Working

by Studs Terkel

  I don’t think anybody’s gonna say their work’s satisfyin’, gratifyin’, unless you’re in business for yourself. I don’t think you’re satisfied workin’ for the other person. But I make a good livin’ at it. I’ve been offered better jobs. But I’ve got a year and a half to go, I’ll have my pension time in. Then I’ll go company-wise. I entertain the idea of being an operator, put it that way.

  HUB DILLARD

  A lower-middle-class suburb south of Chicago. It is a one-family brick dwelling with a two-car garage in the rear. “This one next door is a contractor. The fella across the street, he’s an electrician. We have one that’s an engineer for Allis-Chalmers. We have two policemen that live here. Everybody kind of minds their own business.”

  He is a forty-eight-year-old construction worker who has been at it for twenty-two years. His wife works; his two married children live elsewhere. He is considerably overweight and his breathing is labored. “l’m a heavy equipment operator. I run a crane.”

  There is a pecking order: apprentices; “dirt work”—sewers, water mains, tunnels, roads; buildings; “soft jobs” for the older or disabled. “They’re supposed to be in the union at least ten years and fifty-five years old.”

  There’s no job in construction which you could call an easy job. I mean, if you’re out there eating dust and dirt for eight, ten hours a day, even if you’re not doing anything, it’s work. Just being there is . . .

  The difficulty is not in running a crane. Anyone can run it. But making it do what it is supposed to do, that’s the big thing. It only comes with experience. Some people learn it quicker and there’s some people can never learn it. (Laughs.) What we do you can never learn out of a book. You could never learn to run a hoist or a tower crane by reading. It’s experience and common sense.

  There’s a bit more skill to building work. This is a boom crane. It goes anywhere from 8o feet to 240 feet. You’re setting iron. Maybe you’re picking fifty, sixty ton and maybe you have ironworkers up there 100, 110 feet. You have to be real careful that you don’t bump one of these persons, where they would be apt to fall off.

  At the same time, they’re putting bolts in holes. If they wanted a half-inch, you have to be able to give them a half-inch. I mean, not an inch, not two inches. Those holes must line up exactly or they won’t make their iron. And when you swing, you have to swing real smooth. You can’t have your iron swinging back and forth, oscillating. If you do this, they’ll refuse to work with you, because their life is at stake.

  They’re working on beams, anywhere from maybe a foot wide to maybe five or six inches. These fellas walk across there. They have to trust you. If there’s no trust there, they will not work with you. It has to be precision. There has been fellows that have been knocked off and hurt very seriously. If there’s someone careless or drinking . . . I had a serious accident myself. My one leg is where I don’t trust to run a crane any more with 239, 240 feet of stake.

  These cranes are getting bigger and bigger, so there’s more tension. Now they’re coming out with a hydraulic crane. Cherry pickers they’re called. They’re so very easy to upset if you don’t know exactly what you’re supposed to do. And it happens so quick.

  They’re more dangerous if you don’t respect ’em. Everything inside your cab has got a capacity, tells you what it can lift, at what degree your boom is. But there’s some of these foremen that are trying to make a name for themselves. They say, We’re only gonna pick this much and that much and there’s no use we should put this down. A lot of times they want you to carry things that weighs three or four ton. On level ground this can be done, but if you’re going down a slope, you’re asking for trouble.

  It’s not so much the physical, it’s the mental. When you’re working on a tunnel and you’re down in a hole two hundred feet, you use hand signals. You can’t see there. You have to have someone else that’s your eyes. There has been men dropped and such because some fellow gave the wrong signal.

  Then there’s sometimes these tunnels, they cave in. There’s been just recently over here in Midlothian, it was four fellas killed. They encountered some gas in there. Sometimes you get a breakthrough in water. There was one of ‘em here in Calumet City about a year ago. It was muck. This thing caved in their mushing machine. A big percentage of ’em, the accidents, come from a habit. You’re just not thinkin’ about your work, becomes second nature. Maybe you’re thinkin’ about somethin’ else, and right there in that instant something happens.

  The average age of the workingman, regular, is seventy-two. The average crane operator lives to be fifty-five years old. They don’t live the best sort of life. There’s a lot of tension. We’ve had an awful lot of people have had heart attacks. Yeah, my buddy.

  There was eleven of them in an elevator downtown. They built Marina Towers. The company that built that elevator, it was supposed to be foolproof. If it got going so fast, it would automatically stop—which it didn’t. It fell twelve floors and they were all hurt bad. Two of them had heart attacks when this was falling. There was one fella there that was completely paralyzed. He had eleven children. The only thing he could move is his eyes, that’s all. It’s because somebody made a mistake. A lot of stuff that comes out of the factory isn’t exactly right. It’s faulty. They don’t know until it’s used on a job. It’s not just one person that’s hurt. It’s usually four or five.

  Before I had this heart attack, I sure wanted a drink. (Laughs.) Sure, it relaxes. You’re tense and most everybody’d stop and have a beer or a shot. They’d have a few drinks and then they’d go home. They have a clique, like everybody has. Your ironworkers, they go to one tavern. Maybe the operators go to another one. The carpenters go to another place. They build buildings and tear ’em down in the tavern. (Laughs.)

  There’s a lot of times you have to take another man’s word for something and a lot of people get hurt. I was hurt because I took another man’s word. I was putting the crane on a lowboy—the tractor that hauls it. This foreman told me to swing this stub section of the boom from the front of the lowboy to the back. I said it couldn’t be done. He said it’s been done a number of times. The lowboy wasn’t big enough for the crane and the crane went over backward. They had some extra weight on the back of the crane, which is an unsafe practice. When the crane went over backwards and threw me out, a five-hundred-pound weight went across my leg and crushed my ankle and hip. I was in the hospital, had three operations on my leg and was out of work eighteen months.

  With an air of fatalism, he relives the moment: “It threw me out and it was a real hot day. I said, ‘My leg is broke.’ He said, ‘No, it can’t be broke.’ They Seen me lyin’ there, these women came over and started throwin’ blankets on me. I said, ‘Jesus, as hot as it is now, you’re gonna smother me.’ The ambulance came. They started takin’ the shoe off. They ended cuttin’ it off. And the bone came out.

  “This doctor showed me everything he did. It was crushed. It wouldn’t heal. He told me to go home, walk on it. I’d get outside and I’d scream. So finally they took me back in the hospital and operated again. There was a piece of jour-inch bone never mended. He said it didn’t show on the x-ray.

  “Comin’ downstars or goin’ down a ramp, it bothers me. We have a boat, it’s an awful nice boat and it’s awful hard for me to get in and out of it. I used to do an awful lot of huntin’. I’m a farm boy. Boy! I can’t do any huntin’ now. It was three years ago, August twenty-second.”

  What were you thinking of during those eighteen months?

  Trying to feed my family and make my house payments—which was very hard. My wife worked a little bit and we managed. The union gave us thirty-one dollars a week, Workmen’s Compensation gave us sixty-nine dollars a week. And after I was off for six months, I received $180 in Social Security.

  The work I’m doin’ now, sewers, water mains, and such as that—dirt work—there’s no chance of hurting anybody. If I was doing the same work as before, set irons, such as that, there’s a c
hance somebody could be killed. Your hands and feet, the pairs of them, have to work together.

  You take other crafts, like an ironworker, he needs a belt, two spud wrenches, a knife which costs him fifteen dollars, and he makes more than a crane operator. The crane operator, he’s responsible for a machine that cost over a quarter of a million dollars. Regardless of what kind of machine it is, they all costs anywhere from thirty-five, forty thousand dollars and up. So why isn’t he worth as much money?

  In the wintertime, sometimes you’re off several months. People will say, look at the money this man’s making. But when other people are working, he’s getting nothing. In the steel mill, when they get laid off, they get so much money per week for so many weeks. When I get laid off, there’s nothing more than to get another job. We have no paid holidays, no paid vacations.

  We can’t go out and get our own jobs. When we get laid off we have to call the union hall and they send you to a job whenever it’s your turn. But there’s so many people work for a contractor, say, for twelve, fifteen years, these people will do anything to keep their job. They don’t think of the safety of another operator, of his equipment or anything. They’re doing things to please the contractor. You have some contractors that’ll try to get an operator to work below scale. But not like you used to. The majority of contractors are pretty good.

  Instead of asking for more money, the union should ask for better conditions. Conditions are being improved, though. Our union has hired a man, he can call a man out on a job if he thinks it was unsafe. Years ago, if you said it was unsafe, they fired you.

  Oh yeah, every union has a clique. I don’t care what union it is, their own people are going to work more. I mean their brothers and their son and such like that. And as the machinery gets more complicated, you have to learn how to read them. Somebody has to teach you. But if you’re just another person and have no pull, why then you’re not gonna have an opportunity to learn it.

  Sure, there’s a lot of colored boys do real good work. You set down with ’em and you have your lunch and there’s no hard feelings. But there again, they hate you because you are something. You didn’t get this just through a friend. You got it through hard work and that’s the only way you’re gonna get it. I was an apprentice and I worked my way up.

  My father was a crane operator since 1923. We lived on a farm and he was away from home a lot. So I said I’d never do this. When I got out of the service, I went to school and was a watchmaker. I couldn’t stay in the pack. It was the same thing, every day and every day. It was inside. And being a farm boy . . . So I went to work with my father, construction work, and stayed with it ever since.

  I have one son doin’ this work. But this youngest one, he’s pretty intelligent, I’d like to see him be a professional man if he will. Of course, I wanted the other one too. But . . . there’s so many changes now. When I started, to build a road a mile it took you two or three months. Now they can build a mile a day. The work is so much more seasonal because they can do it so much quicker. Your chances of being off work in the wintertime is a lot greater now than it was years ago.

  When they put up this new strip on the Dan Ryan,13 they had one machine there that did the work of five machines fifteen years ago. It did it faster and so much better. It would take one man to do that. Fifteen years ago, it took five men and it took all summer. They did it now in three months. I just don’t know . . .

  There’s a certain amount of pride—I don’t care how little you did. You drive down the road and you say, “I worked on this road.” If there’s a bridge, you say, “I worked on this bridge.” Or you drive by a building and you say, “I worked on this building.” Maybe it don’t mean anything to anybody else, but there’s a certain pride knowing you did your bit.

  That building we put up, a medical building. Well, that granite was imported from Canada. It was really expensive. Well, I set all this granite around there. So you do this and you don’t make a scratch on it. It’s food for your soul that you know you did it good. Where somebody walks by this building you can say, “Well, I did that.”

  BOOK TWO

  COMMUNICATIONS

  In coming of age, communications has become an end in itself. . . . We are all wired for sound. . . .

  —Wright Morris

  SHARON ATKINS

  A receptionist at a large business establishment in the Midwest. She is twenty-four. Her husband is a student. “I was out of college, an English Lit. major. I looked around for copywriting jobs. The people they wanted had majored in journalism. Okay, the first myth that blew up in my face is that a college education will get you a job.”

  I changed my opinion of receptionists because now I’m one. It wasn’t the dumb broad at the front desk who took telephone messages. She had to be something else because I thought I was something else. I was fine until there was a press party. We were having a fairly intelligent conversation. Then they asked me what I did. When I told them, they turned around to find other people with name tags. I wasn’t worth bothering with. I wasn’t being rejected because of what I had said or the way I talked, but simply because of my function. After that, I tried to make up other names for what I did—communications control, servomechanism. (Laughs.)

  I don’t think they’d ever hire a male receptionist. They’d have to pay him more, for one thing. You can’t pay someone who does what I do very much. It isn’t economically feasible. (Laughs.) You’re there just to filter people and filter telephone calls. You’re there just to handle the equipment. You’re treated like a piece of equipment, like the telephone.

  You come in at nine, you open the door, you look at the piece of machinery, you plug in the headpiece. That’s how my day begins. You tremble when you hear the first ring. After that, it’s sort of downhill— unless there’s somebody on the phone who is either kind or nasty. The rest of the people are just non, they don’t exist. They’re just voices. You answer calls, you connect them to others, and that’s it.

  I don’t have much contact with people. You can’t see them. You don’t know if they’re laughing, if they’re being satirical or being kind. So your conversations become very abrupt. I notice that in talking to people. My conversations would be very short and clipped, in short sentences, the way I talk to people all day on the telephone.

  I never answer the phone at home. It carries over. The way I talk to people on the phone has changed. Even when my mother calls, I don’t talk to her very long. I want to see people to talk to them. But now, when I see them, I talk to them like I was talking on the telephone. It isn’t a conscious process. I don’t know what’s happened. When I’m talking to someone at work, the telephone rings, and the conversation is interrupted. So I never bother finishing sentences or finishing thoughts. I always have this feeling of interruption.

  You can think about this thing and all of a sudden the telephone rings and you’ve got to jump right back. There isn’t a ten-minute break in the whole day that’s quiet. I once worked at a punch press, when I was in high school. A part-time job. You sat there and watched it for four, five hours. You could make up stories about people and finish them. But you can’t do that when you’ve got only a few minutes. You can’t pick it up after the telephone call. You can’t think, you can’t even finish a letter. So you do quickie things, like read a chapter in a short story. It has to be short-term stuff.

  I notice people have asked me to slow down when I’m talking. What I do all day is to say what I have to say as quickly as possible and switch the call to whoever it’s going to. If I’m talking to a friend, I have to make it quick before I get interrupted.

  You try to fill up your time with trying to think about other things: what you’re going to do on the weekend or about your family. You have to use your imagination. If you don’t have a very good one and you bore easily, you’re in trouble. Just to fill in time, I write real bad poetry or letters to myself and to other people and never mail them. The letters are fantasies, sort of rambling, how I feel,
how depressed I am.

  I do some drawings—Mondrian, sort of. Peaceful colors of red and blue. Very ordered life. I’d like to think of rainbows and mountains. I never draw humans. Things of nature, never people. I always dream I’m alone and things are quiet. I call it the land of no-phone, where there isn’t any machine telling me where I have to be every minute.

  The machine dictates. This crummy little machine with buttons on it—you’ve got to be there to answer it. You can walk away from it and pretend you don’t hear it, but it pulls you. You know you’re not doing anything, not doing a hell of a lot for anyone. Your job doesn’t mean anything. Because you’re just a little machine. A monkey could do what I do. It’s really unfair to ask someone to do that.

  Do you have to lie sometimes?

  Oh sure, you have to lie for other people. That’s another thing: having to make up stories for them if they don’t want to talk to someone on the telephone. At first I’d feel embarrassed and I’d feel they knew I was lying. There was a sense of emptiness. There’d be a silence, and I’d feel guilty. At first I tried to think of a euphemism for “He’s not here.” It really bothered me. Then I got tired of doing it, so I just say, “He’s not here.” You’re not looking at the person, you’re talking to him over the instrument. (Laughs.) So after a while it doesn’t really matter. The first time it was live. The person was there. I’m sure I blushed. He probably knew I was lying. And I think he understood I was just the instrument, not the source.