Gaining a New, Yet Familiar View on Working

This week I finished reading a monumental book on people and their relationships to work. The stories are poignant, maddening, funny reminders of the good and bad in the American workplace.

"Proud of my work?" spot-welder Phil Stallings asked. "How can I feel pride in a job where I call a foreman's attention to a mistake, a bad piece of equipment, and he'll ignore it. Pretty soon you get the idea they don't care." This from a man who also says of his work, "To a great degree, I enjoy it." A poor manager can create a poor employee.

Nora Watson, staff writer for a health care information publisher, had the opposite problem but the same result. Her boss gave her jobs he thought would take three weeks that took her two hours. No one was trying anymore. "The people, just as capable as I and just as ready to produce, had realized it was pointless, and had cut back…" she said. "The amazing, absurd thing was that once I decided to stop doing a good job, people recognized a kind of authority in me. Now I'm just moving ahead like blazes."

Similar to that, a telephone worker sometimes gave misinformation to callers because she was so bored. Many people mentioned the thoughts that got them through the days. "Maybe about baseball or about getting drunk the other night or he got laid or he didn't get laid," steelworker Mike Lefevre said. "I'd say one out a hundred will actually get excited about work."

Jill Torrance had much the same problem as a fashion model. "For forty-five minutes they tell you what they want," she said of her clients. "They explain and explain and you sort of tune out and do the same thing."

Steve Dubi's company cut back workers in face of foreign imports. He acknowledged the firm had to make cuts somewhere, but the push to produce more with less was taking its toll. "It's getting tougher. I'm not like a machine. Well, a machine wears out too sometimes," he pointed out. The remaining workers "were real angry. But there's nothin' we can do about it. What can I do? Quit?"

Meanwhile, the wage gap in the company was widening. On average the pay seemed high at his company, he said. "But it's the big bosses who are makin' all the big money and the little guys are makin' the little money."

The power of finding a job you enjoy, if possible, is a clear theme of the book. Italian immigrant Mario Anichini worked as a butcher for 28 years before going back to sculpting fountains and statuary at age 55, initially in a basement. People would say, "You eat too much dust down there, and you getting better and better. Before you work in the butcher shop, very nice, very airy, everything, you used to be sick. How come?" It was because he enjoyed sculpting, he said. Unfortunately, another theme is that of people getting trapped in careers they don't really want.

Change is coming, though, according to Ernest Bradshaw, head of the auditing department in a large financial institution. "I can't ever envision a time where we'll go back to a period where when a man starts out in a business he's dedicated to it for the rest of his life… That's over with."

This provides a sort of power to younger workers, said Tom McCoy, a 23-year-old proofreader in a printing plant. The older workers fear the boss who decides promotions and raises. But job concerns don't translate to career concerns for younger ones, McCoy said. "We have power over (the boss), because he doesn't know how to persuade us."

A college English teacher, Jack Currier, told of being in his father's office as the "boss was chewing him out for something—in a tone and language that was humiliating…" Currier's dad had worked there for 30 years. "My father's a dignified man and he works hard."

Currier continues, "I would hate to spend my life doing work like that." A college administrator could question his methods. "But there's no way he could deprive me of the satisfaction that comes from doing my job well."

Fortunately, managers are changing, too. "You can't run a business sitting in the office 'cause you get divorced too much from the people," plant manager Tom Brand said. "The people are the key to the whole thing." His progressive attitude reduced turnover and union grievances.

"Doing my job is part salesmanship." His boss was a "bull," Brand said. "It doesn't work. The old days of hit 'em with a baseball bat to get their attention—they're gone."

The auditor Bradshaw captures well the dilemmas of leadership. He wrestled with the implications of giving a 50-year-old woman a bad performance appraisal when less courageous predecessors had "carried" her instead. But he had to constantly help her do her job. "I'm a good supervisor," he said. "I write it up the way it's supposed to be written up. My feeling can't come into it."

The irony is that his sadness over the incident is clear. "That's the thing you get in any business. They never talk about personal feelings. They let you know that people are of no consequence," Bradshaw lamented.

Oddly, or fittingly, the greatest compassion comes from a jockey, Eddie Arroyo. "By understanding the horse, the animal himself, his moods, his personality, his way of life, his likes, his dislikes—humans work the same way—you have to accept them for what they are. People do things because it's the only way they know."

These stories mirror the complaints I hear regularly from team members about their jobs and from bosses about their workers. But this book, Working by author Studs Terkel, was published in 1971. Groundbreaking as it was at the time, reading it in 2011 cannot help but evoke a cliché: The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Action Item: Head to the library or your local bookstore. This book remains worthy of your time.

Source: Terkel, S. (1971), Working: People Talk about What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. Pantheon Books: New York.