Those Working Hours
Levison, Andrew
Those Working Hours working, by Studs Terkel. Pantheon Books. 589 pp. $10. reviewed by Andrew Levison Despite all the attention which the 1972 strike of automobile workers in Lordstown, Ohio, and...
...But those workers one remembers— the steelworker, the truckdriver—speak with an eloquence that rivets them in the reader's mind and earns the book a central place in any discussion of American politics and society...
...The political effects of this lack of understanding have been disastrous...
...Paradoxically, while this sharp focus is what makes Working unique and valuable, it is also the source of the book's main weakness...
...One is also left with a deep feeling for the people themselves and with a dawning sense of *he mammoth political possibilities that could exist if liberals put aside stereotypes like Archie Bunker and "hard hats" and replaced them with a genuine concern and respect for working people and their needs...
...Aside from an occasional article describing an auto assembly worker, twenty years of academic superficialities about the "affluent" worker and the subsequent banalities about the "hard hats" have left the problems and discontents of blue collar workers in 1974 as littie understood as the black ghettos in the early 1950s...
...At their best, the interviews become deeply moving human documents...
...There is a steelworker who dreams of running "a combination bookstore and tavern...
...The extraordinary achievement of Working is that in a single volume it presents not only an incomparable insight into the neglected field of work and its discontents but that it shatters the oversimplifications and cliches about American workers which have bedeviled liberal strategy in dealing with their needs...
...in Terkel, he speaks with his own voice...
...The result is that the subjects at times seem one-dimensional...
...To have communicated that message is an extraordinary achievement, and Terkel has done it with exceptional warmth and skill...
...His forthcoming book, "The Working Class Majority," will be published next fall...
...several excerpts from it mil appear in The New Yorker this summer...
...One need only note that Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, and George Wallace were all political beneficiaries of this ignorance about the problems and feelings of the "average American," while George McGovern and the Democratic Party have been its chief victims...
...There is no commentary or even background information on the subjects...
...Terkel's technique of using only the quotations of his subjects and focusing exclusively on their jobs eliminates not only commentary and interpretation but also information vital for a three-dimensional portrait...
...two weeks picking up a load at one port, delivering it to another port...
...Terkel does not describe his subjects or characterize in more than a few sentences what their homes and communities are like...
...Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta...
...There are recurrent reports of long hours, inadequate pay, and even danger...
...His article, "The Rebellion of Blue Collar Youth," appeared in the October 1972 issue of The Progressive...
...For this reason, Studs Terkel's Working is a book of vital political importance, even though Terkel is neither a political analyst nor an ideologue...
...Levison is a research associate of the Martin Luther King, Jr...
...in their own words they describe what they do and how they feel about it...
...Sharon Atkins, the receptionist, shades into Heather Lamb, the telephone operator...
...One finishes Terkel's book with more than abstract recognition of yet another social "problem...
...Working is a collection of interviews that Terkel, a skilled interviewer based in Chicago, conducted with people ranging from doctors and executives to waitresses and construction workers (the book is heavily weighted with the latter), probing the day-to-day reality of their jobs...
...a place where college kids come and a steelworker could sit down and talk...
...he does not deal with any aspect of their lives beyond work...
...There is a long haul truck-driver who combats loneliness by imagining himself a modern sailor: "We sail out on the highways . . . gone for a week...
...Reports like theirs say more about the continuing injustice and unfulfilled promises of American society for ordinary people than even the most scholarly formulations about working class alienation and stunted human potential...
...reviewed by Andrew Levison Despite all the attention which the 1972 strike of automobile workers in Lordstown, Ohio, and Work in America, a special task force report of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, focused on the problems of American workers, most people's understanding of worker conditions and attitudes is still all too often composed of two images: Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times and Archie Bunker...
...Mr...
...As Terkel notes, "This book, being about work, is about violence—to the spirit as well as the body...
...The results are profoundly important for American politics...
...In other writers the "common man" may have found interpreters...
...From the receptionist who says, "You're just a little machine," to the spot welder who says, "Man, jail ain't never been this bad," a mosaic of pervasive pressure, boredom, and lack of fulfillment emerges...
Vol. 38 • June 1974 • No. 6
