Category: Uncategorized

Perhaps equally important to analyzing the language of work and what that language means is also considering when working people want to talk about their work vs. when working people don’t want to talk about their work . . .

Working People [podcast]

Similar to 20th-century Chicago author + radio host Studs Terkel’s book of interviews with working class Americans, Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, “Working People is a podcast about working-class lives in 21st-century America. In every episode you’ll hear interviews with workers from around the country, from all walks of life. We’ll talk about their life stories, their jobs, politics, and families, their joys and hopes and frustrations. Overall, Working People aims to share and celebrate the diverse stories of working-class people, to remind ourselves that our stories matter, and to build a sense of shared struggle and solidarity between workers around the country.”

“Can the Working Class Speak” by Maximillian Alavarez(Current Affairs)

“No one wants to talk, but everyone’s got something to say. I can feel it, a shared heaviness sitting on all of us, invisibly filling the room like a gas leak. But no one really knows how to articulate it or what to do with it. We’re all just wading through that mud-like thickness from one minute to the next, from the time we wake up till the time we go to bed. Occasionally, someone cracks a joke, but no one laughs that hard. We share some stories about good, bad, and horrible assignments. That’s about it. We don’t talk about our paychecks or our families. We don’t ask if this is the only way it has to be.

I certainly don’t want to talk about it with my friends or family either. I don’t want to bother them. It’s my problem to deal with. More than that, though, deep down, I don’t want to talk about it with anyone, because talking about it means facing it, head-on; it means prying open the ominously-rattling manhole cover and staring into the pink, dripping teeth of the real. And that is, quite literally, the last thing I want to do.

What would I tell them, anyway? Where would I start? And how could I even begin to describe the smell?”

Love Your Job? Someone may be Taking Advantage of You (Duke FUQUA School of Business)

“Professor Aaron Kay found that people see it as more acceptable to make passionate employees do extra, unpaid, and more demeaning work than they did for employees without the same passion.

“It’s great to love your work,” Kay said, “but there can be costs when we think of the workplace as somewhere workers get to pursue their passions.”

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. + the Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike

“The Strike That Brought MLK to Memphis”

Dr. King delivered his famous “I Have Been to the Mountaintop” speech the night before he was assassinated at the Lorraine Hotel in downtown Memphis. Had King not supported workers and this worker strike, he may not have been assassinated–at least on this day.

Audio Recording of King’s “I Have Been to the Mountaintop” Speech

The text of King’s “I Have Been to the Mountaintop” Speech appears below:

“Thank you very kindly, my friends. As I listened to Ralph Abernathy and his eloquent and generous introduction and then thought about myself, I wondered who he was talking about. [Laughter] It’s always good to have your closest friend and associate to say something good about you, and Ralph Abernathy is the best friend that I have in the world.

I’m delighted to see each of you here tonight in spite of a storm warning. You reveal that you are determined [Audience:] (Right) to go on anyhow. (Yeah, All right) Something is happening in Memphis, something is happening in our world. And you know, if I were standing at the beginning of time with the possibility of taking a kind of general and panoramic view of the whole of human history up to now, and the Almighty said to me, “Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?” I would take my mental flight by Egypt (Yeah), and I would watch God’s children in their magnificent trek from the dark dungeons of Egypt through, or rather, across the Red Sea, through the wilderness, on toward the Promised Land. And in spite of its magnificence, I wouldn’t stop there. (All right).”

Former U.S Poet Laureate, Philip Levine: “A Voice For the Voiceless” by Charles Simic (New York Review of Books)

Philip Levine never forgot the past. He was born in 1928 and grew up in Detroit when that city was a car-manufacturing capital and the global symbol of the ambition and ingenuity of American industry. With factories operating around the clock and its railyards busy with freight trains hauling in raw materials that were unloaded into trucks at all hours, the city’s frenzied activity required a huge labor force. They’d hire anybody, people used to say. And they did. Midwesterners, poor whites from Appalachia, African-Americans from the rural South, and immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe worked side by side on assembly lines, in stamping and tool-and-die plants, foundries, and smaller plants that made everything cars needed from spark plugs to hood ornaments. Ford Motor’s enormous Rouge complex in Dearborn, a self-contained industrial city, employed almost 100,000 people at its peak. It could convert hundreds of parts into a finished product in twenty-eight hours.

Detroit may have resembled other grimy cities in the industrial heartland, but what emerged out of its dirt and smoke was a shiny car with a sleek hood and a noiseless engine sought after by millions of people. In some parts of this now shrunken city, the abandoned factories and boarded-sup houses that have no visitors in recent years evoke a lost world. In an essay in My Lost Poets about a trip to his former hometown, Levine describes his astonishment on discovering that the neighborhoods where he once lived and worked had been reduced to miles of mostly vacant lots. “Nothing lasts” is how an old black man he got to talking to while passing by his garden summed up their generation’s experience of this country.

In that once-bustling city, Levine’s father owned a used auto parts business with his maternal grandfather. Though an immigrant from tsarist Russia and a deserter from the British army during World War I, he prospered in America. Just as he and his family were starting to think of themselves as middle-class, he died suddenly. Philip, who was the second of three sons and the first of identical twins, was five years old at the time. His mother, who like his father came from an immigrant Jewish family, had no choice but to go to work, starting as a stenographer and eventually becoming an office manager. Although she always provided for the family, they were forced to move from the house where they lived to a series of ever-smaller apartments. Worry about money and the lack of it, he said, became the main topic of their conversations at mealtime.

From the age of fourteen until he graduated from high school in 1946, Levine worked summers and after school, first at part-time jobs in the neighborhood and then in factories. Even after he got his bachelor’s degree from Wayne State University in 1950, he continued working the same type of jobs. As his witty mother used to joke, “Philip set out to prove there is social mobility in America, so he got born smack-dab in the middle of the middle class, grew up in the lower middle class, and then as an adult joined the working class.”