WORK, WORK, WORK
Maloff, Saul
it), The Conversation never gives us the feeling that its director was deflected by mental struggle in making it. Like the timing of its release, the film itself seems so calculated that we...
...When I got up and took the stand, my testimony destroyed him...
...Like the conversations that Harry Caul eavesdrops on, this film seems to record life at a great distance and by purely mechanical means...
...You chip in for a meal together...
...They'd go shopping and hit their kids and talk about those idiots passing out anti-grape petitions...
...Their acts of self-assertion were unprecedented, staggering in their very ordinariness and modesty: as the line hurtled by at killing speed they wanted now and then to glance at a newspaper, talk to the worker alongside, even if it meant momentary neglect of duty: sabotage...
...BO$ A Biography ROBERT SPEAIGHT Georges Bernanos ( 18881948) was one of the most powerful forces in contemporary French literature, best known here for his Diary ot a Country Priest and The Dialogues ot the Carmelites...
...The cop works on the rescue squad of the emergency service: "a man under a train, trapped in an auto, bridge jumpers, psychos, guys that murdered people and barricaded themselves in...
...It's hard work," she says, "but I like it...
...I got my hips pushin' on the button and it rolls around on the counter9 . . 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...
...Nine to five and it's shit...
...but she loves her job: "I'm a checker and l'm very proud of it...
...Terrifying...
...Work certainly isn't a drag for the man who's "probably the youngest general foreman in the plant, yes, sir" --a Ford assembly plant...
...The fireman is a marvel, he really is: he truly wants to save lives, laying his own on the line every time out...
...And along comes the radical critic of work and lectures her on the profit system, the immorality of the cash nexus, alienation and dehumanization, cleverly pointing out the surgical violence of the deep, mutilating injury done her that she might become a happy slave, a fast rhythmic checker in love with the one-two, one-two tempo of her life...
...and his two sons--yes, a cop and a fireman...
...They're people, not The People: how, then, is it possible to see them truly, without hypocrisy or sentimentality, condescension or the moist pity that scarcely conceals contempt...
...You're Iookin' at numbers...
...They use people as long as they can...
...You just die if something falls off a shelf9 1 saw so much crap there I just couldn't take...
...If he believes he's working too hard, he stands up and says so...
...And my left hand is on the groceries...
...And she will say: "I'm a couple of days away, I'm lonesome for this place9 When I'm on a vacation . . . I start to get fidgety...
...8.95 at bookstores or use this coupon to order...
...that's not human--they weren't robots or machines...
...obligatory reference to Civilization and Its Discontents, R. H. Tawney, Max Weber, assorted neo-Freudians and neo-Marxists...
...Work, not death, is the wages of sin...
...That guy loses, he buys coffee . . . I'm the kind of guy, if I was due for a raise I'm not gonna ask for it . . . I don't question my boss, I don't question the 3 May 1974:216 company...
...T H;agTEMPTATION nOW that Work at last---or again--hecome a central issue in serious discourse, is to bring to bear upon it all the heavy conceptual apparatus: the young Marx of the Paris Manuscripts on alienation...
...Aw, fm it," they said...
...These need not detain us...
...Hell, no...
...The archcriminal is a black man, getting on in years, who has worked there for twentyfive years and was soon to have retired9 "'And he just blew everything," he goes on...
...Hell isn't other people--only a French intellectual, after a succession of large cocktail parties, would think so...
...So you take an overriding concern on how the ice cream is packed," he says...
...she's too tired to sleep at night...
...Accordingly, they close out the book: the father, a former teamster blacklisted for union organizing and now in his late sixties a freight-elevator operator...
...right...
...People wouldn't pay attention to the music [soul-soothing Musak]," he observes...
...He was a force, too, in French politics, a believer in radical Christianity whose principles led him, at different times, to espouse and oppose the causes of reaction and of revolution...
...I don't need a test to prove my honesty That's the chance he [the employer] takes . . . I'd want to polygraph hinL" Rolling his eyes heavenward--where all the seraphim know what charming cretins women are, God bless them--he says plaintively: "Everybody looks at the employer like he's the evil guy...
...1 enjoy it somethin' terrible...
...Hell, he may be ten times more intelligent as this foreman...
...Far from boring . . . . We'd come up with different games--like we'd take the numbers of the jeeps that went by...
...He doesn't ask for more money...
...Faced with work, but with Work conceived by an economy of abundance (and rigged scarcity) stockpiling trash skyhigh and heeldeep--Work can make theologians, and rhetoricans and bad poets, of us all...
...her husband asks incredulously...
...an eschatologist of everyman...
...I believe socialism is gonna he the future," the father says...
...and we must not profanr their lives...
...Got him...
...He should have found out the reasons9 Apparently he needed extra money for something, whatever it was, right...
...No, she goes on to tell her husband, the spy--no, she would not submit ~o a polygraph test to get a job...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...What do you need that extra money for?' Maybe the guy's in a bind or something...
...Well, the checker here has been at it all her life, for thirty years starting when she was twelve in the antediluvian age of the small family-owned store and prices penciled on brown paper bags...
...Because I wouldn't," she replies...
...It's a great feelin...
...At the now-famous GM assembly plant in Lordstown, Ohicy--the fastest, most automated line in the world-things have changed, not all that much, but enough so that for a while people who should have known better thought they detected the winds of transforming change blowing in from Lordstown, deceived, perhaps, by the ringing apocalyptic name...
...However impressed we may be with Coppola's control over his material, we don't come away from the film feeling that he has even Harry Caul's pathetic capacity to let his passions interfere with his work...
...Big business uses people...
...they believed they have "something to say" about work which, they said, could drive a man nuts...
...and appended a happy ending to the saddest story...
...If The Future were in their hands I'd want to live in it...
...But for all the bravado something's nagging at him...
...He'll be, let us hope, what another "subject" who quit his job says he wants to be: "a frontiersman of the spirit--where work is not a drag...
...Please enclose check...
...weren't by God going to tell them What to do, or eat...
...Like his father, he's superb...
...Her varicose veins are killing her...
...but of course it isn't and I'm afraid I won't...
...Monsters outright: zombies and psychopaths, fully processed hirelings so bought and paid4or, such wholly-owned subsidiaries, that they would no more think to question the rightness of things-as-theyare than would the man in Personnel, or the time-motion statistician...
...That's it...
...caught him redhanded...
...What a masterpiece we have created--the boy who without a murmur will sell shoes and load crates for fifty years, die smiling with a shoe in his hands, a crate in his arms, the girl filing her life away, typing her fingertips spatulate, the ribbon like entrails unwinding...
...But I can look back and say, 'I helped put out a fire...
...praised novel, Heartland (Scribner's...
...She's a true professional: "I use my three fingers--my thumb, my index finger, and my middle finger...
...She's unmistakably a decent soul--a good, warmhearted, affable woman, honorable, independent, beholden to no one, toweringly superior to the job she does...
...unlike their fathers they didn't see doing "dirty work" past the point of utter exhaustion as "manly...
...What is still astonishing is the humanity that survives in some pretty unlikely places...
...No work of art that appears to have been made without any spontaneity can seem trustworthy...
...Robert Speaight, the noted actor and author of biographies of Hilaire Belloc and Teilhard de Chardin, has presented Bernanos, for the first time, in full dimension-as man, writer, and steadfast opponent of the literary and political establishments in Europe...
...There are other proletarian heroes in this rather contrived morality play, true working-class diamonds-in-therough straight out of agit-prop theater...
...Nothing after twenty-five years9 He ain't got a job, he's not a kid any more, what does he do...
...His agency had given him a week for the job: "I never thought I'd finish the case Commonweal: 215 in a week--never thought I'd catch the guy...
...9 . . 1 look forward to comin' to work...
...A common goal...
...Terkel has caught some themes in the American drama on his tapes and by some canny shuffling and a little tinkering created a fable closer than reality is to his (and my) heart's desire...
...You shouldn't throw him out in the street9 In an angry ouburst she says, "all right, so he stole some lousy butter...
...What you get is the grossest national product...
...He is the evil guy," his adoring wife replies furiously...
...I want people to accept me as 1 am...
...N. Y. State residents add sales tax...
...But these aren't concepts or factors of production...
...Like the timing of its release, the film itself seems so calculated that we cannot help suspecting it of being disingenuous...
...I like everybody workin' together," he says...
...Spying --sorry: industrial investigation--is a growth industry, a real comer, a "fast growing field of employment9 Tremendous . . . . It's a very important field...
...The right hand...
...There are genuine monsters in Studs Terkel's new collection of tape-recorded interviews, which are less interviews than they are monologues and reveries --people running on about their lives, as if this is the moment they've been waiting for a long time, a chance to tell someone, anyone, a stranger with a machine, about how it is with them: "what they do all day and how they feel about what they do...
...In the curtain speech he says: "I worked in a bank...
...This is one industry that affects all industries...
...Asked whether he finds the assembly line boring, he says: "No, uh-uh...
...he himself is married to one, only she's Colombian--and he can tell them apart...
...I'm proud of thai...
...But he knows, he knows9 The others "needed the job to subsist9 I guess 1 had the luxury to hate it and quit9 Nor could he take the customers who went out of their way to buy grapes because the Chavez people passing out leaflets outside the market (which is in L.A...
...We must change the world...
...He not only would bless his son's marriage to a Puerto Rican...
...Actually the astutest critic is a 17year-old "'box boy," a natural satirist with an unassailable built-in cant-detector who knows just what to make of the credo pasted on the backroom wall of the supermarket: "Be good to your job and your job will be good to you...
...It's not real...
...and now imagine a society in which that conflict of interest poses a monumental problem seemingly beyond the remotest possibility of resolution...
...He didn't have a leg to stand on," he says...
...Reading a thick book devoted entirely to the actual workaday lives of a wide spectrum of flesh-andbone persons should if justice and reason prevailed on earth make tupamaros of teamsters, Maoists of insurance salesmen, revolutionaries of certified public accountants, anarchists of orthodontists, Marcuseans of deacons, Reichians of computer programmers and bank tellers...
...the workers argued "that's mechanical...
...If you've got that rhythm, you're a fast checker9 . . I love my job...
...One guy goes to the store, one guy cooks, one guy washes the dishes...
...For him the firehouse is a kind of commune, a utopian soviet of the golden age...
...though it would probably leave untouched all celebrants of the "work ethic," that Aesopian obscenity, but only because they are untouchable...
...You know, it's just paper...
...WOBE woxK,NO -- 0][~' ( I STUDS TERKEL ~O~U f ~ Pantheon, $10 i l SAUL MALOF _ _ , ordained, necessary, morally good-without shaking a fist at Providence, cursing God, storming the ramparts, taking to the hills, getting out of town, blowing up the earth, poisoning the reservoir, getting high and staying there, never coming down except to man and woman and child the barricades...
...They're only doing their jobs...
...Sartre never worked in a supermarket, so how would he know...
...If one were to say that to her, she would no doubt repudiate the idea with contempt and anger--the job she does is good in itself and she's good at it, she loves and is proud of it...
...His wife, who happens to be in the room during the interview, reminds him that though he's "always stickin' up for the employer," in this instance he'd wavered9 The employer, who in 25 years had never before set eyes on the man who'd "put his life's work into the business," should have had "more rapport with the guy . . . called him in and said 'What's the problem...
...We got a lieutenant there, he says the fire department is the closest thing to socialism there is...
...It's only a car...
...Nam4~ Addrcqm____ City State Zip . . . . . . . . . . m m m m m m m m m m m Commonweal: 217...
...I met my deadline...
...He says, ' . . . I want to keep my job and keep my senses.' " Some deep upheaval has occurred in a society's constellation of values: some people decided "the almighty dollar is not the only thing...
...He doesn't believe that when the foreman says it's right that it's right...
...The company argued that the saving of a second over a year's spread added up to a million dollars...
...arch supports ease the pain but not much...
...He was out...
...They're epidemic in industry, as elsewhere9 Why not...
...I helped save somebody.' It shows something I did on this earth...
...Then multiply that weighty conundrum by a factor of a billion...
...this is hell, the cash register and that unending tidal wave of groceries...
...Imagine the colossal corporation and its cherished object, the fastest, most automated line in the world...
...How can it be that we are not all Luddites...
...Anything but a time-serving hack, the president of Local 1112, UAW, is 29 years old and pleased that "Lordstown is the Woodstock of the workingman": average age 25, the "mod look, long hair, big Afros, heads," the works...
...This is my life...
...Above all, the experience, when one has risen again from the slough of despond, moves one to wonder, with something like awe, that the human creature can be so subdued, so flattened and emptied of vital fires as to submit his brief life to the carnivorous timeclock, to measure his freedom by the ten-minute coffee breaks, ultimate happiness by a pink bathroom, a flagstone fireplace, an A-frame cabin at the lakeside...
...and all three cast in bronze...
...Livenght 386 Park Avenue South New York 10016 Please send me _ _ _ copy (ieu) of Georges Bernanos @ $8.95...
...The genius of the social order: the process called "socialization" by which a 16-year-old, blood rampant, fluids raging, can stare down the long corridor of his/her certain life and walk willingly into the darkness, even choose to do so, accept it as if it were the only possible path, foreI SAUL MALOFF is the author o] the highly...
...and a worker who by turning his head sabotages a car...
...We busted the guy...
...The gung-ho "undercover industrial investigator" (read company spy) has just brilliantly succeeded, by squatting in a dark corner atop a refrigerator for four days, working eight-hour shifts, in collaring the culprit who'd been stealing butter from the bakery...
...Who hasn't stood at the checkout counter, stealing furtive, guilty glances at the girl or woman rolling the groceries with one hand while she taps out your fate, and her own, with the other...
...They questioned the boss and the company...
Vol. 100 • May 1974 • No. 9
