He is remembered.Īs the automated pace of our daily jobs wipes out name and face-and, in many instances, feeling-there is a sacrilegeous question being asked these days. It was some time ago that John Henry sang, “A man ain’t nothin’ but a man.” The hard, unromantic fact is: he died with his hammer in his hand, while the machine pumped on. Blue collar and white call upon the identical phrase: “I’m a robot.” “There is nothing to talk about,” the young accountant despairingly enunciates. ‘Tm an object,” says the high-fashion model. “I’m less than a farm implement,” says the migrant worker. “A monkey can do what I do,” says the receptionist. “I’m caged,” says the bank teller, and echoes the hotel clerk, “I’m a mule,” says the steelworker. The blue-collar blues is no more bitterly sung than the white-collar moan. Nonetheless, there is a common attribute here: a meaning to their work well over and beyond the reward of the paycheck.įor the many, there is a hardly concealed discontent. There are, of course, the happy few who find a savor in their daily job: the Indiana stonemason, who looks upon his work and sees that it is good the Chicago piano tuner, who seeks and finds the sound that delights the bookbinder, who saves a piece of history the Brooklyn fireman, who saves a piece of life … But don’t these satisfactions, like Jude’s hunger for knowledge, tell us more about the person than about his task? Perhaps. To be remembered was the wish, spoken and unspoken, of the heroes and heroines of this book. Perhaps immortality, too, is part of the quest. 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. Often the two impulses are fused in the same person.) Something more than Orwellian acceptance, something less than Luddite sabotage. (“More or less,” that most ambiguous of phrases, pervades many of the conversations that comprise this book, reflecting, perhaps, an ambiguity of attitude toward The Job. The scars, psychic as well as physical, brought home to the supper table and the TV set, may have touched, malignantly, the soul of our society. To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us. It is, above all (or beneath all), about daily humiliations. 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. This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence-to the spirit as well as to the body.

Working stud terkel