Steelworker Mike LeFevre wonders whether buildings might carry the names of the workers who helped construct them. A parent walking past with a child could then point out their contribution. Cities are full of things labor has left behind, yet workers struggle to find themselves acknowledged in them.

The wish sounds like praise for work, but Mike does not love his days at the steel mill. He does not want to celebrate moving steel every morning. Disliking his job and wanting recognition for what he has done coexist without contradiction. Such feelings, resistant to a single category, help keep Working worth reading.

Published in 1974 by American broadcaster and writer Studs Terkel, the oral-history collection poses a plain question in its subtitle: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. More than a hundred people discuss pay, boredom, pride, families, and hopes. Manual workers appear alongside office staff and professionals. This is not a table of career prospects. It is a gathering of people whose speech exceeds their job descriptions.

Terkel is skilled at drawing conversations toward this territory. Someone starts by explaining a procedure and ends up describing how they most hate to be seen. The time work occupies ceases to be a line on a résumé. How it changes a person and follows them home becomes a question in its own right.

Disliking a job does not leave you with nothing to say

Mike's wish reveals an easily misunderstood dissatisfaction. Others might ask why a name should remain when wages have been paid and the product belongs to someone else. Yet he need not be demanding ownership or applause for every completed task. He cannot accept that after spending a day's strength, he seems absent from accounts of what that day produced.

A division of labor gives someone only one part of a process, which need not be unreasonable. The difficulty is that workers sometimes cannot see the whole or know whether their experience can influence arrangements. Their hands are needed; their judgment may not be. Asking whether work is meaningful therefore requires more than assessing a product's social usefulness. We must ask how people live while making it.

Mike's boredom also prevents us from rewriting his account as a thank-you letter. People who build cities deserve respect without being obliged to enjoy daily hardship. If praise permits only pride and excludes anger or tedium, what receives respect is an attractive image rather than the worker.

Terkel's speakers disrupt the emotions we have prepared. Just as we extract dedication from an account, someone says they want to leave. Just as we decide they merely endure, they take pride in a skill others overlook. Conversation allows these changes of direction. People need not first become representatives of a position to have something worth saying.

Why she wants to keep waiting tables

Waitress Dolores Dante sounds very different from Mike. She entered the occupation because she needed money quickly, but came to enjoy it. She varies her greetings and develops a rhythm of service. She resents being praised for her ability only to be asked why she is still merely a waitress.

That compliment carries an occupational hierarchy: if you are so capable, you should not remain here. The speaker may mean well without asking what she likes or how she understands her abilities. Apparently, leaving the job is the only way to demonstrate the worth of the person doing it.

Her confidence does not make service equivalent to submission. She has views of her own and refuses to reduce encounters with customers to pleasing them. What she values includes being able to use language and judgment. Service acquires a personal style instead of hiding the worker behind prescribed movements.

Placed beside Mike, Dolores makes a single answer impossible. Telling him to find enjoyment as she has would turn dissatisfaction with conditions into a failure of attitude. Telling her that she simply does not understand her oppression would dismiss her account of her own life. Both need possibilities for improvement, but outsiders cannot decide in advance what improvement should mean.

Here oral testimony differs from a general argument about labor. Concepts identify shared conditions; conversations keep returning differences. Among wage earners, some want greater room to exercise their abilities, while others want work to consume less of their lives. Neither desire establishes superior virtue or insight. We have to listen further to understand where each comes from.

After the telephone is put down

Receptionist Sharon Atkins describes a change unlikely to appear on an attendance record. Calls repeatedly interrupt workplace conversations. Eventually, even speaking face to face, she expects interruption and finds it difficult to complete a train of thought. This habit does not stop at the end of a shift.

Her example changes the question. The earlier speakers ask whether their work leaves a trace and whether they can develop their own way of doing it. With Sharon, work leaves too deep a trace, entering her interactions with others.

Contemporary readers may think of incessant notifications, but need not declare that she predicted the internet. She describes a particular job in her own period. The resemblance concerns demands gradually becoming habits; the differences concern each technology and organization's conditions of use. Recognizing a feeling across decades does not allow us to omit the changes between them.

Her account complicates the reassurance that life exists outside work. People cannot exchange their attention and tone for a different set when the shift ends. Practiced responses become skills, exhaustion, or habits that take years to lose. Counting labor's costs only until someone leaves the workplace misses part of them.

These accounts preserve changes that external evaluation struggles to detect. Calls answered can be counted; compliance with a script can be checked. Increasing difficulty completing a thought becomes knowable only if someone listens. Feelings are not a sentimental addition to facts here. Hearing them is one way of learning what the work does.

Someone stands behind the recorder

Turning on a recorder does not automatically turn life into a book. Terkel chooses whom to interview, what to pursue, and which passages to retain. Chapters that appear to be uninterrupted individual speeches have undergone considerable editing.

In a 1974 Harvard Crimson interview, he likened his work to finding and refining ore. A long conversation contains much material; a book requires selection. The comparison admits an editor's necessity and prompts a question: who identifies the gold? Might the sentence an author finds most powerful push other parts of a person aside?

Writing much later, Peter Tonguette argued that Terkel's position survives through selection and arrangement even when his own voice is removed. Oral historians also point out that selecting, questioning, and editing belong to historical practice. These observations need not cancel each other. Editing does not necessarily falsify, and natural-sounding speech does not mean an author is absent.

This matters for the book's humor too. In the same 1974 interview, Terkel recounted a meter reader deliberately maneuvering sunbathing women into exposing their bodies, presenting the behavior in a discussion of enlivening tedious work. Read now, it is hard to treat this merely as mischief. Someone else's violation supplies the worker's amusement.

The answer is not to remove every unlikable speaker. If workers appear as whole people, they will also have prejudices and sometimes harm others. We can listen seriously to injustice they suffer without accepting injustice they inflict. Excusing an intrusion whenever it illustrates ordinary people's vitality turns them back into symbols.

With this caution, Working becomes more interesting. Terkel need not always judge correctly; his speakers need not always be appealing. An oral history that leaves inconsistencies available to readers offers more than one in which everyone lines up to prove the same point.

Bringing different voices together

Working is substantial. Occupation follows occupation, and familiar grievances recur. Some readers find the accumulation tiring. That is understandable: we can attend carefully to only so many people in everyday life. Hundreds of pages of lives do not become effortless merely because every account deserves respect.

Yet the extent has a purpose. Mike's and Dolores's contrasting feelings become clearer together, while Sharon adds another dimension. Space around a memorable sentence lets us hear what precedes and follows it. Extracting only the most quotable lines removes the feelings that complicate them.

The book concerns the United States around the early 1970s, not today's labor market. Equipment, occupations, and social conditions have changed. What remains valuable is its order of inquiry: first learn how someone spends the day working, then ask how they understand it, without supplying the meaning in advance.

We identify strangers by occupation—steelworker, waitress—and assume we know enough. Working makes these labels inadequate. After hearing the voices, we may bring a little more curiosity to a similar job: what has this person done today, and what has their occupational title failed to tell us?