We are children, and then we work. If we’re fortunate, at any rate, we’re allowed to experience our childhood as children, and able, when the time comes to make our way in the world, to find work. Meaningful work, if we’re truly fortunate.
The truth, though, is that the introductory icebreaker for youngsters—“How old are you?”—is too quickly replaced by “What do you do?”
Work occupies a huge territory in both the conscious and unconscious minds of twenty-first-century Americans. We do it, talk about it, take it home with us, dream about it, get obsessed with TV shows about it; many of us allow it to dictate the parameters of our identities and the orbit of our social lives and what we do when we’re not working. The question of meaningful work looms larger all the time.
Yet chances are that “meaningful work” means radically different things to people, depending on their economic circumstances, ethnic backgrounds, and ambitions. Also built into the notion are such questions as who or what we are when we’re not working. How much of an alternate identity does our work allow us?
Our first notions of work, of course, take root in childhood, and in our childhood dreams and fantasies, which probably explains the wealth of evidence—first-hand, anecdotal, and statistical—suggesting that kids have largely unrealistic notions of work. Precious few have any real understanding of what their parents do for a living; thus the move, in the past decade or so, toward bring-your-kids-to-work programs. So it’s not particularly surprising that for generations, children, when presented with the inevitable question about what they want “to be” when they grow up, tend to choose highly visible occupations that involve art, public service, spectacle, and the archetypically heroic: ballerinas and painters, doctors and nurses, police officers and firemen, astronauts and professional athletes. In other words, they latch on to dream jobs—clear, simple concepts, really—that can be easily grasped at a time in their lives when they are more purely imaginative and idealistic.
The real world, such as it is, usually crowds out these early dreams, whether through economic considerations (on both ends of the spectrum: a need to simply make a living or a desire for greater affluence), or the usual, practical process of gradual disillusionment that comes with growing up. For many of us, ambition and dreams inevitably take a backseat at some point, and work becomes a series of contracts and compromises with blunt reality.
At the same time, we’re constantly bombarded with portraits of affluent achievers and annual reports featuring “executive compensation packages”; but what about all those other people who are still pursuing their dreams, or doing the sort of jobs most of us (with the possible exception of sociologists and economists) take for granted? There’s really no such thing as an “average Joe,” but what about those people who are routinely characterized as such? We went in search of random people doing random, interesting things for a living, most of whom are situated far outside the world of corporate America—a barber, a bartender, and a ballerina, for instance—and asked them not just what they do, but why and how they came to do it, and what sort of pleasures and perils their work offers. And as conscientious job interviewers have done since the beginning of time, we wondered: Where did they see themselves in five years?
There are always a number of challenges involved in any discussion of work, many of them questions of perception and definition; for instance, how do we view the work we do, especially in relation to the work of our peers? What kind of attitudes and expectations do we bring to our jobs and careers? How does the reality of our work life measure up against those childhood dreams? And what, really, is work, beyond the purely personal nature of what each of us does to make ends meet?
It’s huge, for one thing. The world is work. It’s everywhere, even if so much of it remains invisible, taken for granted, or situated outside the blinders many of us wear in our day-to-day lives. Work is a chain of connections and interconnections, the endless series of transactions and compacts that make the world run. Break down any fifteen-minute increment of your day and try to recognize all the points at which you are a participant in the ceaseless relay of work. You go to a restaurant, for instance; somebody seats you and takes your order; somebody mixes your drink, numerous other somebodies prepare your meal, somebody clears your table, somebody washes your dishes. Somebody else runs the whole shebang. Somebody owns the place. Another constellation of bodies supplies the restaurant with its meat, its produce, its liquor, its tableware; somebody hauls away its trash. Somebody built the restaurant, and somebody designed the layout and décor; somebody else cleans and maintains it. The signs and awnings are somebody’s livelihood. Somebody sells the proprietor insurance.
Look at your life. Look at yourself in the mirror. Your shoes, the clothes you’re wearing and the clothing in your closets, the food in your cupboards and refrigerator, the stuff arrayed around your kitchen sink and in your medicine cabinet. All your gadgets and gizmos. Your car. The shit in your garage. Your haircut. All that stuff is the end result of somebody’s labor, and somewhere along the line it has passed through human hands. Trace any of it to its origins and you’d encounter a human being—or several, or dozens, even hundreds—just trying to earn a paycheck, support a family, and make ends meet.
Again, how you perceive work, and how likely you are to see it all around you, probably depends largely on where and how you were raised. Certainly a kid raised on a farm, or in a family that has spent generations plying one trade or laboring in a particular industry, has a different conception of work than a kid raised in a white-collar bastion of suburbia. Such early ideas about work form the foundation for perceptions of class, and have for centuries.
The future of work is another question that gets more complex and contentious all the time. Ever since a generation of post-war blue-collar parents sent its children off to college to learn their way out from under their upbringing, there has been an explosion of well-educated, well-trained white-collar professionals. The last few decades have been unprecedented boom times for the upwardly mobile.
At what cost, though? Somebody still has to do the dirty work, the grunt work, the nuts-and-bolts stuff that keeps our cities (and our economy) afloat. Increasingly, of course, many of these sorts of jobs are filled by immigrant labor—another fact that raises complex and contentious questions. In this sense, it sometimes seems as if we’ve turned back the clock a century or more, to when America’s major cities were teeming with newly arrived workers from all over the globe. Those workers offered insane levels of productivity in return for paltry wages, and the often squalid conditions they worked under, once sufficiently publicized, helped to bring about government protections, as well as the formation of trade unions. They also inspired a wave of realist art and literature that both called attention to their plight and ennobled them and the work they did.
These days blue-collar work—and work in general—has all but disappeared from popular culture. We’re not likely any time soon to see public art on the scale of Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry frescos, commissioned in 1932 by Edsel Ford and the subject of almost immediate controversy. White-collar labor, on the other hand, particularly of the drone variety, has become a ripe target for satire, whether in the form of television’s The Office or Joshua Ferris’s alternately hilarious and grim recent novel, Then We Came to the End. There have also been best-selling books along the lines of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, in which the white-collar writer introduced millions of Barnes and Noble customers and frequent fliers to the travails of workers at the lower end of the economic food chain. But what we mostly get today from culture is gauzy, fictionalized treatments of upper-crust lifestyles and careers, most of which are so unrecognizable as to qualify as purely escapist entertainments. Or we’re treated, generally through advertisements, to corporate America’s fantasies of working men and women: labor as soft-focus patriotic propaganda, complete with a soundtrack from Bob Seger or John Mellencamp.
All of this comes at a time when, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2006 report on income and poverty, the number of uninsured Americans rose to an all-time high of forty-seven million. And when, despite reported economic expansion, the poverty rate among children and working adults is still stalled at recession levels. Americans work longer hours than the Japanese and enjoy less vacation time than Europeans, even as average CEO pay over the past decade has increased by forty-five percent and the CEOs of the largest U.S. companies make more money in a day than the average worker makes in an entire year.
According to recent data there are roughly 383,000 Minnesotans without insurance, nearly seventy percent of whom are employed. Fifty-six percent of those are self-employed or work for small businesses.
Those are all just numbers, though, even to the people who are most affected by them. People still go to work, and as we discovered in our interviews, they do what they do for all sorts of reasons. Somewhat to our surprise, many of these folks are doing exactly what they want to. These are people who’ve somehow realized their dreams, or made sacrifices for the sort of freedom and flexibility made possible by what they’ve chosen to do with their lives. Some of them, certainly, have made a kind of peace with what they’re doing. These are people who have come to the crossroads, and chosen.
All of them have presumably wrestled with the questions familiar to anyone who works for a living. How much insecurity are we willing to accommodate to square the work we do with the lives we want? How much, in a very literal sense, is our work worth? And how much are we willing to pay?
BAIL AGENT: Janet Radloff
BALLET DANCER: Penelope Freeh
BARTENDER: James Flemming
BOOKSTORE CLERK: Clarence Thrun
BARBER: Jayson Dallmann
DOG GROOMER: Bonnie Kane
FARMER: David Van Eeckhout
TAILOR: John P. Meegan
MASSAGE THERAPIST/FLIGHT ATTENDANT: Mary Thomes
AUTO MECHANIC: Steve Skibbe
CONSTRUCTION/HOME REMODELING: Aria Williams and Moe Dominguez
HOUSE CLEANER: Heather Joyner
