Call for Submissions: Work in the 21st Century

Introducing a New CLiuAnon Series: Work in the 21st Century, featuring guest posts inspired by Studs Terkel’s Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do.

Also: don’t forget to apply to the PSSSR’s Emerging Writers Fund. Deadline is August 20th.

---

Writing About What You Do All Day

By Aimee Walleston

“Most of us…have jobs that are too small for our spirit. Jobs are not big enough for people.” —Nora Watson, as told to Studs Terkel

You take a job. Any job—dishwasher, doorman, dermatologist, defense attorney, drug dealer. You are forced, over and over, to squeeze into a role that wasn’t invented for a human being; it was rather designed for some abstract idea of what a person could do in a day. What someone could achieve if their humanity was subtracted from them. You work that job day in, day out. You give your boss the best hours of your day. You try to find the little streaks of moonlight through the bars of your jail cell. In certain moments, that light is blinding, and you feel more in love with your occupation than with anything else in your life. More often, that light is a dull glow, barely visible to the naked eye. And what’s the alternative? For most of us, you either work or you perish from some poverty-related illness or disorder. Work can give life a poetic countenance, or it can strip life of all its lyricism. And no matter how hard you work or what path you choose, it’s a roll of the dice whether work will be something you find meaningful—a vocation—or something you do just to survive. Most of the time, it’s a little of both.

Considering how much of our lives is taken up with it, it is surprisingly rare to find work as the primary subject in literature or art. In the early 1970s, American radio host Studs Terkel embarked on what he described as “uncharted territory”— he traveled around the country and interviewed over 130 people about their occupations. The result, Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (1974) comprises a kaleidoscope of oral histories given by all types of workers, from “unskilled laborers” to “high-status executives.” It is a project with no equivalent.

Reading these accounts, you learn—as Terkel desired for us—just how thoughtful people can be when you give them the time and space to talk about their working lives. You also learn that industrial and post-industrial capitalism spares no one from its wrath, no matter how many commas and zeros one collects at the end of the day. One of Terkel’s interviewees, a labor organizer named Bill Talcott, reveals a sense of futility that cuts through class lines and tax brackets:

“Middle-class women…are more alienated than lower-class women. The poor woman knows she’s essential for the family. The middle-class woman thinks, If I die tomorrow, the old man can hire himself a maid to do everything I do. The white-collar guy is scared he may be replaced by the computer. The schoolteacher is asked not to teach but to baby-sit. God help you if you teach… The policeman has no relationship to the people he’s supposed to protect. So he oppresses. The fireman who wants to fight fires ends up fighting a war… School is a process of taking beautiful kids who are filled with life and beating them into happy slavery. That’s as true of a twenty-five-thousand-dollar-a-year executive as it is for the poorest.” —Bill Talcott, as told to Studs Terkel

The reality of working life today is colored by alienation and resignation. Contemporary hustle-preneurs and tech dorks insist that this is merely the mindset of the poor, but you can’t buy your way out of this system—and that’s as true today (and likely even more true) as it was in 1974.

In other interviews, we encounter the brief flashes of luminescent moonlight, as with Dolores Dante, a waitress who has worked at the same restaurant six days a week, from 5pm to 2am, for the past 23 years. Dante’s account is that of a woman who refuses to let the petty indignities of work collapse her internal sense of beauty and her love of craft:

“To be a waitress, it’s an art. I feel like a ballerina, too… I do it with an air. If I drop a fork, there is a certain way I pick it up. I know they can see how delicately I do it. I’m on stage. I tell everyone I’m a waitress and I’m proud… I like to have my station looking nice. I like to see there’s enough ash trays when they’re having their coffee and cigarettes. I don’t like ash trays so loaded that people are not enjoying the moment. It offends me. I don’t do it because I think that’s gonna make a better tip. It offends me as a person.”

And yet there is still that pain—the ache we all feel—looming in the shadows:

“It’s tiring, it’s nerve-racking. We don’t ever sit down. We’re on stage and the bosses are watching. If you get the wrong shoes and you get the wrong stitch in that shoe, that does bother you. Your feet hurt, your body aches. If you come out in anger at things that were done to you, it would only make you feel cheapened. Really I’ve been keeping it to myself. But of late, I’m beginning to spew it out. It’s almost as though I sensed my body and soul had had quite enough. It builds and builds and builds in your guts. Near crying. I can think about it ... (She cries softly.) ‘Cause you’re tired. When the night is done, you’re tired. You’ve had so much, there’s so much going ... You had to get it done. The dread that something wouldn’t be right, because you want to please. You hope everyone is satisfied. The night’s done, you’ve done your act. The curtains close.” —Dolores Dante, as told to Studs Terkel

During the Great Depression, Terkel benefited from the Federal Writers’ Project—a program within Roosevelt’s New Deal that provided jobs writing local histories, ethnographies, children’s books and other materials to unemployed writers. Terkel’s work on working rejects the idea that something as presumably humdrum as the personal story of a waitress isn’t “good enough” to become art, and in doing so enters a corpus of related artworks that sharpen our appreciation of thinking about work and workers.

Around the mid-nineteenth century, the same era that saw the burgeoning of workers’ strikes in France, French Realist painter Gustave Courbet made what are considered some of the first depictions of working class laborers, including the now-destroyed The Stonebreakers (1849) and The Wheat Sifters (1854). In this era, the most advanced painters of the post-Impressionist period were obsessed with waterlilies, toreadors, and bored, beautifully dressed Parisian women looking off frame, chins cupped in white hands. Courbet’s paintings broke with existing standards of content for oil painting, being produced at a time when working and workers were not considered proper subject matter for high art.

Early in the 20th century, German photographer August Sander created People of the 20th Century, a portrait series he developed to document every type and profession within Germany’s Weimar Republic. In America, the Great Depression inspired John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and James Agee and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), books focused on the lives of the poorest workers, further shifting their place in art and literature. The 1966 film Au Hasard Balthazar by French filmmaker Robert Bresson revealed that the plight of work can also be metaphorically translated from human form to animal, in a film that follows a donkey who is passed from owner to owner and worked relentlessly until his death. In the late 1970s, union activist and artist Fred Lonidier made The Health and Safety Game (1976/1978) to document the ways in which corporations try to snake their way out of compensating workers injured on the job (Lonidier shows this work in both local union halls and international art museums). And in the 1970s and 1980s, photographer Chris Killip photographed workers in a rapidly de-industrializing Britain for his book In Flagrante (1988).

In the spirit of Terkel’s book and the evolving canon of works of art and literature that give meaning to the lives of workers, CLiuAnon is launching “Work in the 21st Century,” our new series inviting our readers to submit their own writing related to their experiences of work. As an example of what we are looking for, we have already published two exceptional pieces of writing related to the topic: The Mad Redneck’s Wizards: a Historical Ethnography of the Auto Shop Floor details the historical plight of auto mechanics in a world that now prizes digital efficiency over human competence, while Anonymous Number’s Life, Death and Quotas at PDX9 gives a boots-on-the-ground report of Amazon workers who must ignore the death of a fellow teammate, revealing the hypocrisy behind the company’s insistence that its “associates” should never feel that they are merely a “number.”

We are looking for unique writings related to work that are no longer than 3,500 words. If accepted, we will work with you to get your writing to the highest standards of literary non-fiction. Imagine if legacy media like the New Yorker or the New York Times would embark on profiles of people at work: they won’t. But we will. We have a fraction of their resources, but we have a love of language and writing—and work and workers—that is free from the pressures of conglomerates and investors. We will pay a one-time honorarium of $100 for the pieces we publish on CLiuAnon. Please send your writing to matt [at] cliuanon.com.