Changing Collars

...As a result, the generalizations Coleman does put forward carry added weight...

...The workplace differs from the school or the park only in the activities that occupy people as they go about their real business of getting along with one another and with themselves...

...Coleman learned that a number of things distinguish a good garbageman from a bad one, and he reports that garbagemen take justifiable pride in doing their job well...

...And that is a small price to pay for one of the most honest and refreshing, if modest, books on American working-class life to appear in quite some time...

...as an introspective autobiography it is pretty much of a bore...

...Fifty-one years old, traumatically divorced, with adolescent children, Coleman seems to have been consciously engaged in a classically Eriksonian period of self-reevaluation, for intermittently he talks about his quest for identity...

...Not that he is averse to questions of theory or speculations on how his experience fits into the broader picture...

...Coleman's pride reflects the still-powerful fact that a job well done is intrinsically satisfying, that people generally seek this satisfaction whenever it is available, and that even what are often thought to be the most menial of employments can provide ample opportunity for it...

...Coleman worked successively as a ditch digger for a crew laying sewer pipes, a sandwich man in a restaurant and a garbage collector for a private refuse company, and his descriptions of the actual content of those occupations comprise the most enjoyable and most vigorously narrated parts of his diary...

...Coleman's principal theme????that the workplace, all things considered, is pretty much like any place else, that people bring to it every variety of fear, aspiration and attitude????is supported with considerable evidence...

...Since "blue-collar blues" are all the rage among academics????currently engaged in their periodic rediscovery of America's working class????it was reasonable to expect from this book either a heavy dose of dogma surrounding a small kernel of distorted observation, or a kind of ingenuous gee-whiz, look-ma, even a man with three degrees can drink Jax beer with Wallacite ditch-diggers...

...Significantly, too, he conveys a sense of real pleasure in learning to master each of his jobs, a pleasure that seems to have been only partly related to his desire for acceptance by his colleagues...

...All in all, he has enormous respect for the skill and abilities of the men he worked with...

...His sensitivity to the subtler expressions of class and caste in the workaday world have genuine force, particularly his comments on the refusal of people to talk to their garbagemen...

...He is especially conscious of...

...Coleman, never permitting himself the illusion that he is becoming just like his fellow workers, remains explicitly aware of how peculiar and privileged his situation is...

...Yet Coleman avoided these and other pitfalls by refusing to get carried away with himself, and he has produced a work at once good-humoredly self-deprecating and wise...

...His diary of that experience has now reached print, and the first thing one should say is that it fails to confirm the fears one might have had about such a venture...

...Although, characteristically, he insists the jobs he held were not entirely typical, he nonetheless saw little indication of the much discussed disappearance of the work ethic...

...But those discussions are presented as hypothetical, informed musings, not as scraps of data seized upon to confirm what he had been writing in textbooks all along...

...But the passages in which Coleman examines his own navel probably don't add up to a dozen pages...

...As a work of social exploration, Coleman's diary is compassionate, insightful and telling...

...Unfortunately, Coleman's pride in his blue-collar accomplishments reflects something else as well, an underlying drive that strikes the single sour note in his remarkable volume...

...New York City-Rand Institute John R. Coleman, president of Haverford College, the prestigious small Quaker school outside Philadelphia, attracted an enormous amount of publicity last year when, as part of his sabbatical, he spent eight weeks working up and down the East Coast as a manual laborer...

...Indeed, if his repeated apologies for his status conform at times to the stereotype of liberal apologetics, they strike this reader, at least, as more in keeping with a personality that steadfastly refuses to take its individual experience as a microcosm of the social universe...

...and especially good at describing, the exigencies of race relations, a subject that must be treated by anyone seriously attempting to understand contemporary blue-collar life in America...

...That fascination with self is even less becoming in a middle-aged man than in an adolescent, who comes by his self-absorption naturally...