unalienated labour

it's work, Jim, but not as you know it

This past week I have been reading a book called Is This Working? by Charlie Colenutt, the subtitle of which is The Jobs We Do, Told by the People Who Do Them. It is an oral history, of sorts; a series of anonymous accounts of work, taken from interviews with the writer, removed of (most) of his questions, so the accounts themselves stand alone. They are truncated—each just a few pages long—and ascribed only to a job role and a vague age; 30s, 50s, etc. This allows the reader to focus on what is important to the book: the unadulterated oral history of the speaker’s experience of their work. And, crucially, how they feel about that work.

The book is heavily inspired by, and can be seen as a modern version of, a book called Working by Studs Terkel—who I would have assumed to have been a San Francisco butch from the name alone, but who actually turns out to have been an oral historian and broadcaster who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985. The subtitle of this book is phenomenal: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. The book attempts to engage with the practical and emotional realities of work—not just what we do, but the impact it has on us, as workers. The first line of the introduction sums it up admirably:

This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence—to the spirit as well as to the body. It is about ulcers as well as accidents, about shouting matches as well as fistfights, about nervous breakdowns as well as kicking the dog around. It is, above all (or beneath all), about daily humiliations. To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us.

Unlike Colenutt, Terkel names his interviewed workers (as well as giving family, situation and autobiographical details), so we know that those featured include actor Rip Torn (a person I only know about from Wayne’s World), Chicago Blackhawks centre Eric Nesterenko and Major League Baseball player Steve Hamilton—alongside stonemasons, editors, a strip miner, various farmers, policemen, janitors, factory mechanics, cab drivers, stock chasers, sex workers and many more, all grouped by the general type of their work (the ‘books’ collect them into groupings like ‘communications’ and ‘footwork’). Like Colenutt, he allows the testimonies of his subjects to appear without questions, but does edit them. What results is a fascinating glimpse into the world of American labour exactly fifty years ago.

A farmer laments the cost, and overuse, of chemicals in his line of work. A receptionist says that she is just part of the equipment, there because it’s not economically feasible to hire a man. A waitress rages against injustice. A factory owner hates being called ‘the boss’, hates the way that people both despise him and cower in front of him. People’s conception of how much they enjoy (or don’t hate) their jobs is reliant not just on the type of work they do, but on the jobs they’ve had before, the conditions of the work and the ways in which it allows them a degree of autonomy, even when the labour itself might be more demanding and difficult and badly paid. Here, a garbage worker positive compares his intensely physical job to the desk job that came before it:

I don't look down on my job in any way. I couldn't say I despise myself for doing it. I feel better at it than I did at the office. I'm more free. And, yeah - it's meaningful to society (laughs).

The world in Colenutt’s book is much more recognisable, to the contemporary reader, but the considerations are the same: a job is measured not just on its own merits but on the relative world of work in which it exists, and on the worker’s previous experiences in that world. Notably, in the newer book, a former soldier states that ‘teaching is harder than soldiering, without a doubt… It was far less stressful in Afghanistan’.

What comes across so strongly in both of these books that there is something beyond economics that makes a person feel that their labour has meaning; pay is one thing, but value is another. It is not only the hours that we put into work, but our bodies, our personalities, our energies and our skills, and we need more than a strong paycheck to feel our various sacrifices have been really worthwhile. As Terkel puts it in the introduction to Working:

It is about a search, too, for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor: in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.

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I am interested in the meaning-making of work. There is much discussion, in the contemporary landscape, of the pointlessness of modern labour; what David Graeber defined as the preponderance of ‘bullshit jobs’. Writing about this first in a 2013 essay for Strike magazine, then in a (very good) 2018 book, the late anthropologist defined these jobs as ones that cannot be justified by the workers themselves, but exist within a framework that does not allow the workers to express this, which causes psychological damage. While blue-collar jobs might be shit jobs, white-collar jobs are bullshit jobs, he argues:

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century's end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There's every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn't happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul.

This is a theory that can be easily bolstered by personal experience, and widespread belief. Since the 1980s the UK, especially, has been firmly positioned as a services economy. We used to make things and now we don’t; this is a popular opinion, one you’ll hear from cab drivers as readily as left-wing theorists, and one that is supported by the facts. Broadly speaking, the belief is this: we used to have industry, then Thatcher demolished it. We used to have jobs that produced things, and now we don’t. And yet we still have jobs—many of which feel, and largely are, totally meaningless outwith the very system that create and sustains them. We know all this. We feel it in our bones.