Aman Sethi: on stories about work and working

The Nights of Labor

By Jacques Rancière (1981)

1. Late one evening in Paris in October 1839, a group of men meet at the house of Martin Rose, a tailor, to start a workers' journal. Among the group is Vincard, a maker of measures, and Guany, a floor layer. Who are these men? Why are they assembling at an hour when the conscientious are senseless with sleep, and the wastrels with drink? In this pathbreaking work of labor history, philosopher Jacques Rancière sifts through the writings of tailors, hat makers, carpenters and laborers in 19th-century France to map their mental lives. In doing so, he destroys the myth of the unthinking masses praying for salvation and instead discovers working intellectuals who forged alliances with radical thinkers. The night becomes a metaphor for a different way of life to which workers can aspire, one enjoyed by those who, free from the dulling routine of the factory, can afford to stay awake and philosophize into the early hours of morning.

Working

By Studs Terkel (1974)

2. Studs Terkel's remarkable book is a series of dispatches, in the form of first-person interviews, from the American workplace of the 1970s. "Your job doesn't mean anything," Sharon Atkins, a receptionist, tells him, "You're just a little machine. A monkey could do what I do." Yet each conversation reveals individuals struggling to find meaning in a job that simultaneously defines and erodes the self. Dolores Dante, a waitress, imagines herself a ballerina swiveling between tables as she balances loaded plates on each arm; Roberta Victor teaches "Alice in Wonderland" to fifth-graders by day and works nights in a brothel to support a drug habit; Booker Page, a retired sailor, dreams of buying a schooner as he pilots his cab through Manhattan. Gradually the book acquires a hypnotic, immersive quality as the waitress speaks of prostitutes, the prostitute of housewives, and a housewife of the insecurities of not working. Terkel pencils in fragments until "Working" has an entire world between its covers.

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Chassis Workers assembling a Model T at Ford's plant in Highland Park, Mich., 1913.

Rivethead

By Ben Hamper (1991)

3. Ben Hamper's great-grandfather built motorized buggies, his paternal grandfather worked 32 years at Buick, his maternal grandfather worked 40 at Chevrolet. Uncle Jack was working at Buick, as was Uncle Clarence. When Hamper flunked out of school he tried everything, from painting houses to cleaning toilets, to stave off the moment when he walked into the GM plant where his father once fitted windshields. "Rivethead" pulls you along like a Suburban chassis on an assembly line, from 1977, when a booming auto industry couldn't make enough trucks for an America rebounding from the Arab oil shocks, right up to 1988, when plants across the country were shuttering in the face of Japanese competition. Hamper draws the reader close as he skirmishes with cokehead foremen, binges with fellow shoprats, and fires rivets into trucks late into the night, nine hours a day, six days a week, year after year. Yet the most harrowing part of the book isn't the clamor of the assembly line but the quiet, grinding drudgery of layoffs, hangovers and the endless wait for the clock to run down.

Down and Out

In Paris and London

By George Orwell (1933)

4. In 1928, George Orwell moved to the Latin Quarter in Paris, where a stroke of sudden misfortune left him almost penniless. A keen observer of the absurdities of class and power, Orwell introduced in this, his first book, many of the themes that he fleshes out in his later works. He captures vividly how a quick descent into temporary penury altered how he bought bread, smoked cigarettes, and was perceived by friends and strangers. As his friend Boris explains: "It is fatal to look hungry. It makes people want to kick you." Eventually, Orwell finds work as a plongeur, washing dishes in an expensive hotel where a double door divides the chic restaurant from the filth and chaos of the kitchens. The sections set in London, where he returned after a year and a half, are a searing indictment of the criminalization of poverty. Orwell tramps from workhouse to workhouse, thanks to city laws that keep the poor in perpetual motion: A man may stay in a given workhouse only once a month or face a week's confinement, but he also can't sleep in the open. So one either sleeps in the day and misses work or spends the night in a workhouse and spends the waking hours searching for a place to sleep.

Extreme Measures

By Martin Brookes (2004)

5. At age 4, Francis Galton could add and multiply, read English and French, and recite substantial amounts of Latin poetry. By the time of his death in 1911, he had provided future statisticians with the invaluable tools of correlation and regression, dabbled in meteorology, psychoanalysis, biology and phrenology, and, to his eternal discredit, coined the term "eugenics"—the science "of good descent"—which found its most ghastly expression in the Holocaust. In this slim biography, Martin Brookes, an evolutionary biologist at University College London, lays out Galton's eerie obsession with breeding geniuses but also describes his subject's more absurd preoccupations and inventions. Convinced that his brain was turning into "a furnace, fueled by facts," Galton invented a pair of submarine spectacles to read underwater and a "gumption reviver" that continually dripped water on his head to enable long hours of work. "Extreme Measures" is as much a brief history of European science as a tale of a man, certain of his genius, in search of an epic, defining discovery.

Source:The Wall Street Journal