What Do People Do All Day

...In addition to amending the physical drawbacks, one can shorten his hours so he will be less tired and shorten his week so he has significant blocks of time for other interests...

...One might counter by asking why one should feel worse for these people than for the dead-faced, bum t-ou t businessman...

...Lasson’s book does not deal with this challenge at all, and only incidentally with less sweeping issues such as the heat in which the baker works, or the boredom of the telephone operator...

...When you drive around with the garbage man, his lot doesn't seem that bad-his mind is free, he knows he's doing something useful, and he uses skill in his work...

...In other words, fate...

...it would just create breathing space, time for regeneration, so shockingly scarce in the lives described in this book...

...Peterson less at the Colonial Village Supermarket...

...Because they really know what they are doing, and, living so much in it, also know the world, you learn a lot-information-from them...

...The miner went underground at 17 in his father’s footsteps: “When I was in the coal mine, I never tried to find another job...

...The only telling distinction between them lies in the props: everything surrounding the banker indicates his importance while the baker has only his hat...

...She picks out several things for supper, some of which she knows cost Mrs...

...But they lead at least in the direction of a few basics...

...But the combination does achieve a profundity, a composition of sharp edges and mystery which is illuminating and well suited to the new concern with quality of work, a far more complex, more elusive issue than child labor or the minimum wage, but one which must soon become a chief concern of the times...

...There is the dirty work of civilization, and then there is the really dirty work...

...Flat fame isn’t necessarily the goal, though it will do nicely, but stature, recognition of superiority in some form, is essential, which is why the trappings of rank-large offices, receptionists-are obsessive concerns, even necessities, in the middle- and upper-class working force...

...Yet to de-mechanize the system so she can have more personal contact and variety in her job is not going to make her job significantly more desirable, just more bearable...

...On balance it is difficult to say why a banker in a large institution, one of identical thousands, is much less obscure than a baker: whatever difference does exist, it hardly measures up to the vast differences in terms of self-image and pretentions between the two men...

...Coal-mining, for example, is hard work, but it is necessav, we must have coal...

...The banker is a figure of respect in his little world but so is the bakerneither is known beyond the little sphere of his organization...

...Three or four summers I worked in a can-making factory, I was laid off...

...Like Richard Scarry’s book, it’s hypnotic...

...In fact, these people, reasonably content and at peace with the world, and their adjustment, in a way mock the idealistic urge to “make things better” for them-just a sample of the dilemmas you come up against...

...It’s an easier living to work with your brain instead of your body...

...By simply describing in a vivid and interesting way what it's like in the garbage truck, editing his material according to its relevance to the person rather than to issues, Lasson causes one to reflect in new ways and in far greater depth than the reformist polemic, hidebound by old conceptions, can...

...But the problem has not been recognized as a major challenge to society, as a principal concern of a future which, with its threats and its possibilities, is now very close upon us...

...They are comfortable with fate...

...The only way I can see to reconcile the need for coal with rudimentary social conscience is a job draft in which everybody does the really dirty work for a short time...

...In actuality this hasn’t always been true...

...The coal miner was drafted in World War 11, but they sent him back to the mines: “They needed this coal...

...Of them all these two are the most likely to make one feel acutely *The Workers...

...More generally, they all know, know that they are exploited by the system, that their sparse family economies bear a disproportionate part of the tax burden and receive little in return, know that others profit from their labors...

...No such reform is going to change the basic unfairness that some people will find their lot in “common” work, and others will be able to choose where to invest their life’s labors...

...It’s hard to say why this is, except possibly that he lacks an awareness shared by most of Lasson’s people of his direct usefulness to people, as opposed to a company, or a superior...

...The garbage man, driving his huge Brockway Huskey down the freeway, backing into difficult corners, manipulating the dangerous hydraulic compressing mechanism, never letting up his pace, is curiously splendid...

...A first step,” he writes, coining an infelicitous slogan, “towards putting the demos back into democracy is accepting the need for professional full-time citizen advocates to represent the interests of the unrepresented...

...then the quality of life in that crew becomes an issue of primary political importance...

...If you find yourself stuck in a coal mine, with no escape in view save old age, then you simply can’t afford to flirt with “what might have beens...

...But the line between free person and slave would still be blurred by the involuntary element, combined with the lifetime term...

...The very least measure which could make a dent in that fundamental unfairness would be to give the auto worker a piece of the Vega and the garbage man a share in the company, a measure which, one is given to feel after reading Lasson’s book, would not be revolutionary, only minimally just...

...The cost is anonymity, the anonymity that the associate lawyer is spared by having Arnold & Porter attached to his identity...

...If the more immediate negative aspects-the smell and the danger of the compressing mechanism-prick your conscience, you can see your way to a solution, for most of the discomforts on these jobs are almost surely alterable by technology...

...The baker works in 110-degree heat and the miner in cramped and dangerous darkness...

...But the faith has provided a sop to the democratic conscience, which is snatched away when the innate “goodness” of progress becomes discredited...

...The baker states that he doesn’t even care whether his son gets a summer job, for instance: “He can learn to relax...

...Further, they have, as Ralph Nader points out in his afterword, an intimate knowledge of the more impersonal crimes of the system, specifically of pollution, defective products, and wasteful processes...

...The banker makes more money, but that only differentiates him from the baker, not from the masses on his own income level...

...Fate operates more nakedly in these lives than in other classes...

...The companies for which these people work are, for them, just vehicles through which they do necessary jobs...

...Finding out what you want to do is considered an intrinsic part of growing up, of finding yourself...

...His personality is strangely muffled, his dignity inexplicably sapped, and, as a result, a slight awkwardness is likely to color any conversation...

...Few people would actually want to do most of these jobs...

...The lifetime term seems the most logical point at which to meet the challenge...

...The tired folk going home to a beer, supper, and a television show which they cannot see out before falling asleep in their chairs are shockingly transformed...

...Which is not to say that Nader is irrelevant-just that he isn’t at his best with a pen-but that there is a built-in limitation, a shallowness, to liberal/social polemic, a tendency to drift off in its own concepts without checking back with reality...

...This adjustment to reality engenders an on-the-job dignity far less apparent in the air-conditioned offices of the higher professions...

...The telephone information operator’s boredom with a mechanized system which has robbed her of all but the most minimal contact with customers, and her efforts to squeeze interest out of tiny variations such as alternate ways to spell a name, are the closest one comes in this book to the problem of the great masses who do robot work...

...Now progress, with both its advantages and dangers, has brought us to the point where we have to consider all of it...

...Nick Abruzzi, bricklayer A children’s book by Richard Scarry called What Do People Do All Day...

...This faith is very important to most of the people in Lasson’s book...

...Several images juxtapose unequal lots vividly: the garbage truck driving up to the empty country club in the early morning, its driver eyeing the undisturbed pool as he hurries to empty the trash bins...

...This point is worth considering...

...Ken Lasson...

...Working in the sewers is unpleasant, but somebody must work in the sewers...

...Such improvements certainly won’t make the work “meaningful” or enriching to the soul...

...I just didn’t.’’ Early one morning in 1928 the baker saw a classified ad, “Boy wanted to work in bakery,” and got there before anyone else...

...They want better things for their children-a job of higher status, which means, I suppose, choice-but they’re not unhappy with their status or in the least self-conscious about it...

...That was around 1947,” says the garbage man...

...Choice becomes the pivotal distinction, the final qualifier...

...Progress may have stepped up productivity, but the actual quality of life on these jobs has remained, for the most part, in stasis...

...They fell into their professions, usually through the first job they happened to land: ‘‘I had a friend in the business and the money was pretty good so I went in...

...In a way one envies them-for the usefulness of what they do, which might be compared with trepidation to one’s own chosen work, for the ease with which they apply themselves, for the soothing regularity of their tasksmaking hospital corners on the bed, filling all the eclairs...

...That’s when you realize that the bricklayer is right, that it’s an easier living to work with your brains than your body, that the demand for a four-day week is far from greedy...

...Baker versus Banker They are also comfortable with obscurity...

...Somebody’s got to do it...

...guilty about one’s good luck in having escaped the more menial work of civilization, about the human price others pay to make the world go around while the privileged engage in loftier pursuits...

...Almost all the jobs entail a degree of physical discomfort (stench, heat, noise), and some involve danger...

...Lasson has avoided this by giving us nine characters-not types but individuals and one a downright eccentric-and allowing them to unfold...

...The contrast between sophisticated equipment and efficiency devices, all oriented towards speed and production, and the primitive physical hardships suffered by the human beings who use them emerges strikingly on several occasions in the book...

...At best he is probably confused on this issue, a confusion born of the fear of obscurity...

...It is the work of civilization, therefore unquestionable...

...They see somebody else doinga disagreeable job, and think that they have solved things by saying that the job is necessary...

...He’d held other jobs but “I just couldn’t stay out of bakeries...

...Against that assurance, openness and lack of pretense exhibited by Lasson’s workers in their job situations, this intangible wrongness in higher zones leads one to come out of this book seeing especially clearly how much the obsession with Making It-as opposed to Doing It-is a distraction and a curse...

...Further, already fogged by the involuntary element, the line between the free person and the slave becomes even more blurred by the realization first that the work literally drains many of these people of the will and energy to create a rich off-the-job life, and secondly that they are almost certainly stuck there forever...

...People have a way of taking it for granted that all work is done for a sound purpose...

...Though he’s probably beating his brains out, there is little sense of competent doing, of self-sufficiency in work, about him...

...But more than making one feel lucky or guilty, the book brings one up short against the affectations and pet delusions in the realm of loftier pursuits...

...Or can any two be expected to perform a task necessary for the welfare of the whole group which not only exposes them to immediate danger but will also take an inevitable and cumulative toll on their bodies...

...the doorman leaving in the morning, giving in to his stoop, unrecognizable in his plain hat...

...His words sound a little shrill and vapid, not terribly relevant to the individuals Lasson has presented to us...

...He is pigeonholed in a hierarchy, enslaved, observing arbitrary rules of decorum...

...Perhaps because of the undeniable usefulness of what these people do-often less clear in grander endeavors such as journalism-and the simplicity and lack of presumption with which they work, they jolt the reader into a reassessment of self as well as society...

...The Really Dirty Work While none of these jobs could be made more than simply tolerable, and hence all fall into the category of “dirty work,” one big distinction among them emerges, at least for me, with absolute clarity...

...There’s a pretense, a hypocrisy in avowing that this work should be made “meaningful” which these folk would hoot at...

...The knowledge that some are free to pursue rewarding work because of the service of others in lives of dirty work has probably been gnawing at the human conscience since the dawn of civilization...

...Just something common...

...A reduction in hours wouldn’t make the work any better...

...And because the businessman is a fool to let it happen...

...Yet for Lasson’s people it’s the arbitrary game of tinker-tailor-soldier-sailor...

...Asked exactly how his work is useful, he and his peers in other professions are likely to recoil from the question altogether...

...You can’t get very far before being thrown back to the same realization-that you wouldn’t want to hold those jobs yourself, that hardly anybody, given a choice, would...

...The bricklayer toils in the same way his grandfather did...

...While I would be far from pleased to find myself in any of these people’s shoes, I would do almost anything to stay out of the coal mine...

...Because they get so little for it...

...Lasson keeps out of the way, often leaving his subjects to speak for themselves, and in themselves they are instructive...

...This knowledge is not accompanied by smoldering revolutionary anger, but it’s there, a latent but immensely powerful political force...

...Our better institutions of higher learning seem to inculcate, if nothing else, a morbid fear of obscurity...

...But they also trigger reflection...

...I don’t have any regrets, I’m not complaining...

...But (though he doesn’t seem to think so himself) the coal miner’s occupation is the only one which strikes me as really intolerable physically, and the telephone operator’s is the only one which comes off as insufferably boring...

...It’s just a job,” as the miner says...

...Orwell, a man ahead of his time, said, “This point is worth considering,” but he could take it no further than to point out that some of the work actually is not necessary, providing only luxuries...

...As they see it, they don’t work for organizations, they work for people, doing jobs that have to be done...

...Those reflections do not, however, unveil a clear path to utopia...

...That’s when obscurity becomes a threatening, devouring condition...

...They simply are not jobs a person would freely choose...

...There is little dignity here, just people being used up, a relentless sapping of life-blood, symbolized by that alarm clock set as they fall at last into bed, or even more shockingly by the new shift which passes the coal miner as he wearily walks to his car...

...Awareness of this issue is already surfacing on the editorial pages of newspapers, in company work-improvement programs, and among younger workers...

...one is still left with the vision of the garbage man at 40 facing another 25 years driving that Brockway Husky, however safe and deodorized, down the freeway and into back alleys...

...The entwined elements of social inequity, the irrevocable human condition, personality, expectations, satisfactions and complaints, and curious anecdotes which have no relation to any issue, do not lend themselves to formulas or point the direction to utopia...

...Since we can't just abolish these jobs, we are probably stuck with the involuntary element...

...So in the end the difference is that the baker is the less deluded of the two...

...Here are a few of my own...

...The average middle-class youth might be as predetermined away from auto-mechanics as the coal miner was from the law, but he at least conceives of himself as free to choose between a number of professions...

...Can you imagine what it would be like if nobody wanted to pick up the garbage...

...They are, while only intolerable in the case of the coal miner, all physically oppressive...

...That X has a smaller piece of the pie than Y, he points out, seems not so terribly unfair when the overall pie, and hence each piece, is growing bigger...

...One suspects that his sense of worth is more attached to being a lawyer at Arnold & Porter than to the uses of lawyering per se...

...If you recognize that, then the lot of people on that crew becomes a far more unavoidable matter of conscience than it was when you saw them as builders paying their dues, jumping in to take their chances in the land of opportunity...

...From Builders to Maintenance Crew Anthony Lewis recently pointed out in The New York Times that as unlimited economic growth becomes an untenable ethic-in the face of ove rp o pul a tio n - an d civilization strives for a stasis, the injustice of unequal lots takes on a new bite...

...I don’t know why...

...The issue isn’t personal fulfillment, it’s simply making the common jobs tolerable, directing the genius of a technology at least as much towards the comfort and sanity of workers as towards productivity...

...It’s a necessity,” says the garbage man...

...What Do People Do All Day a review by Suzannah Lessard The question is, why does this slavery continue...

...They are contradictory, often lead to moral or logical swamps, bring you flat up against the wall of impractibility, or leave you mocked by your special brand of elitism or utopianism...

...Like the baker he is employed in the repetitive, never-finished, everyday business of making the world go around, leaving no special mark of his own, his handiwork swallowed up daily...

...He subsequently served in the Marines and missed getting into the police force through a fluke and so remains a garbage man, albeit a driver rather than a barrel shaker...

...The result yields no pat answers...

...It’s liable to be an embarrassing, somehow inappropriate question...

...the maid leaving the better part of town for home where she buys inferior food to cook for her family, just as she cooked the roast for the family she works for...

...Much as I admire him, Nader’s contribution, cliche-ridden and windy after Lasson’s clean simple prose, is disappointing...

...And it also remains that these are not tasks that anyone is likely to want to do...

...Lasson points out in rare intrusions of commentary that conditions haven’t changed much in these trades over the last hundred years...

...it is easier to reconcile principles of social justice with the fact that some people are stuck with the nastier chores, if you-and they-have faith that their children will go to college and move up into nicer endeavors...

...Even people on the middle-class level who feel no magnetic draw towards their work believe in vocation as a concept...

...There are better jobs around, and I’m not crazy about this one with the grind and the hustling and the smell, but I don’t think it’s the lowest of the low...

...Those tasks, it seems clear, should be shouldered equally by everyone...

...But that’s only looking at them as a foil against which to examine one’s own life...

...In this sense reading about him and his peers is a relief...

...from Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell...

...Although the black clouds of disaster on the horizon have not yet curbed our appetite for unabated growth, and we still search desperately for frontiers, we have already reached at least a mental plateau in prosperity...

...Mothers hope their sons will become doctors in the same way they used to hope for a priest in the family...

...Even more absurd to apply such words to reform on an assembly line...

...He now wears the coveted white hard hat which distinguishes the bakers from the linemen...

...Then society will be faced head on with the feudal nature of the division of labor...

...This, more than the physical oppressions they suffer on the job, is the truly upsetting revelation in this book...

...He has a choice...

...It makes sense to me that of all Lasson’s people, Tiso, the miner, is the least questioning of his lot in life...

...In other ways this book does stir the revolutionary impulse, however...

...None of the nine workers are in robot-like employment, but all are in the solid base of what Orwell calls the “work of civilization”: a coal miner, a garbage man, a telephone operator, a maid, a baker, a bricklayer, a waitress, a cop, and a New York cabbie...

...I worked at Martin’s as an airplane mechanic...

...Kenneth Lasson’s The Workers, * nine portraits of workers and what they do in a day, is written not to prove a point-although it is a Nader book-but just to describe different characters, their jobs, how they approach them, and what’s on their minds as they do them...

...He is comfortable in the obscurity most of us share...

...Coming back to the book itself, it would be wrong to suggest that it portrays one outrage after another...

...The notion of “making work meaningful” is empty, if not insulting when the worker has little or no choice...

...Some people must feed in restaurants, and so other people must swab dishes for 80 hours a week...

...So every time I’d find myself back in a bakery, no matter what I’d done...

...shows the chain of labor on a certain product-bread from the farmer, to trucker, to baker, to housewifethe simultaneity of activity-the dentist, the shoemaker-and the different cuts of town and country in which all this busyness takes place...

...He uses words like “victimization” and speaks of the sense of depreciated self-worth and desperation eroding the esprit of the work force-one finds neither in ths book...

...And similarly with a plongeur’s work...

...So while, according to the faith, someone will always have to do the “work of civilization,” it will always be done by a new set of people, who, having paid their dues, will then ascend as a group into the higher reaches of prosperity...

...Reorganizing an auto plant so that workers get to put a whole Vega together rather than turn identical bolts all day isn’t going to make their job appealing-particularly after they have put the ten thousandth Vega together-only tolerable...

...The cop is an exception, as is the waitress who quit a job as a nurse’s aide, despite the higher status, to return to waitressing...

...The cabbie’s environment has probably gotten worse...

...The other side of this coin is that while the lawyer is reduced in his work situation, Lasson’s people are reduced when they leave work...

...The darkness and noise of the mine, a complex set of daily dangers, and on top of that the almost inevitable hazard of black lung could perhaps be somewhat alleviated by technology, but it doesn’t seem likely that significant improvement is within reach...

...That people have adjusted to them and seem relatively happy doesn't change that, any more than the fact that most women profess satisfaction with their roles makes their subjugation acceptable...

...The same families have been mining coal for generations and the upward mobility of black people, who supposedly had a head start on hoardes of Irish and Italians, has been at best comparable to the mobility of a snail...

...It’s painful that anyone has to spend his life in any of these jobs, and hopefully we will eventually meet the complexities of solving that imbalance, but right now, given the flexibility that prosperity has gained for us, nobody, absolutely nobody, should have to spend his entire life doing something like mining coal...

...Economic growth also generates .upward mobility...

...If 10 acquaintances were marooned on an island, the less skilled might reasonably be allotted the duller work, the drudgery, while the cleverer members concentrated their talents on more complex tasks, but should any two have to accept latrine duty for the full extent of their stay...

...We can no longer talk of building a nation-it is already built: labor can no longer be romanticized as the unlauded but indispensable builder, it is already the maintenance crew...

...We’ve all seen it: the cook, glorious in his apron, tyrannical in his domain, walking out the back door of the restaurant, a broken-down little man in cracked shoes and an old coat...

...Most whitecollar workers, on the other hand, are slightly diminished on the job: the young associate in a fancy law firm may be dashing and impressive at a dinner party, but visit him the next day in his office and he will seem measurably reduced...

...But The Workers is an especially valuable contribution towards understanding the challenge, because it brings you into a flesh-and-blood immediacy with these daily lives, which draws out the subtleties lost in reform rhetoric and illustrates the inadequacies as well as the follies of the more standard brands of outrage...

...But he, too, pays a price...

...But however important it is to remedy these drawbacks-one discovers what they are very quickly by getting into that truck-one is still left with the fact that the jobs are not likely choices...

...But because the work is necessary, the situation has always been accepted as inevitable, closed to question...

...Every time I went to work someplace else, something would happen...

...Easing the Lifetime Term However useful, however hypnotic to us in the Richard Scarry sense, these jobs may be, few people would actively want to hold any of them for more than a short term...

...And there is, probably a far solider connection between what he does and his hat than between the banker’s function and his trappings, which is why the banker so assiduously maintains those appearances-he depends on them for the suspension of disbelief...

...The book is not just entertaining but interesting to both the child and the adult reader-in teresting in the especjally absorbing and satisfying way that everyday things getting done can be...

...Grossman, $5.95 Suzannah Lessard is an editor of The Washington Monthly...

...The sense of usefulness does not alter the fact that much of this work is so brutally monotonous and physically draining that the useful worker is almost useless to himself at the end of a day...

...A draft for all the merely tolerable jobs doesn’t seem practicable-though this doesn’t preclude the possibility of somehow breaking the life sentencesbut for the plainly sub-human work, a draft, or any other way of distributing the burden democratically, is imperative...