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GIG: Americans Talk About Their Jobs at the Turn of the Millennium, edited by John Bowe, Marisa Bowe and Sabin Streeter. Crown, 548 pp., $25. ONE HUNDRED JOBS: A Panorama of Work in the American City, by Ron Howell. Photographs by Ozier Muhammad. The New Press, 223 pp., $15.95 paper. IN THE late '60s and early '70s, armed with a tape recorder, Studs Terkel traveled around the United States and interviewed scores of people about their jobs and the experience of work. The interviews were published in 1972 as the widely read book "Working." From factory workers, farmers and janitors to athletes, entertainers and a gravedigger, Terkel's interviews took readers into the lives of ordinary people. And more than just providing a glimpse of what a flight attendant, car salesman or hotel clerk did all day, the interviews presented an array of people who, as Terkel wrote, "found a meaning to their work well over and beyond the reward of a paycheck." In the 28 years since "Working" was published, much has changed in the U.S. economy, from the loss of entire manufacturing industries and corporate downsizings to the explosion of temporary employment and the rise of the Internet. But work, of course, remains a big, maybe even a bigger, part of people's lives. It is fitting, then, to find two new books extending the Terkel tradition. "Gig" is a collection of 150 monologues collected over the last several years by the editors of the online magazine Word. As in "Working," the people encountered in "Gig" are drawn from a wide range of occupations and talk about their work and what it means to them. But the intention of "Gig" is less earnest and reverent. Terkel saw people struggling to overcome the daily drudgery of work and hold on to a sense of self, but the editors of "Gig" do not weigh their book down with such sentiments. Instead, they make the assertion that "our sole position on work is that it's interesting, it's significant and it's at or near the center of everyone's identity." There's nothing very profound about that statement, and after reading the interviews in "Gig," I understand why. Most of the people interviewed had very little to say about the world around them. While there are a few tales of real back-breaking or soul-crushing labor - such as a chicken-part sorter in a poultry factory who says "We are slaves," and an autoworker at Ford who complains that "workin' in here - it's like a prison sentence" - a surprising number of the people interviewed seem to really enjoy what they do for a living. What you don't find in "Gig" are people questioning the big picture. When Terkel assembled "Working," it was the tail-end of the 1960s, and you hear a lot of people talking about how "the system" is unjust or broken. But the 1990s workers in "Gig" are not dreaming about radical social change. Although it's not a penetrating look into the souls of working folk in America today, "Gig" does offer some good bits of unintentional humor. The best moments are the crazy stories that people tell and the obscure and raunchy details the editors get from people who do unusual or bizarre jobs: a guy who runs a crime-scene cleaning business, a heavy-metal roadie, a porn star, a webmistress for porn sites. A systems administrator tells a good story about fighting off a hacker who pesters him like a gnat, and a pretzel-stand vendor recounts how she had an affair with her co-worker, complete with afternoon trysts in the pretzel van. And, of course, there are stories about hazardous working conditions - a flight attendant, for instance, recalls getting hit in the face with a cheeseburger by a passenger who had asked for chicken. While both "Working" and "Gig" present the stories of working people in their own words, Newsday reporter Ron Howell takes a different approach in "One Hundred Jobs." Howell teamed up with New York Times photographer Ozier Muhammad and talked to 100 workers in New York City about their labors. In a series of compact and crisply written profiles, accompanied by Ozier's well-composed and sympathetic photographs, Howell provides quick glimpses into the working days of people who pick up the city's trash, cut hair, deliver packages, sell newspapers, cure the sick and so on. The workers Howell talks to represent the full range of the city's multicultural makeup, and many of them are new immigrants diligently saving for a better future. As in "Gig," most of the workers profiled in "One Hundred Jobs" seem to like their jobs, or else they're working toward something better. One of the more distinctive things about the workers in New York City, and something that is certainly not the norm in America today, is that a large number of them are union members, which means you hear a lot of people talking about just putting in their time and looking forward to retiring on a nice union pension. While much has been written about the changing nature of employment in the United States, about the decline of worker loyalty toward companies that don't really care about their employees, the people encountered in "Gig" and "One Hundred Jobs" reveal a surprising respect for work. They may even hate their jobs, but doing them well still seems to matter. For those who think we place way too much importance on work in this country, and I'm one of them, I was hoping to find in these books more people expressing a desire for life with a little more freedom, and not just when you retire. Oh well, off to the salt mines.
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© 2000, Labor Research Association |