Different world of work

What did the American world of work look and sound like forty years ago?

Studs Terkel's book Working tells us all about it.

Terkel, a writer and a radio host, published Working, an oral history of American workers in 1974.

According to Forbes Magazine, Terkel's book is valuable as it archives a part of American history--a world of agricultural and industrial work--that already looks remote:

For better or worse, the world that Studs Terkel captured forty years ago in his brilliant oral history of American workers,Working, no longer exists. His compelling look at jobs and the people who do them now is a time capsule of the agricultural and industrial eras that preceded the Information Age.

 In Terkel’s world, work primarily was about making things and selling them, often disassociated from other interests, values or senses of pleasure. A single job was to be secured for most of one’s adult life, mainly to provide money to put food on the dinner table, albeit at a significant cost to the soul. At work, his interviewees recounted daily humiliations that they faced with supervisors, co-workers and customers. Their most frequent sense of satisfaction was that they made it through another day as one of “the walking wounded among a great many of us.” The delayed gratification of receiving a Social Security check led many to plod on until they no longer needed to bring in incomes at the level that their earlier years required.