Latest news with #Terkel
The Guardian
09-03-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
Is This Working? by Charlie Colenutt review – labours of love in unexpected places
A little over 50 years ago, the American broadcaster Studs Terkel published an oral history based on interviews with 133 workers across the US. This was a time of automation and global competition, a new era of enormous change, and Terkel wanted to discover how the world of work might offer ordinary people a sense of purpose; of what he described as 'daily meaning as well as daily bread'. What he discovered is that there were people doing 'good' jobs, sometimes performed with grace and beauty – the piano tuner, for example, the stone mason, the firefighter – but that most workers were trying merely to survive the day. As one of his interviewees told him: 'Most of us… have jobs that are too small for our spirit.' Terkel's book – whose full title is Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do – later spawned a Broadway musical, a graphic novel and then a Netflix series presented by Barack Obama. Now it has inspired an examination of the world of work in the UK in the 2020s; one that is again based upon extensive interviews, across a landscape that has largely been deindustrialised. This too is published at a time when the workplace is being revolutionised, this time by artificial intelligence. In his book, Charlie Colenutt aims, like Terkel, to discover the ways in which our employment can nourish us, or leave us drained. As in the US half a century ago, many people seem to suffer the latter. A panel beater says he aches all the time and has too little time for his children; a chef says most of his colleagues are alcoholics or drug addicts; an accountant laments the loneliness of working from home during lockdown: 'I know everyone's on LinkedIn posting a picture of their coffee with their dog at their feet, sun shining through the kitchen window. It looks like you're having a nice morning but what are you like at 6pm when it's gloomy and you haven't spoken to anyone all day?' Even a derivatives trader, paid a vast fortune in the City while still in his 20s, endures existential disquiet: 'I struggle to see the point of my job. I think it doesn't really need to be done. It basically serves only to make myself and my company's shareholders richer. I'm totally checked-out, to be honest.' While Terkel heard frequently how gruelling manual labour could be – 'strictly muscle work', as one steel mill employee put it – most of Colenutt's 68 interviewees work in the service economy, and he encounters many complaints about mushrooming bureaucracy. A midwife says that whenever she gives an expectant mother a back massage, she must fill in a form. A childminder has three filing cabinets in her kitchen – 'and that's before you go to my attic'. A construction site manager has 1,600 unread emails in his inbox. A church minister in Northern Ireland says he has less and less time to study his Bible, as 'an awful lot of ministry today is like being an administrator'. In this way, occupations that looked very different a generation ago are now coming to resemble one another. They also entail similarly increased workloads. A lawyer usually sends her last email at 2.30am. A primary school teacher, who was previously a soldier, says: 'There were some tough times in the army, but I've never felt under more pressure. I've probably cried in front of my headteacher more than anyone else in my life. It was far less stressful in Afghanistan.' Colenutt believes that the mountains of paperwork are being generated by organisations' fears of failure: of being sued or publicly criticised by a regulator. As a consequence, workers are doing less of their actual work, instead spending their time inputting data, writing reports and ticking boxes. Morale is sapped and staff turnover rises. But he finds too that the joy and pride of work can be found in unexpected places. A food delivery rider says he is often exhausted and occasionally very wet, but that he loves cycling around London. 'It's a chance to see the sights. I've crossed Tower Bridge a hundred times. You feel a freedom on the bike. You are not strapped to a desk. That's the best thing.' A cleaner knows she is making a difference in her clients' lives and says: 'I get a real sense of fulfilment when I look back at a room I've cleaned. I think, oh yeah, lovely.' Perhaps one of the most satisfied workers in Colenutt's book is a joiner, who employs one apprentice and who finds that the work he delivers, and the training he gives, results in a life of deep contentment. 'I don't want a fleet of 10 vans,' he says. 'I don't want to be on a million pounds a year. I don't want to be any higher than I am. I'm happy. Everything's balanced nicely, work, social life, family, gym, and still time for other things. 'I know that what balances can easily topple over, but if that happens, I'll deal with it.' Ian Cobain is the author of Anatomy of a Killing (Granta, £10.99) Is This Working?: The Jobs We Do, Told by the People Who Do Them by Charlie Colenutt is published by Picador (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
Chicago Tribune
19-02-2025
- Politics
- Chicago Tribune
Laura Washington: Studs Terkel had a quality today's Democrats so sorely need
Studs Terkel. It's a big name with a huge past. Terkel left us in 2008 at the age of 96 but left behind accolades that abide today. The latest Terkel homage is a podcast series launched last month by former Tribune journalists Mary Schmich and Melissa Harris. (Harris now is CEO of a Chicago-based marketing agency, M. Harris and Co.) The project expands on 'Division Street: America,' Terkel's oral history that chronicled the Chicago of the 1960s. In the seven-part series, 'Division Street Revisited,' Pulitzer Prize winner Schmich examines the lives of seven everyday people Terkel interviewed for the book, which is named after the Chicago thoroughfare. It is an apt and timely effort. No one has emerged to succeed him as the quintessential Chicago media icon, but his legacy remains. Terkel was born a New Yorker in 1912, but his family changed towns and landed in Chicago when he was 10 years old. He grew up in a Near North Side rooming house and evolved into many things: writer, historian, broadcaster, political analyst, labor commentator and all-around one-of-a-kind character. The prolific author told the stories of the working class in his 1974 classic, 'Working,' interviewing workers of all types and stripes. He won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for his epic World War II oral history, 'The Good War.' Terkel's tales were as colorful as the ubiquitous red socks he sported. His life and stories offer lessons at a time when the nation's Democrats have lost voters and lost the presidential election. Terkel could have warned them. He had the quality today's Democrats so sorely need. He spoke authentically in the language that the working classes of America understood and embraced. When you heard from Studs, you always wanted more. He spoke to those at the grassroots who mattered. In telling their stories, he did not patronize them; rather, he elevated them. He toiled in the American tradition of supporting the underdogs who never have the resources or connections to smooth out the rough patches of life. He never put blue-collar workers on pedestals like so many on the political left. Terkel reached out to them, listened to them and shared their stories, warts and all. His cigar-filtered, crackling voice was singular, in his decades of interviews that were broadcast on WFMT-FM 98.7. He was the unofficial spokesperson for Chicago, 'the City of the Big Shoulders.' He was a national star but never left those roots. His credentials were his conversations with people famed and regular. He had his ear to the ground. Journalists followed him tirelessly. Terkel was a go-to for me and countless others here and around the world. If you wrote about Chicago, you had to check in with him to get the lowdown on our people and history, through his quirkily wise insights. I was fortunate to know and spend time with him. Whenever we talked, he would reflect on the importance of learning from history. We have forgotten our history, he would say. Americans, he would declare, suffer from 'national Alzheimer's disease.' In Terkel's heyday, working in Chicago was a different place than the industrial powerhouse that dominated the dawn of his life. Chicago poet Carl Sandburg once wrote, was the 'Hog Butcher for the World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders.' That was Terkel's milieu. He was always harking back to these chapters of Chicago history, nostalgic for a simpler, bygone era. Upton Sinclair's tale of the old Chicago stockyards, 'The Jungle,' had been in circulation for six years by the time Terkel was born. Sandburg's poem 'Chicago' was published two years after Terkel came into the world. Chicagoans are working today, but their livelihoods have changed. A city that was once Black and white now enjoys an intensely varied ethnic mix. When you tell the story of this city, you tell it through our outstanding storytellers, who are much more likely to be Black or Latino or Asian. Chicago is now a much more fractured place, split between so many lines that fail to capture diversity and the drama. Nailing the ethos and ecosystem of a big city is no easy feat. Terkel did, yet he was an eternal optimist. Finding an open window in the psyche of a challenged Chicago is tricky. The 'Division Street' series, Schmich said, aims to explore how the lives of Terkel's ordinary people 'can give us perspective on our lives today.'
