Studs Terkel keeps call­ing me. I’m really not sure if it’s him or the caller who called him to write Work­ing about 40 years ago. All I know is that I’ve wanted to raise a col­lec­tive con­scious­ness about work, what and why we do what we do and how we feel about it, since first read­ing Terkel’s tome 25 years ago.

If this is my call­ing and not a nar­cis­sis­tic fan­tasy coin­cid­ing with a break in real­ity, I don’t take it lightly. I sim­ply want to take it. And do it.

Before I sound like I’m tak­ing myself (and not the call­ing) too seri­ously, I’ll do my best to assure you that I prob­a­bly have more doubts and hangups about my career path and what I’m doing in/for this world than you have. Maybe I don’t have more, I just rumi­nate longer. As far as I know, I don’t have low self-esteem, just a com­bi­na­tion of a high need for achieve­ment and ADD with a lit­tle OCD sprin­kled on top.

I went to school a long time to study labor his­tory, moti­va­tion the­ory, diversity/multiculturalism and the nuts and bolts of human resources. I have a back­ground in jour­nal­ism. I like to help peo­ple find their voices through non­fic­tion, poetry and other artis­tic forms. And I feel hap­pily com­pelled to fur­ther your inter­est in your own work life: what you do, why you do it and how you think and feel about it.

My long-range goal is to col­lect, with explicit per­mis­sion, sto­ries (any genre), poetry, and other art forms into an anthol­ogy that hon­ors Studs’ orig­i­nal work. I want to hear from you often and build the kind of trust Studs had between him­self and the more than 100 work­ers whose voices remain true and impor­tant today.

Another way to under­stand Worker Writes is through Studs’ voice, so I’ve included a cou­ple pas­sages from Work­ing: Peo­ple Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (1972). Here, Studs describes his research methodology:

I real­ized quite early in this adven­ture that inter­views, con­ven­tion­ally con­ducted, were mean­ing­less. Con­di­tioned cliches were cer­tain to come. The question-and-answer tech­nique may be of some value in deter­min­ing favored deter­gents, tooth­paste and deodor­ants, but not in the dis­cov­ery of men and women.* …In short, it was con­ver­sa­tion. In time, the sluice gates of damned up hurts and dreams were opened.

*from the pref­ace to Divi­sion Street: America

and here, the ram­i­fi­ca­tions of tech­nol­ogy (fore­casted 40 years ago):

Per­haps it is time the “work ethic” was rede­fined and its idea reclaimed from the banal men who invoke it. In a world of cyber­net­ics, of an almost run­away tech­nol­ogy, things are increas­ingly mak­ing things. It is for our species, it would seem, to go on to other mat­ters. Human mat­ters. Freud put it one way. Ralph Hel­stein puts it another. He is pres­i­dent emer­i­tus of the United Pack­ing­house Work­ers of Amer­ica. “Learn­ing is work. Car­ing for chil­dren is work. Com­mu­nity action is work. Once we accept the con­cept of work as some­thing meaningful–not just the source of a buck–you don’t have to worry about find­ing enough jobs. There’s no excuse for mules any more. Soci­ety does not need them. There’s no ques­tion about our abil­ity to feed and clothe and house every­body. The prob­lem is going to come in find­ing enough ways for man to keep occu­pied, so he’s in touch with real­ity.”  Our imag­i­na­tions have obvi­ously not yet been challenged.

Finally, my daugh­ter Sarah Bill sug­gested this excerpt from 1984 by Orson Welles. I think it speaks to the seami­est type of orga­ni­za­tion. Hope­fully, you don’t rec­og­nize it.

He looked round the can­teen again. Nearly every­one was ugly, and would still have been ugly even if dressed oth­er­wise than in the uni­form blue over­alls. On the far side of the room, sit­ting at a table alone, a small, curi­ously beetle-like man was drink­ing a cup of cof­fee, his lit­tle eyes dart­ing sus­pi­cious glances from side to side. How easy it was, thought Win­ston, if you did not look about you, to believe that the phys­i­cal type set up by the Party as an ideal-tall mus­cu­lar youths and deep-bosomed maid­ens, blond-haired, vital, sun­burnt, care­free — existed and even pre­dom­i­nated. Actu­ally, so far as he could judge, the major­ity of peo­ple in Airstrip One were small, dark, and ill-favoured. It was curi­ous how that beetle-like type pro­lif­er­ated in the Min­istries: lit­tle dumpy men, grow­ing stout very early in life, with short legs, swift scut­tling move­ments, and fat inscrutable faces with very small eyes. It was the type that seemed to flour­ish best under the domin­ion of the Party.