Education and alienation in Studs Terkel's Working

Terkel, Working (Organizational Behavior)

The interview subjects in Studs Terkel's book Working run the gamut from farm wife to university professor, but all are able to be articulate about what it is that they do for a living. However, some basic patterns emerge upon examination of a representative sample of Terkel's interviews. The first thing to note is the relationship of education to work: in some sense, these people are all concerned with how their education did or did not prepare them for the work that they do. A second point to note is the sense of institutional difficulty, in how the individual relates to the larger structures of the workplace -- this can take the form of labor organizations like labor, or the corporations, or even competitors. The final thing that is worth noting in Terkel's interviews is whether or not the individual feels dehumanized or alienated from the work: in some sense, job satisfaction seems to correlate to independence and a sense of personal validation. A closer look at some remarks made by Terkel's subjects will bear out these observations.

Obviously education in America is largely a preparation for entering the American economy. Some forty years after Terkel's original publication, this is clearer than ever, as the economy is shifting to a new paradigm with Silicon Valley replacing industrial production -- if education does not address the use of these new technologies, the students will be completely unemployable. However, it is worth noting that many of Terkel's interview subjects relate their own position directly to the education that they received. A memorable example early in the book comes with the seventy-seven-year-old "farm wife," Aunt Katherine Haynes. Aunt Katherine Haynes is clearly one of the oldest interview subjects in the book, so she belongs to a truly distant past by the standards of 2014. Yet she notes that her economic and social position has a lot to do with her education, or rather her lack of it: as she memorably notes, "I was just raised an old hillbilly and I'll die one…They wasn't much to think on when you didn't have no education. I didn't get half through the third reader, so I've got no education at all." (Terkel 15). Terkel faithfully reproduces her manner of speech and it is easy to believe that she has received almost no education, and crucially her work has largely been domestic: she worked in the house or on the farm, basically enabling what sounds like a subsistence living. For the heavy machinery operator Hub Dillard, formal education is -- in his opinion -- largely irrelevant to the job that he does, for which only experience can prepare a worker. In Dillard's words, "What we do you can never learn out of a book. You could never learn to run a hoist or a tower crane by reading. It's experience and common sense." (Terkel 23). But if we move up to white collar occupations, we can see that education is still a primary focus of how workers define themselves. We may recall Terkel's interview with Sharon Atkins, a receptionist at a large office. Atkins was not expecting to do the sort of work she is doing when Terkel interviews her: as she says, "I was out of college, an English Lit. major. I looked around for copywriting jobs. The people they wanted had majored in journalism. Okay, the first myth that blew up in my face is that a college education will get you a job. I changed my opinion of receptionists because now I'm one." (Terkel 29). The implication here is that perhaps Atkins would have chosen a different educational path if she had known the job she wanted required a different major, but at the same time her frustration is understandable. There is not much difference between majoring in English and majoring in journalism, the only difference perhaps is the amount of attention paid to commercial and advertising concerns. But we are led to believe that Atkins could very well do the job of a copywriter, but has ended up as a receptionist because of a quirk of her educational path.

Another theme that runs through Terkel's various interviews is the idea of frustration or intimidation with larger power structures, whether corporate or financial. This parallels a sense of identification with the larger power structures represented by organized labor and unions. Both issues are memorably summarized in the early interview with Roberto Acuna, a Latino farm worker who has turned into a labor organizer. Acuna describes his decision to leave the farm work thus: "I saw the need to change the California feudal system, to change the lives of farm workers, to make these huge corporations feel they're not above anybody…I try to organize for the United Farm Workers of America" (Terkel 7). But this is essentially a factory farming system, and it is interesting to see that the family farmer interviewed by Terkel, Pierce Walker, sees the larger financial system as basically making survival increasingly difficult for individuals: "As a farmer the return on your investment is so small now that it isn't really worthwhile. A younger person cannot start farming unless they have help from the father or somebody. Cause you have to be almost able to retire a rich man to start out. The only way the farmers are making it today is the ones in business keep getting bigger, to kinda offset the acreage, the margin income. I don't know what's gonna happen in the future. I'm afraid it's gonna get rough in time to come" (Terkel 3). In both of these cases, we realize that individual agency is increasingly difficult to exert in a marketplace dominated by large corporate and financial forces. Yet the faith that is placed by someone like Acuna in organized labor is not necessarily shared by the people who participate in unions: the mine worker Joe Haynes memorably complains that he does not think that the union has adequately protected the interests of workers like him in negotiations: "I think the United Mine Workers has let us down a little bit. I think they sold us out is what I do. They teamed up with the operators, I think" (Terkel 16). This may be paranoid on Haynes's part, but it represents a very real sense that large institutional structures -- whether corporations or unions -- may not adequately pay enough attention to individuals.

This leads to a sense of individual alienation and disenfranchisement which runs throughout a number of Terkel's other interviews. The most basic theme is summed up by the strip miner Bob Sanders, who claims "I don't think anyone's gonna say their work's satisfyin', gratifyin', unless you're in business for yourself. I don't think you're satisfied workin' for the other person." (22). This sense that personal control over one's own work position is the only thing that can prevent alienation. But at the same time, the vast gulf between institutional authority and individual agency can be the cause of this alienation, as Sanders himself notes in the gap between workers wages and the price of mining equipment: "You go on a piece of equipment and say it's worth ten million, fifteen million dollars. You don't expect people to go out there and take care of that for thirty or forty dollars a day. If you got that kind of money to spend for equipment…it just doesn't add up." (Terkel 21-2) Overall these small financial differences can make a large difference in the lives of individuals. It certainly lends color to the overworked and underpaid hotel switchboard operator Frances Swenson, who notes the way in which management promised a raise than reneged upon it: "I worked 125 hours last two weeks. We asked the boss why we didn't get time and a half overtime. He says, 'Well, the girls at the front desk are getting it, I don't see why you don't. You'll get it starting the first of the month.' We were informed today we were not going to get it." (Terkel 33). What is most noteworthy is that an explanation for the change was not thought necessary by management. To a certain degree these workers do feel dehumanized. We can see it even more clearly in the testimony of another telephone operator, Heather Lamb. She describes her workplace routine as follows: "You have a number -- mine's 407. They put your number on your tickets, so if you made a mistake they'll know who did it. You're just an instrument. You're there to dial a number. It would be just as good for them to punch in the number." (Terkel 37). Not only are Lamb and her co-workers reduced to a mere identification number, as though Bell Telephone were Auschwitz, but more importantly the identification number is only there to assign blame if a mistake is made. It is no accident that Lamb describes her job in the most dehumanizing possible terms: "just an instrument." (It is also noteworthy that in the years since Terkel's publication, Lamb's job has been entirely automated and replaced by machinery: people who make long distance numbers now do "punch in the number" on their own without the intervention of an operator like Lamb. Her job has been entirely replaced by technology.) The interview I conducted with a NYC theatrical agent, "Brett Shelley," also noted the way in which humans can be reduced to something insignificant by the marketplace: "The client has spent 6 months of his life writing a screenplay -- but you'll know within a week, maybe two, if anybody's going to buy it. If not, there's very little chance for that script to be reconsidered." (Shelley Interview, 2014). The rather chilling sense of how dehumanizing people have become in large-scale corporate enterprises is perhaps best underscored by Jack Hunter, a Professor of Communications (who is so bewilderingly out of touch with reality that he thinks the Watergate affair will be easily forgiven and forgotten by the public). Hunter is accustomed to thinking of people in terms of mass audiences -- in other words, reducing them to demographic slices and parts of a giant collective to be persuaded and manipulated. He therefore describes his role in the ruling class that controls these masses in terms of power: "Communications specialists do have a sense of power. People will argue it's a misuse of power. When a person has so much control over behavior, we're distrustful. We must learn how to become humane at the same time." (Terkel 40). Hunter is persuasive as to why people distrust those who have control over large numbers of people -- however he doesn't seem to offer a persuasive reason to believe that corporate overlords will become more humane, or what might incentivize them to do so.

Overall, the basic issues with the workplace in Terkel's interviews are fairly intuitive. People feel a greater sense of satisfaction from personal autonomy, from feeling connected to what they do -- the uneducated hillbilly farm wife seems much happier with her lot than the woman who works for Bell Telephone, and is assigned a number and constantly scrutinized for error. Even collective enterprises like unions that are designed to help, rather than exploit, workers can become problematic: because they must negotiate with management, there will always be workers who feel that too much power has been ceded to management. But the most important thing is something intangible: a sense of agency and a sense of humanity. The coal miner who says that nobody is satisfied working for another person does have a valid point: yet most of America is not self-employed. The real solution here must be to restore the sense of personal agency to workers even as they operate within the framework of larger institutions: just because a corporation is large does not mean it automatically has to be dehumanizing. Maybe the solution is to remember to place people before profits.

"BRETT SHELLEY" (Literary Agent, William Morris Endeavor Agency, NYC)

What is a typical day like in your job?

I am a literary agent in the New York offices of William Morris Endeavor. Everybody knows WME, because the Hollywood office is so well-known and Ari Emanuel is just a force of nature. But I'm not based in Hollywood, I'm based in New York. I represent writers -- people who write scripts for theatre, film, television, things like that. I have one or two composers who write musicals, but there is another agent in our office who basically specializes in musicals, so that's not really my main area of focus.

My clients are playwrights, mostly, but these days playwrights are also screenwriters and increasingly television writers. A lot of the big flagship HBO shows are staffed mostly with playwrights, and there's plenty of other stuff on TV that is written by people who came out of the New York theater. "New Girl" is a great example -- the showrunner on "New Girl" isn't my client, but she's got a typical trajectory of how things work, she started as a playwright like six or seven years ago, then she wrote a screenplay that got made, a romantic comedy with Ashton Kutcher and Natalie Portman, then off the back of that she sold her TV spec. It was originally titled "Chick With Dicks" or something like that, but of course to put it on network TV they can't use that title, so now it's called "New Girl."

Any writer who works in theater, film, television has an agent, and that's basically my job. I have a client list of -- well, most agents these days represent about fifty to a hundred different clients. A hundred is way too many. But you have to maintain a broad range of clients because at any given time half of them aren't going to be working -- they're going to be staring at the computer working on the next thing, and that's an investment of like six months to write a script. Obviously sometimes less, maybe with some writers it's more time, but I generally estimate that a piece of writing represents six months of the writer's life.

But think of it this way: if you're good at writing drama and dialogue, you might not necessarily be good at sales. You don't have the time or energy to go out and make connections with the people in production companies or film studios or theatres who actually buy the work. That's where the agent comes in. My job is basically to know what's going on in the larger entertainment marketplace -- to maintain connections with the people who are buying or staging new work -- and then to maintain connections with my clients, who are the writers. Then when a writer has a new piece of work, it's my job to send it out for submission, follow up, generate interest, play one potential buyer off another to get the price up, make the sale. The agency takes a ten percent commission from the sale and from profits of the work. So say that we get a writer's work to go up on Broadway. The writer has a fee arrangement for that -- a percentage of the box office or whatever. The writer gets paid through us: the producers send the checks to WME, we take ten percent of what comes in, and re-cut a check for the client.

Generally I arrive in the office by ten. We are expected to stay late, because our office in New York has to communicate all day with the Los Angeles office, and obviously there's a time difference. I'm in the office generally until about 7:30 and then on weekdays I leave from work to go to the theater or to a reading. If I'm not at the theater, I'm generally at home reading scripts. So my workdays are long but enjoyable.

Would you want your children to choose a similar profession?

Would I want my kids to go into this line of work? I wouldn't mind it if my kids worked in entertainment, but I think agenting is a very specific kind of job: it's all about communication, it's basically a sales job, it's not for everybody. The pressure is high. I would sooner see a child of mine be in the literary side of production: the people who read and choose scripts for film production companies or theaters. It's less money, but also less stress and more security -- if you really like this stuff as writing, or as art, I think that's the more sensible line of work to go into.

What about your job gives you the most satisfaction? The most dissatisfaction?

I find satisfaction when I see a client's work get staged, when I sell a client's screenplay or TV spec. Spec is short for "speculation," it means you write a TV or film script on your own, nobody paid you to write it. You come up with the idea, you write it -- and then your agent, that's me, sends it to potential buyers and says "take a look at this." When I make a sale on something like that, I get a lot of satisfaction. The dissatisfaction comes from the fact that, essentially, with any work you only have one shot. The client has spent 6 months of his life writing a screenplay -- but you'll know within a week, maybe two, if anybody's going to buy it. If not, there's very little chance for that script to be reconsidered. There are some ways for the script to see some life if it doesn't get bought immediately -- it could be put on the Black List, which is a list of the best unpurchased screenplays that all the execs in Hollywood have read over the past year. Or that writer could get hot for something two years down the line, then everybody's like, "We wanna work with this guy, what else has he got?" And I can pull out that old script they all ignored a couple years ago. But it's incredibly frustrating to see writers who work so hard for a long period of time to create something, if I'm not able to do anything with it. That's why there's such a huge client turnover in this business.

But the real satisfaction comes when a writer that you've been nurturing for a long time finally has that big thing. Like suddenly everybody's like "Who is this guy? His work is great? We want to read everything he's got!" And this is somebody that you signed when he was just finishing an MFA program in creative writing, you read the first thing he did, and you think: this guy has talent. But sometimes it can take years before something just strikes a nerve or captures a mood or whatever you want to call it, the tipping point where suddenly everybody wants to work with this writer. And that moment is the best moment for me: because I feel like I've put in the leg work trying to sell this writer for years, and then it's all paying off. That's the moment where every regional theater wants to do this guy's play, where Hollywood wants to fly him out for meetings, all the rest of it. Once you reach that point with a client, you know this person is basically going to get steady work for a while, and I can just sit back a little -- I'm no longer selling him, I'm basically just reading his contracts and negotiating his fees, but it's a good moment because you know this writer is going to have a solid career for the foreseeable future, he's established. Then when the next play goes up, the film premieres, whatever, I get to think: I'm a part of that, but I'm also the one who discovered him before anybody even knew who he was, when he only had written one thing. And I was the person who read that one thing and said "This has promise, I think this guy's gonna be big." And five years later, he is. That's my job satisfaction.