Posted on 05/31/2004 4:31:52 AM PDT by Archangelsk
Babe Secoli, a supermarket checker for nearly 30 years, is proud of her dexterity in moving items along the conveyor belt. If asked, she will do a little dance, showing how she hits the keys on the cash register with one hand, pushes the food along with the other and intermittently whacks the conveyor-belt button with her hip. She knows what everything costs — the price list on the register is, she says, only "for the part-time girls." Almost everything amuses her, especially the rich ladies who drop in to shoplift meat. "I'm a couple of days away," she says, "I'm very lonesome for this place."
Ms. Secoli's is one of the dozens of throaty, acerbic voices in "Working," Studs Terkel's oral history of working life, which was published 30 years ago this spring. When it appeared, "Working" was a revelation, a window on the thoughts of Americans who were rarely heard from: hospital aides, skycaps, gravediggers. Many of the interviews follow a similar, surprising trajectory, beginning with mundane workplace details but quickly moving on to existential thoughts. Even for the lowliest laborers, Mr. Terkel found, work was a search, sometimes successful, sometimes not, "for daily meaning as well as daily bread."
The oral histories in "Working" are wistful dispatches from a distant era. The early 1970's were the waning days of the old economy, when modern management practices and computers were just beginning to transform the American workplace. In the last 30 years, productivity has soared, but job satisfaction has plummeted. It is hard to read "Working" without thinking about what has gone wrong in the workplace.
Mr. Terkel's ragtag collection of little-guy monologues was a runaway best seller. Part of its appeal was the unusual, occasionally illicit glimpses it offered into the ways of the world. "If you work nights and it's real quiet, I don't think there's an operator who hasn't listened in on calls," a switchboard operator says. "The night goes faster." A gas-meter reader tells of the codes meter men put on customer cards when there was an attractive woman in the house.
Mr. Terkel's interlocutors also offer deeper insights. A parking lot attendant holds forth on why working people are better tippers than Cadillac drivers. A prostitute reflects that she was "the kind of hustler who received money for favors granted," not the kind who "signs a lifetime contract for her trick," or who "carefully reads women's magazines and learns what it is proper to give for each date, depending on how much . . . [he] spends on her."
It is striking how many of Mr. Terkel's subjects have found the meaning he says they are looking for. "Obviously I don't make much money," a bookbinder says, but she still loves repairing old books because "a book is a life." A gravedigger recalls how impressed a visiting sewer digger was with his neat lines and square edges. "A human body is goin' into this grave," he says proudly. "That's why you need skill when you're gonna dig a grave."
There are disgruntled workers in "Working," who feel caged in by their jobs, but many others exult in their ability to demonstrate their competence, to show off their personality and to perform. "When I put the plate down, you don't hear a sound," a waitress says. "If I drop a fork, there is a certain way I pick it up. I know they can see how delicately I do it. I'm on stage."
The 1970's were a slower age, and much of the workers' pleasure in their jobs is related to the less-demanding time clock. A hospital billing agent can take time off from dunning patients to look in on a man whose leg was amputated, who has no one to care for him. "If he's going to live in a third-floor flat and he doesn't have anybody home, this bothers me," she says. A stewardess says she is supposed to spend a half-hour on a Boston to Los Angeles flight socializing with passengers.
Three decades later, we are caught up in what a recent book dubbed "The New Ruthless Economy." High tech and new management styles put workers on what the author Simon Head calls "digital assembly lines" with little room for creativity or independent thought. As much as 4 percent of the work force is now employed in call centers, reading canned scripts and being supervised with methods known as "management by stress." Doctors defer to managed-care administrators and practice speed medicine: in 1997, they spent an average of eight minutes talking to a patient, less than half the time they spent a decade earlier.
It is much the same in other fields. There have been substantial productivity gains. But those gains have not found their way to paychecks. In a recent two-and-a-half-year period, corporate profits surged 87 percent, while wages rose just 4.5 percent. Not surprisingly, a study last fall by the Conference Board found that less than 49 percent of workers were satisfied with their jobs, down from 59 percent in 1995.
When "Working" was written, these trends were just visible on the horizon. A neighborhood druggist laments "the corner drugstore, that's kinda fadin' now," because little shops like his can't compete. "Most of us, like the assembly line worker, have jobs that are too small for our spirit," an editor says. "Jobs are not big enough for people."
When America begins to pay attention to its unhappy work force — and eventually, it must — "Working" will still provide important insights, with its path-breaking exploration of what Mr. Terkel described as "the extraordinary dreams of ordinary people."
I wouldn't hold my breath given the virtually inexhaustable supply of illegal aliens waiting in line to take anything. The best way to promote worker satisfaction is by promoting some kind of balance between the number of workers who need jobs and the number of jobs who need workers.
There is a mechanism which does this called the free market, but it only works when it is not selectively managed to undermine those which built this country and other free countries of the world by giving despotic regimes access to the fruits of the free markets without making them pay the costs.
Figures the NYT would resurrect that commie's book.
Leave it to the New York Times.
In really, really sophisticated circles, this phenomenon is called "emerging from a recession."
I am not rich by any means.
But I enjoy my work immensely.
I also strive to improve myself and to stay competitive.
Work is prayer. If you don't do your best, it's a sin. If you are not allowed to do your best, seek employment elsewhere.
A gravedigger recalls how impressed a visiting sewer digger was with his neat lines and square edges. "A human body is goin' into this grave," he says proudly. "That's why you need skill when you're gonna dig a grave."
This just impressed me so much. This man really cares. Probably most people were in too much grief to realize or express thanks to the gravedigger for his efforts at making straight lines. But thanks to him now.
They are comparing apples and oranges. Are they really implying that wages should have risen 87% in the last two and a half years? Find me a period where wages have ever risen 87% in two and a half years and you will have found a period of hyperinflation.
Old Studs was the last of the entertaining Socialist Realist writers, I read the book when it first came out and laughed at the BS. Hauling ash in a coal fired power plant set my priorities.
good one from the NY slimes
And if these "dead end" jobs are "outsourced", the Times will be the first to complain.
I've never heard of "Management by Stress" as a valid b-school technique. Wanna stress your employees? Fire half of them. That will do it.
Yer missing the point. Nobody who works at a call center, and I defy anyone to argue otherwise, enjoys their job (unless they are some kind of masochist who likes getting cursed at, have air horns and whistles blown into their receivers and have managers who breath down their necks. There's a reason why the churn rate is so high in this "industry").
No kidding...these people are morons. Coporate profits were almost non-existant two years ago. If you made almost $0 then an 87% increase wouldn't be much. In addition...if you pegged peoples salaries to the profits of the company everyone would be happy in good time and claim they were getting ripped off in the bad (look at Saturn for example.)
Why do you think that was my point? My point was that call center work *is* probably not much fun, so why whine if it is outsourced? Like all of the cotton pickers who lost their jobs when mechanical cotton pickers were developed.
Source please.
The Times is burying the lead as usual---the good news is that corporate profits are up by 87% in the past two and a half years. When this happened during the Clinton bubble years, that would have been the point of the story. Since the goal of every article in the Times is to bash Bush, this fact becomes a piece of bad news.
Thank you!
That is one of the best things I have heard regarding illeagals and free trade as it is practiced in this country.
There are too many people making too much money hiring illeagals, taking away jobs that Americans WILL DO ( but of course, the Americans will expect to be PAID decently) Too many people on both sides of the aisle are willing to wink at it, too.
Some of our capitalists have LOST their moral compass and if they don't regrow it, we are gonna have a HUGE problem down the line.
The French Revolution happened for a reason.
Interesting post. Thanks!
When have wage increases been equal to the increase in corporate profits? I don't know much, if anything, about economics, but it seems to me that those profits must go to things like reinvestment in the company...and of course to politicians on both sides in the hope that they will at the very least leave them alone.
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