Working

by Studs Terkel

  I’m a checker and I’m very proud of it. There’s some, they say, “A checker—ugh!” To me, it’s like somebody being a teacher or a lawyer. I’m not ashamed that I wear a uniform and nurse’s shoes and that I got varicose veins. I’m makin’ an honest living. Whoever looks down on me, they’re lower than I am.

  What irritates me is when customers get very cocky with me. “Hurry up,” or “Cash my check quick.” I don’t think this is right. You wait your time and I’ll give you my full, undivided attention. You rush and you’re gonna get nothin’. Like yesterday, I had two big orders on my counter and I push the groceries down, and she says, “I have to be somewhere in ten minutes. Hurry up and bag that.” You don’t talk that way to me or any other checker.

  I’m human, I’m working for a living. They belittle me sometimes. They use a little profanity sometimes. I stop right there and I go get the manager. Nobody is gonna call me a (cups hand over mouth, whispers) b-i-t-c-h. These are the higher class of people, like as if I’m their housekeeper or their maid. You don’t even talk to a maid like this.

  I make mistakes, I’m not infallible. I apologize. I catch it right there and then. I tell my customers, “I overcharged you two pennies on this. I will take it off of your next item.” So my customers don’t watch me when I ring up. They trust me. But I had one this morning—with this person I say, “How are you?” That’s the extent of our conversation. She says to me, “Wait. I want to check you.” I just don’t bother. I make like I don’t even know she’s there or I don’t even hear her. She’s ready for an argument. So I say, “Stop right there and then. I’ll give you a receipt when I’m through. If there’s any mistakes I’ll correct them.” These people, I can’t understand them—and I can’t be bothered with their little trifles because I’ve got my next customer that wants to get out . . .

  It hurts my feelings when they distrust me. I wouldn’t cheat nobody, because it isn’t going in my pocket. If I make an honest mistake, they call you a thief, they call you a ganef. I’m far from bein’ a ganef.

  Sometimes I feel my face gettin’ so red that I’m so aggravated, I’m a total wreck. My family says, “We better not talk to her today. She’s had a bad day.” They say, “What happened?” I’ll look at ’em and I’ll start laughin’, because this is not a policy to bring home your work. You leave your troubles at the store and vice versa. But there’s days when you can’t cope with it. But it irons out.

  “When you make a mistake, you get three chances. Then they take it out of your pay, which is right. You can’t make a ten-dollar mistake every week. It’s fishy. What’s this nonsense? If I give a customer ten dollars too much, it’s your own fault. That’s why they got these registers with the amounts tendered on it. You don’t have to stop and count. I’ve never had such mistakes. It happens mostly with some of these young kids.”

  Years ago it was more friendlier, more sweeter. Now there’s like tension in the air. A tension in the store. The minute you walk in you feel it. Everybody is fightin’ with each other. They’re pushin’, pushin‘—“I was first.” Now it’s an effort to say, “Hello, how are you?” It must be the way of people livin’ today. Everything is so rush, rush, rush, and shovin’. Nobody’s goin’ anywhere. I think they’re pushin’ themselves right to a grave, some of these people.

  A lot of traffic here. There’s bumpin’ into each other with shoppin’ carts. Some of ‘em just do it intentionally. When I’m shoppin’, they just jam you with the carts. That hits your ankle and you have a nice big bruise there. You know who does this the most? These old men that shop. These men. They’re terrible and just jam you. Sometimes I go over and tap them on the shoulder: “Now why did you do this?” They look at you and they just start laughin’. It’s just hatred in them, they’re bitter. They hate themselves, maybe they don’t feel good that day. They gotta take their anger out on somethin’, so they just jam you. It’s just ridiculous.

  I know some of these people are lonesome. They have really nobody. They got one or two items in their cart and they’re just shoppin’ for an hour, just dallying along, talkin’ to other people. They tell them how they feel, what they did today. It’s just that they want to get it out, these old people. And the young ones are rushin’ to a PTA meeting or somethin’, and they just glance at these people and got no time for ’em.

  We have this little coffee nook and we serve free coffee. A lot of people come in for the coffee and just walk out. I have one old lady, she’s got no place to go. She sits in front of the window for hours. She’ll walk around the store, she’ll come back. I found out she’s all alone, this old lady. No family, no nothin’. From my register I see the whole bit.

  I wouldn’t know how to go in a factory. I’d be like in a prison. Like this, I can look outside, see what the weather is like. I want a little fresh air, I walk out the front door, take a few sniffs of air, and come back in. I’m here forty-five minutes early every morning. I’ve never been late except for that big snowstorm. I never thought of any other work.

  I’m a couple of days away, I’m very lonesome for this place. When I’m on a vacation, I can’t wait to go, but two or three days away, I start to get fidgety. I can’t stand around and do nothin’. I have to be busy at all times. I look forward to comin’ to work. It’s a great feelin’. I enjoy it somethin’ terrible.

  THOMAS RUSH

  We’re in a modern bungalow in a middle-class black community. It is an area of one-family dwellings with front lawns well-trimmed and cars carefully parked. An air of well-being pervades in this autumn twilight.

  He is a lead skycap for one of the major airlines—“supervisor of passenger service. I make out the work schedule, who’s going to work upstairs in the lobby, who’s going to work downstairs, who’s going to work the baggage claims area. I direct all the skycap traffic.”

  He’s been at it since 1946. “When I came home from the service I was gonna go in the police department. While waiting for the call, I applied for a job at the airport and got it. The following day I was called by the police academy. My mother didn’t want me to be a policeman. My wife didn’t want me to be a policeman. So I said, ‘What the heck, I’ll just stay here and see what happens.’ I’ve been here ever since.” He is fifty-seven years old.

  I’ve walked hundreds of miles on this job. I haven’t really had too much problem with my feet. But I do get tired, very tired. (Laughs.) I’m wearing a knee supporter. One day I went to the check-in counter with a passenger that had excess baggage. As I turned to walk away, my knee just snapped. I went around first aid and she bandaged it for me. It comes and goes.

  When I first started you carried all baggage by hand. Later, when we worked for individual airlines, you got two-wheel carts. Some fellas can put as many as eighteen to twenty bags on a cart. I’ve done it many times, but I don’t do it any more. ’Cause I’m a little old now. I don’t press myself.

  The skycap came into being with the jet aircraft. We were called porters, redcaps. The man you meet now at the curb cannot be a dummy. He has to read tickets, he has to sell tickets. He has to get someone to take hotel reservations. You’d be surprised at the things people ask you to do.

  We have to do a lot more than the general public thinks. They think of us as a strong back and a weak mind. They don’t realize that what we’re doing is the same thing they get when they walk to a counter. All the agent does is look at his ticket and check his bag. We have schedules in our pockets. I know if there’s a meal on the plane. I know if there’s cocktails, movies, and so forth. No one has to tell me this. From memory I know most flights on my ships—where they go, what time they go, when they arrive.

  We’re the first and the last people to meet the passengers. We meet them when they get out of their cars or cabs and we meet them at baggage claim. Old people, especially, are anxious to talk to anybody that’s working for the airlines. They want to be reassured. I tell them silly little stories: “You’re not going to get the thrill you get on a roller coas
ter. There ain’t nothin’ gonna happen. Just relax and enjoy it. When you come back, I want you to look me up.”

  I look at everybody at eye level. I neither look down nor up. The day of the shuffle is gone. I better not see any one of the fellas that works for me doing it. Not ever! You do not have to do anything but be courteous and perform your job. This is all that is necessary. That perpetual grin I just don’t dig. I have been told that I don’t smile, period. I said, “I don’t think it’s necessary.” I smile when I have something to smile about. Otherwise I don’t. If I make the passenger happy, that’s all that’s necessary. I don’t have a problem with people. Maybe it’s the way I carry myself. I’m strictly business at work. People just don’t run over me.

  I had a sailor one night who walked up to me and said, “Boy, where can a man get a drink?” I took him down to the end of the terminal, under the steps, and cracked him in the mouth. He was half-drunk and I didn’t try to hurt him. I said, “Now what were you telling me a few moments ago?” He said, “Can’t you take a joke?” I said, “Okay, boy, you can get a drink across the street.” I just thought I’d teach him a lesson. I was much younger then. It was about twenty years ago.

  The skycap makes a good living. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t stay. We have fellas here with all kinds of degrees. They make more money doing what they’re doing. It’s just that simple. Most fellas here are from forty-six years old and up. You can’t get this job and be a young man. There are no openings. There will be an opening when somebody retires or dies. I haven’t known anyone to quit and I’ve been here twenty-six years.

  I wouldn’t have a job that didn’t make tips. But I would not be a cabdriver. I would not be a waiter. I never wanted to be a Pullman porter. These people here have a dignity all their lives.

  Yet I think I’m grossly underpaid in salary, because of what we really do. There are fellas here that sell three or four thousand dollars worth of seats a week. They don’t come anywhere close to making the salary that agents make, that are doing absolutely nothing by way of selling. We have people at the ticket counters who make two hundred dollars a month more than the average skycap. I’d say the average skycap sells a thousand dollars a month more than this man.

  There are many people that will leave at the spur of the moment. Salesmen, especially. There’s no reservation or anything. He just comes to the airport and wants to know what airline has what flight going as soon as possible to his destination. It’s up to you to sell him your line. I don’t think our value is recognized. At the quarterly meeting the company tells us how important we are, but they don’t say that on the UG-100s, when it comes to salary raises.

  But we make it on tips. Every time I walk through that door I get money. And don’t you think these people know I’m making money? I think most agents have a little animosity towards skycaps because they feel we’re doing quite well. The ramp service man makes something more than five dollars an hour. He’s the guy who puts the baggage in the pressurized cabins, brings them into the claiming area, and puts them on the belt. I take ‘em and the man gives me four dollars. (Laughs.) He does all the work out in the cold and here comes Tom gettin’ money. (Laughs.)

  Supervisors don’t bother us. If a supervisor comes to me and tells me he wants skycaps to do something and I say no, there isn’t anything he can say about it. Would I ever want to be a supervisor? Of course not. He doesn’t make as much money as I make. (Laughs.)

  We prefer not to have a union. We make more money than most people out there. We get more benefits than the guys on the ramp, and they have a union. They’re not dressed like we are, either. They wear dungarees and things. We don’t wear that crap. We wear a uniform, we wear a suit. We’re the elite of the fleet. (Laughs.)

  POSTSCRIPT: “Every one of the fellas on my shift own their own home. All our wives are good friends. We go around each other’s homes occasionally. My wife is in the process of organizing the other wives into a stock buying club.

  “The house next door is a skycap’s. Next door to him is a salesman. And next to him is a policeman, whose wife owns a beauty shop. This neighborhood has changed for the better. The house over there was always falling down and they never cut the grass. A white police lieutenant had it. He never painted it. Everything was peeling. Look at it now, all remodeled. Most people are surprised when they come out here. I wonder why. (Laughs.) Isn’t that house gorgeous? It looks five hundred times better than when the lieutenant had it.”

  GRACE CLEMENTS

  She is a sparrow of a woman in her mid-forties. She has eighteen grandchildren. “I got my family the easy way. I married my family.” She has worked in factories for the past twenty-five years: “A punch press operator, oven unloader, sander, did riveting, stapling, light assembly . . .” She has been with one company for twenty-one years, ARMCO Corporation.

  During the last four years, she has worked in the luggage division of one of the corporation’s subsidiaries. In the same factory are made snow-mobile parts, windshield defrosters, tilt caps, sewer tiles, and black paper speakers for radios and TV sets.

  “We’re about twelve women that work in our area, one for each tank. We’re about one-third Puerto Rican and Mexican, maybe a quarter black, and the rest of us are white. We have women of all ages, from eighteen to sixty-six, married, single, with families, without families.

  “We have to punch in before seven. We’re at our tank approximately one to two minutes before seven to take over from the girl who’s leaving. The tanks run twenty-four hours a day.”

  The tank I work at is six-foot deep, eight-foot square. In it is pulp, made of ground wood, ground glass, fiberglass, a mixture of chemicals and water. It comes up through a copper screen felter as a form, shaped like the luggage you buy in the store.

  In forty seconds you have to take the wet felt out of the felter, put the blanket on—a rubber sheeting—to draw out the excess moisture, wait two, three seconds, take the blanket off, pick the wet felt up, balance it on your shoulder—there is no way of holding it without it tearing all to pieces, it is wet and will collapse—reach over, get the hose, spray the inside of this copper screen to keep it from plugging, turn around, walk to the hot dry die behind you, take the hot piece off with your opposite hand, set it on the floor—this wet thing is still balanced on my shoulder—put the wet piece on the dry die, push this button that lets the dry press down, inspect the piece we just took off, the hot piece, stack it, and count it—when you get a stack of ten, you push it over and start another stack of ten—then go back and put our blanket on the wet piece coming up from the tank . . . and start all over. Forty seconds. We also have to weigh every third piece in that time. It has to be within so many grams. We are constantly standing and moving. If you talk during working, you get a reprimand, because it is easy to make a reject if you’re talking.

  A thirty-inch luggage weighs up to fifteen pounds wet. The hot piece weighs between three to four pounds. The big luggage you’ll maybe process only four hundred. On the smaller luggage, you’ll run maybe 800, sometimes 850 a day. All day long is the same thing over and over. That’s about ten steps every forty seconds about 800 times a day.

  We work eight straight hours, with two ten-minute breaks and one twenty-minute break for lunch. If you want to use the washroom, you have to do that in that time. By the time you leave your tank, you go to the washroom, freshen up a bit, go into the recreation room, it makes it very difficult to finish a small lunch and be back in the tank in twenty minutes. So you don’t really have too much time for conversation. Many of our women take a half a sandwich or some of them don’t even take anything. I’m a big eater. I carry a lunch box, fruit, a half a sandwich, a little cup of cottage cheese or salad. I find it very difficult to complete my lunch in the length of time.

  You cannot at any time leave the tank. The pieces in the die will burn while you’re gone. If you’re real, real, real sick and in urgent need, you do shut it off. You turn on the trouble light and wait for the tool ma
n to come and take your place. But they’ll take you to a nurse and check it out.

  The job I’m doing is easier than the punch presses I used to run. It’s still not as fast as the punch press, where you’re putting out anywhere to five hundred pieces an hour. Whereas here you can have a couple of seconds to rest in. I mean seconds. (Laughs.) You have about two seconds to wait while the blanket is on the felt drawing the moisture out. You can stand and relax those two seconds—three seconds at most. You wish you didn’t have to work in a factory. When it’s all you know what to do, that’s what you do.

  I guess my scars are pretty well healed by now, because I’ve been off on medical leave for two, three months. Ordinarily I usually have two, three burn spots. It’s real hot, and if it touches you for a second, it’ll burn your arm. Most of the girls carry scars all the time.

  We’ve had two or three serious accidents in the last year and a half. One happened about two weeks ago to a woman on the hydraulic lift. The cast-iron extension deteriorated with age and cracked and the die dropped. It broke her whole hand. She lost two fingers and had plastic surgery to cover the burn. The dry die runs anywhere from 385 degrees to 425.

  We have wooden platforms where we can walk on. Some of the tanks have no-skid strips to keep you from slipping, ’cause the floor gets wet. The hose we wash the felter with will sometimes have leaks and will spray back on you. Sometimes the tanks will overflow. You can slip and fall. And slipping on oil. The hydraulic presses leak every once in a while. We’ve had a number of accidents. I currently have a workman’s comp suit going. I came up under an electric switch box with my elbow and injured the bone and muscle where it fastens together. I couldn’t use it.