Working

Terkel spent years with a tape recorder interviewing Americans about their jobs — not economists or executives but the people actually doing the work: gravediggers, waitresses, firefighters, farm workers, parking lot attendants, copy editors, steel workers, and everyone in between. He gave the microphone to people the official culture had decided were not worth listening to and stepped back entirely — no narration, no interpretation, just voices. The result is the most democratic portrait of American labor ever assembled and an implicit indictment of a system that extracts human beings' most productive hours and returns so little of meaning in exchange. Terkel was blacklisted during McCarthyism and kept working anyway. His methodology is the argument: that the people who do the work are the authorities on what the work does to a person, and that a culture that ignores those voices is lying to itself about what it is. The companion to Nickel and Dimed — Ehrenreich works the jobs for a few weeks and reports from outside; Terkel gives the microphone to people who have worked those jobs their entire lives and lets them speak for themselves.