake up at 6:00 AM or spend eight hours a day managing a machine. I myself had doubts about academic work until I heard my amazing Literature teacher in secondary school, Sara Freijido, describe the tiredness I felt after studying for hours as the result of work. I thought that only people who, like my father, were bodily tired after doing hard work could claim they were real workers. People mentally tired were, for me, just impostors. At heart, I still think that we are.
Terkel set out to demonstrate the dignity of jobs many people look down upon. Famously, waitress Dolores Dante defended before him her choice to be a waitress and herself from her patrons’ attitude: “People imagine a waitress couldn’t think or have any kind of aspiration other than to serve food. When somebody says to me, ‘You’re great, how come you’re just a waitress?’ Just a waitress. I’d say, ‘Why, don’t you think you deserve to be served by me?’ It’s implying that he’s not worthy, not that I’m not worthy. It makes me irate. I don’t feel lowly at all. I myself feel sure. I don’t want to change the job. I love it.” This is beautiful, but I’m not sure that many workers in the hospitality business feel this way, or that all patrons are capable of sympathizing with Dolores’ stance. Many workers Terkel interviewed are content like her, and I mean employees of all types, but many are unhappy, disliking jobs in which they are just replaceable cogs in the machine, especially on assembly lines. Workers in ‘meaningful’ occupations might think that those trapped in repetitive, mind-numbing, body-harming jobs have no ability to analyze their situation or articulate a critique of their employers, but Terkel demonstrates this is not the case. If they are generally ignored or silenced, this is because we hush anything that might smack minimally of Marxism, given the very negative historical record of this ideology.
If you think that work is part of today’s general conversation, you’re wrong. There is abundant talk about unemployment and precariousness, and of how migrants are taking the jobs nobody else wants, but we don’t really talk about our jobs and how we feel about them. In what passes for literary fiction today (and in cinema or series), most characters have careers, rather than jobs, and what they do for a living is hardly ever discussed. An interesting exception is The Bear, which focuses on a restaurant, but it’s hard to imagine similar shows about other types of business. Out of sight, out of mind.
As for my own job, if Terkel had interviewed me I would have said that Simonyi-Gindele was very wrong and unfair when saying that teachers have “never really worked” and lie “about meaningful work.” From kindergarten to doctoral tutoring, teachers prepare students for employment, and do hard work. The problem is that today, in 2025, very few people believe that work is meaningful; it’s understood, rather, as a necessity which gives employers huge power over our lives.
We need, then, more books (or websites, or whatever!) like Terkel’s Working to raise awareness about what people must do at least eight hours a day and which choices are open to us, to demand better ones. For everyone.