Working

by Studs Terkel

  Patrick Garrard reflected another point of view: “Steve doesn’t like unions. I merely have a mild distaste for them because they’re bureaucratic. Steve regards the article as getting back at unions—let’s sock ’em. To me, it was a good story, that’s all. I was a bit worried about it because it was the only one in all our issues that could be construed as a right-wing kind of story. I don’t want our magazine to get that reputation.”

  We’re different from other business publications. Fortune and Forbes and Business Week talk about corporations and corporation executives. We talk about individuals and small companies. We have a lot of subscriptions from prisoners, who transfer nine dollars from their commissary account for the Capitalist Reporter. It’s a substantial amount of money when you make twenty-seven cents a day. Many prisoners are natural entrepreneurs that have gone outside the accepted norms that society has set, and they’ve ended up rightfully where they are.

  We have kids coming in here, long-haired hippies, who are very excited and want to buy back issues of the magazine or run an advertisement in it. I think a lot of hippies today have decided it is more fun to be successful than to be a failure. (Laughs.) I think it’s become a fashionable thing now to be successful.

  There are two kinds of people—some are gifted leaders, some are followers. The young leaders in the past few years have been negative, nihilistic, destructive—have run their course. Young people are now looking for other ways. Why am I alive? One answer is: A person must support himself. He can’t expect people to bring him everything on a silver platter. The unhappiest people are the young ones who have everything at home.

  What a lot of young people rebel against is having to go into corporations where they have to spend thirty years of their lives and come out as a wornout human being on a pension. They say, “Why on earth should I do that? There must be something more to life.” It’s more challenging to strike out on your own.

  The Bible says if a man doesn’t work, he shouldn’t eat. I’m in full agreement. Unless he’s crippled or mentally disabled, a man should work. When I was twelve in Canada, I found a bus boy’s job. I searched door to door looking for work. If I would have dictated what I wanted, I would never have found work. I was willing to take anything . . .

  The Depression in the thirties was a unique period. People were willing to work and there wasn’t work around. I think the mentality of the thirties and the mentality today is different. Then people really wanted to work. Now the thing is to want something meaningful. I despise that word. They must be willing to take whatever they find and they must grow from that. Fulfilling, that’s another one they stumble on. I didn’t start out as president of a company with a hundred thousand subscribers. It was necessary for me to scrub toilets. I scrubbed them. Not that I liked doing it. But I didn’t feel debased by it. It was better than doing nothing. Any work is better than no work. Work makes a person noble.

  This is a lie about meaningful work. It comes from teachers, Ph.D.’s who’ve never really worked. They feel they have a special knowledge to impose upon a lower being, who goes to work when he’s thirteen or fifteen and settles down and goes forward . . .

  If I’ve done my best, I find my work meaningful. If I haven’t done as well as I could, I don’t find it meaningful. I don’t think my work is any more important than a man sweeping the streets. It’s important to me only because it provides my livelihood. Whether it’s important to society only time will tell.

  The only truth as far as I’m concerned is the word of God in the Bible. That is the only reliable proven fact that has been uncontested. You can read it in all the papers, Jesus Christ is becoming an issue today. Jesus Freaks is the wrong term. They’re very normal young people. They don’t take drugs any more. They don’t promiscuously screw around with everything that walks any more. They live very healthy lives. Maybe compared to others, they’re freaks.

  I run three miles every morning. I come into the office around eight o‘clock. I spend a half-hour reading five psalms and a proverb—and praying. Then I make a schedule of what’s to be done during the day. I try to assign as many tasks as possible to my staff, so I can reduce my work. I need two or three additional people. A couple who are not pulling their weight I’m in the process of replacing. This is very painful. You have to interview a great many people before you can find that person who has the talent plus the right attitude. This is not a normal time for us, so my work runs until nine o’clock at night. Generally my workday would be over at one ’ in the afternoon.

  No, I don’t take my work home with me. You can become a slave to work. To be a successful executive, you must always be in control of your work, not let work control you. You make sure details have been assigned to others. After you check these things out, you look for new profit avenues. You search elsewhere. Who knows? I may be interested in starting another business. Now I’m interested in studying the Bible. I want to spend more time doing that. I like to read. I’m sadly lacking in my knowledge.

  If God calls me, I may one day become a missionary. I don’t see beyond that. I certainly could be just as happy living on fifty dollars a week as I could on five hundred dollars a week. I can adjust my living standards. I somehow feel there is some kind of destiny ahead of me—that God wants me to use the gifts He’s given me in different ways than just making me rich. I think there’ll be something along that line in the future.

  TOM McCOY

  He is twenty-three years old. He is a proof reader in the printing plant of a national weekly magazine. His father is a retired policeman; his mother, a retired social worker. “My father never saw himself as a cop. He became one during the Depression when there weren’t any other jobs. He was worried about survival.”

  He majored in sociology at Northwestern University “’cause it was just about the easiest thing. I wasn’t really fascinated. The only reason I was in school: I was either too young to object or, when I was a sophomore in college, I figured I might as well stay out of the draft.” It took him five and a half years to graduate. “I was dropping in and dropping out.”

  One of the things I like about my job is that the time will vary each week. I’ll work a Wednesday night one week, a Thursday afternoon, and a Saturday night. Next week it’ll be Tuesday during the day, Friday at night . . . I never know when I’ll be working, and it almost doesn’t seem like working. The hours are weird, so I don’t get caught in a rush hour. You don’t get in a rut. I dig it.

  It bothers me when the boss is there. He’s usually in during the day. In the evening there’s no supervision and I won’t be worrying how I look. It’s really pleasant. When the boss is around, if he sees you reading a newspaper or something, it grates him and he’ll find something for you to do. That’s the part of the job I dislike the most, having to look busy.

  One of the older guys was telling me how amazing he found it that I would sit there totally oblivious to the boss and read a paper. That’s something he would never do. It ran against his ethic. I think there’s too much of an attitude that work has to be shitty.

  I noticed somebody talking on the phone the other day, one of the older guys. He said he was at the office. It dawned on me when a guy says, “I’m at the office,” it means, “I’m a white-collar worker.” It means, “I don’t dirty my hands.” He wasn’t at work, he was “at the office.” It really blew my mind. I don’t think I’ve used that phrase in my life. I say, “I’m at work.”

  I’m not afraid of the boss. I think he’s sort of afraid of me, really. He’s afraid of the younger people who work there because they’re not committed to the job. The older person, who’s got his whole life wrapped in the organization, has a sword hanging over his head. The boss can keep him from getting a promotion, getting a raise. If he screws up, he can be fired. His career is hanging in balance. If I make a little mistake, I’ll say, “That’s too bad, I’m sorry it happened.” This guy’ll freak out because his career is dangling there. Consequently, the boss doesn’t have tha
t power over us, really. The tables are sort of reversed. We have power over him, because he doesn’t know how to persuade us. We do the job and we do it fine. But he doesn’t know why. He knows why the older guys work—because they want to get ahead. He doesn’t know why we work.

  I can’t figure him out. It’s a weird mixture of condescension, trying to be a nice guy—“Wouldn’t you do this?”—and trying to be stern, a fatherly sort of image. He doesn’t know whether to be nice or be stern. Part of it comes out of his own fear. He doesn’t realize younger people resent this. I object to seeing this guy as my father. I would rather see him as some sort of equal or as a boss. Older people, he tells them what to do and they do it, because that’s the way it is. But he never feels sure the younger people are going to do it. They want to know why. Nobody refused to do anything, but we want to know why.

  If there’s a lull in the work, the kids’ll go in the main office, which is plush, where the big boss works—and they’d sleep on the couches. The big boss complained to my boss that people were sleeping on the couches on Saturdays. He asked if I would pass the word along not to sleep on the couches any longer. I said, “Why? It doesn’t make any sense. If there’s nothing to do and it’s the middle of the night and the people want to grab a nap and the couch is there . . .” He said, “Well, that’s what the boss said.” I just told him, “No, I wouldn’t feel right telling them. You’ll have to tell them yourself.” It’s really stupid. If the couch is there and somebody’s tired, he should lay down on the floor to keep this guy’s couch neat for the next Monday?

  RALPH WERNER

  “I’ll be twenty tomorrow.” His parents are divorced and have since remarried. He lives with his stepfather and mother in the area of the steel mills, where most families own their own homes; the archetype, a frame bungalow. “We’re one of the last neighborhoods in the city that is just about all white. There is a fear of black people. Why, I don’t really know. They bus a lot of kids in from the West Side, but there hasn’t been any trouble at school. I do have certain questions about them, but I try to view things from a Christian standpoint . . .”

  He graduated from high school as “an average student. My initiative didn’t carry me any further than average. History I found to be dry. Math courses I was never good at. I enjoyed sciences, where I could do things instead of just be lectured to. We called it labs. Football was my bag in high school. My senior year I made all-city halfback.”

  He is small, wiry, agile, intense. He wears an American flag pin on the lapel of his suit coat.

  In my neighborhood the kids grow up, they get married right after high school, and they work in the mills. Their whole life would revolve around one community and their certain set of friends. They would never get out and see what the world’s like. It seemed terrible to me.

  I was planning to go to Western Illinois on a football scholarship. I didn’t get it. My attitude was kind of down. I couldn’t really see myself working in the mills. I did, when I was a junior, full-time after school for about two months. I would work from two in the afternoon to eleven at night. Fortunately I never had much homework. I hated it. It’s dirty. It’s the same old routine day in and day out, and it’s your whole life.

  I was a laborer. That’s where everybody starts in the mill unless you have a college education. I worked on the scarfing dock. We would burn the shavings off the steel. I would shovel ‘em up and put ’em in a big tub, which would be carried off and remelted and made into steel again.

  It wasn’t that the work was so hard. You had a lot of time to rest. It was just demoralizing. I consider my morals high. Their whole life revolved around the mills, the race track, the tavern. They talked about sex in a very gross way. The language was unheard of in a public place. (Laughs.) It just wasn’t my kind of living.

  After five o‘clock all the important people had gone home. The office people left, and things would kind of darken after that. By six o’clock the mills were pretty well run by the foremen. Those two months heightened my awareness of what the neighborhood was like.

  I can remember as a child I was scared of the mills. I used to see pictures on a steel mill calendar of a big strong guy shoveling coal. Big pits where there was fire. I wanted to get in. I found out it’s not a nice place. There are foremen and something new called sub-foremen. The mills used to be rough, but now they’re getting wild. It’s racial tensions. It’s not where I want to spend my life.

  As I knew a few white-collar workers, I associated with them on breaks. I was afraid to get too close to those that worked labor. Not because I was afraid of them themselves. They were all nice to me. It was just that I didn’t care for their conversation. So I stayed with the white-collar workers. There were different cliques all over the mill, like I found in high school. There’s cliques just about everywhere you go.

  I think a lot of people who are in a higher position, the upper-class people with a lot of money, who don’t have calloused hands, don’t have quite the appreciation of a dollar as someone who has worked in a mill, who knows what it’s like to earn your money by physically working. And if you’re sick, you know it’s gonna hurt you. And if something happens to you where you no longer have your capabilities, they’re gonna get rid of you. They have a deeper concern for life. They have a deep feeling for the political system than someone who’s upper class. Because they’ve worked, they keep our nation moving, they turn the steel out. They put their hearts and their fists behind it. They don’t sit there and let the brain do their work. I think they have a little stronger character.

  Yesterday was my last day of working as a salesman in a store in the big shopping center. I worked there six months. An expensive store, high class. You don’t come in there looking for a pair of socks. People are expected to spend a lot. It goes from upper class to middle, several doctors, execs, important people who have a lot of money.

  We had cards that were color-coded depending on how good the credit rating is of the person. Naturally the best being gold. They were a higher quality of people. I myself would only shop there because I needed dress clothes to work. Otherwise I wouldn’t shop there.

  There was a gray card or silver, which was a good credit rating, but these people weren’t as financially well off as the gold. Then there was a blue card, which they’d pass on to the employees or those with new accounts, where we would call downtown every time they would buy something. Most people would dress alike, so it was hard to tell what somebody did by the color of their card.

  With the blue card, they wouldn’t release any merchandise until we would call downtown. Several times we couldn’t get through on our phones. There was a constant waiting. So we would tell ‘em, “We can’t release the merchandise to you. We’ll have to send it out.” I saw several occasions where people with blue cards as well as silver cards would tear them up and throw them. I didn’t feel it was right to classify people like that. If you give ’em a credit card, whether they can work in a mill or can be a doctor, I feel everybody should be on an equal scale.

  When I got out of high school, I thought I’d go into retailing. That’s what my father did, my real dad. He was a salesman. This is what he’s been all his life. But I didn’t care for it. It’s too seasonal. A lot of standing around.

  My stepfather works in the mill. He used to be a pipe inspector. He’s gone to be a clerk now, a better job. He’s a lot more satisfied with life than my natural father. He gets along fine with the guys in the mill. He’s happy when he comes home. He knows exactly what he’s got to do in life. He talks very little about it. He doesn’t express feelings, but he seems content. He’s never said anything against it. It’s a good paying job. He’s looking for retirement in a number of years. Ten years, something like that. He’s just going to last out his time until he can, which I think is great.

  He also has a part-time job, which helps him waste his time away— collecting on a paper route for a news agency. The pay isn’t that good, but it’s something he likes to
do. It gives him money which he uses on a fishing trip every year. Oh, he’s good at home. He likes to clean up the garage, cut the grass, take care of the house, keep it clean. I believe he’s forty-five, give or take a year or two. This is how old my real dad is, too.

  My real dad, up in Minnesota, he’s constantly traveling. He does sales. Constantly having to talk his way to his next dollar. I have a little brother and sister which are ten and eleven, which he wishes he could spend more time with. He longs to just get a cabin up at the lake and just relax in life. But he knows that won’t come for a long time. He seems very tired for his age, very wornout.

  This past summer, I spent quite a bit of time with him, and he’s had many inspiring words for me. He’s told me several things that have echoed in my mind as I found depressing things in life. He told me: “Sometimes you have to make a decision in life, right or wrong.” Those few words have kept my head above water several times. Nobody’s gonna take your hand and walk you through life. My dad has a lot of intelligence about things like that. He knows what life’s about. He knows what you have to do in life to get ahead. This is why he’s so successful as a salesman. Even though he’s tired.