What Would Studs Terkel Make of ‘Essential Workers’?  – The Village Voice

It was half a century ago that labor radio broadcaster Studs Terkel published Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. The almost-600-page book was anchored in first-person accounts from 150 Americans, who spoke about their working life in just about every sector of the economy, as well as in several civil-service titles.

A mix of labor journalism and anthropology, Working was informed exclusively by the voice of the workers, who demonstrate a disarming intimacy with Terkel (1912–2008), revealing much about each individual but even more about the society they labored in. 

Each work/life account is its own universe. There are descriptions of how people came to be in their jobs, as well as what it took to hold onto them. There are names you might know, such as actor Rip Torn and jazz musician Bud Freeman. But mostly, it’s everyday folks that Terkel, who broadcast from WFMT, out of Chicago, brought into the spotlight. Of course, a table of contents in a book published 50 years ago contains no reference to today’s “essential workers,” nor the “gig economy.” 

Carmelita Lester was a practical nurse who had migrated from the West Indies. Terkel interviewed her in 1962, when she was working in a nursing home for well-off elderly residents. Lester described her unique bond with one of her charges, who she called “her baby,” and also offered a searing social commentary. “All these people here are not helpless,” Lester volunteered. “But the family get rid of them. There is a lady here, her children took her for a ride one day and pushed her out of the car. Let her walk and wander. She couldn’t find her way home … And they try to take away all that she has. They’re trying to make her sign papers and things like those. There’s nothing wrong with her.”

Lester’s decades-old complaint of insufficient staffing at her nursing home would resonate with the 21st-century congregant care workforce that was savaged by the COVID pandemic.

In 1974, 32.6% of our nation’s income was going to the top 10% of the population. By 2022, the top 20% income cohort held close to 71% of all U.S. wealth, worth about $97.7 trillion.

“This picture of the works and days of contemporary America and Americans shows what our life, at least a large part of our life, actually looks like from inside,” wrote the philosopher Lewis Mumford in a blurb that appeared on the back of Terkel’s tour de force. “The shock of reading this book is like the shock of hearing one’s voice played back by a recorder. One cannot put down this book without wanting to take a long hard look at one’s own life and daily work.”

Indeed, Terkel doesn’t pull his punches: “As the automated pace of our daily lives wipes out name and face — and, in many instances, feeling — there is a sacrilegious question being asked these days,” he writes in Working. “To earn one’s bread by the sweat of one’s brow has always been the lot of mankind. At least, ever since Eden’s slothful couple was served with an eviction notice. The scriptural precept was never doubted, not out loud. No matter how demeaning the task, no matter how it dulls the senses and breaks the spirit, one must work. Or else.”

In 1974, the nation was still simmering from the unrest of the anti–Vietnam War and civil rights struggles. Among workers, 26.5% belonged to a union. Today, just 10% of Americans are union members, though there’s been a considerable uptick in workers petitioning to form a union over the past few years, and of employers opting to voluntarily recognize a union. In 1974, 32.6% of our nation’s income was going to the top 10% of the population. By 2022, the top 20% income cohort held close to 71% of all U.S. wealth, worth about $97.7 trillion. 

“For the American worker, 1974 was a glum year,” according to the Congressional Quarterly published in 1975. “Despite the abandonment of three years of wage and price controls, wages never caught up with soaring prices. And by the end of the year, the work force was facing massive layoffs and a recession that threatened to be the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930s.”

Joshua Freeman is a distinguished professor emeritus at CUNY’s Queens College, and recently reread Terkel’s seminal work. When he spoke with the Voice, he noted that while today’s pop culture fixates on the idle rich as social arbiters, the American work ethic Terkel chronicled endures amid the so-called “gig economy,” where workers aren’t actually employed as staff and so get none of the benefits implicit in that status. They are free agents, without a safety net, lionized as entrepreneurs but going without healthcare, disability insurance, or any other benefit that has historically been a part of the social contract between workers and their employers. According to Gallup and McKinsey, these folks make up as much as 36% of the American workforce.

Says Freeman, “They say work has changed, but the one thing that Terkel was getting out is that across the political spectrum we tend to positively value work almost in and of itself as a morally positive thing that builds our character and helps our society and all that, and the left shares that view, for the most part. But there have always been dissident voices, like Karl Marx’s son-in-law [Paul Lafargue], who wrote the book The Right to Be Lazy that said work may be necessary, but it may not in itself be good.”

“You can’t be a hero on Wall Street.”

Freeman observes that in the ’70s, when Terkel was uplifting everyday working lives, the holders of great wealth were not the focal point that they are today. “Fifty years ago, in the 1970s, there was a post-1960s turn away from all that and some generalized sense in the culture that there were other things that were more important. And then slowly, in unexpected ways, you had this rise of the next generation of the super-wealthy who were much wealthier proportionately than even the great Gilded Age fortunes. You had the Rockefellers — which were nothing compared to Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.” Freeman adds, “People don’t go around holding the billionaires in contempt that much. They kind of get a free pass as far as I am concerned. There’s not a general disdain for the super-wealthy at this moment.”

John Samuelsen is the international president of the Transportation Workers Union of America, representing 155,000 workers in several sectors, with a heavy concentration in transit, where there has been considerable pressure to switch to driverless technologies that eliminate jobs. In 2019, Samuelsen spoke out against this automation trend at a conference convened at the Vatican by Pope Francis on the global climate crisis. The TWU leader warned that driverless buses would undermine public safety and cause the loss of several hundred thousand jobs in the U.S. alone. “The world has dramatically changed in 50 years — whatever original generations of technology there were back then, we are so beyond that. The only thing that’s going to maintain the dignity of work and the idea of work itself is the trade union movement. That’s the only force that can come up against capital, the investor class, the Silicon Valleyists, and perhaps worst of all, your neo-liberal bean counters that are looking to use technology because they think it is better for society. They think they can reduce a state or city budget and so they cut taxes for the rich by implementing technology to screw workers, and oftentimes to screw communities.”

Samuelsen gave the Voice some real-world examples of how having a sentient human being driving a bus or train was a matter of life and death. “There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell anybody rooted in reality would believe that an automated bus in inner-city America is better or provides better service than a human. Bus drivers have delivered babies. They have gone off-route and brought mothers whose water has broken to the front doors of hospitals. They have radioed ahead to make sure that the maternity ward crew was at the front door waiting for them as they pull up. They have brought gunshot victims right to the front door of hospitals that would have died otherwise…. They are a vital part of service delivery and our communities.”

Terkel’s tome sees work through the prism of a search “for daily meaning as well as daily bread.” There isn’t a differentiation analogous to the Covid caste distinction that society made in 2020, between the so-called “essential worker” and everybody else, who had either lost their job or were able to work remotely. There was no collective pot banging or bell ringing for Terkel’s army 50 years ago. 

The Covid mass death event — which killed more than 1.1 million Americans, almost twice the number who died during the WWI-era Spanish flu epidemic — shifted the labor-capital balance of power in much the same way as a war. And with government and employers unable to contain the deadly virus, workers and their families had to fend for themselves. An intimate familial mutual aid was required, as in-person public education shut down to varying degrees, depending on how red or blue your zip code was. According to the National Governors Association, the metrics and dashboards used by education officials in determining these shutdowns varied from state to state. Grandparents, aunts, and uncles quit their jobs to care for grandkids, nieces, and nephews, drafted by the necessity of somebody having to be home with the children. Workers and employers, both public and private, are still processing the effects of the lockdown and the changes it wrought in the way we work. 

In the 21st century, there was a price to be paid for our pandemic unpreparedness. The lack of basics, such as N-95 masks, and the shortage of nurses and allied professionals undermined efforts to contain Covid, and there were consequences. As reported in Kaiser Health News, 3,600 healthcare workers perished in Covid’s first wave, with close to 700 in the New York/New Jersey area alone. And Covid outpaced every other cause of line-of-duty death for law enforcement. In 2023, the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund reported that in the previous year, Covid had been the leading line-of-duty cause of death for police officers, including state, tribal, and local law enforcement officers, with even higher numbers in 2021.

In 2003, the EPA inspector general was harshly critical of how the EPA, under the leadership of former New Jersey governor Christie Todd Whitman, had downplayed and actually misrepresented the hazards in and around the World Trade Center site.

Workers engaging with the public in the Transportation Security Administration, represented by the American Federation of Government Employees, were particularly hard-hit, as the Trump administration tried to downplay the pandemic. Overall, close to 600 federal civil servants died; particularly vulnerable were workers at congregant care facilities for the Veterans Administration and the Bureau of Prisons, as well as those employed in food processing. This workplace exposure posed a significant risk to civil servant households. Unlike in Terkel’s 1974 time capsule, at the height of Covid anyone who had to be out in the world to “earn their daily bread” risked death, or bringing the possibly fatal disease home to their families.

Similarly, in the early days of the pandemic members of TWU Local 100 were told by New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority managers not to wear masks in the subway, for fear it would panic subway riders, stating that the masks should be reserved for clinicians. More than 100 of these workers perished from the disease. When Covid vaccines became available, most of New York City’s 300,000 municipal workers were required to get one or face termination, including firefighters. 

In Working, Terkel interviewed New York City firefighter Tom Patrick, who had started out as a New York City police officer. Patrick saw firefighting as a noble pursuit, telling Terkel, “The fuckin’ world’s so fucked up, the country’s fucked up. But the firemen, you actually see them produce. You see them put out a fire. You see them come out with babies in their hands. You see them give mouth-to-mouth when a guy’s dying. You can’t get around that shit. That’s real. To me, that’s what I want to be.” Terkel concludes Working with Patrick’s story, perhaps because the fireman’s tale is so compelling, as when he notes, “I was in a fire one night, we had all-hands. An all-hands is you got a workin’ fire and you’re the first in there, and the first guy in there is gonna take the worst beatin.’ You got the nozzle, the hose, you’re takin’ a beating. If another company comes up behind you, you don’t give up that nozzle. It’s pride. To put out the fire. We go over this with oxygen and tell the guy, ‘Get out, get oxygen.’ They won’t leave. I think guys want to be heroes. You can’t be a hero on Wall Street.”

New York City firefighter Andy Ansbro is the president of the Uniformed Firefighters Association, which represents today’s FDNY firefighters. “In the last 50 years, the changes to the fire service have been enormous and the dangers that come with it have grown exponentially,” Ansbro tells the Voice. He points out that “the contents of the average home have gone from wood and natural fibers to a collection of plastics and heavy metals associated with electronics and e-bikes. Firefighters are now exposed to much more toxins and carcinogens during the regular course of duty than would have been imagined.” Ansbro explains, “Due to the chemical makeup of contents of apartments, houses, and commercial office buildings, the fires are growing faster, and also the better environmental standards for insulation are keeping the buildings buttoned up tighter so that the heat and toxins don’t escape as quickly. Windows tend not to fail, so hold all the toxins, smoke, and heat in until we have to breach the exterior and get in and fight the fire while everything gets released on us all at once.”

In recent years, workers, particularly healthcare workers, have been more apt to go on strike.

These changes have been decades in the making. Ansbro recalls how his members found themselves caught up in the 9/11 World Trade Center terrorist attack, with 343 FDNY members perishing that day. In 2023, the FDNY announced on social media that an equal number of FDNY members had now succumbed to 9/11-related illnesses, after toxic exposure to the air in and around the site, which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the City of New York had falsely claimed was “safe to breathe.” In 2003, the EPA inspector general was harshly critical of how the EPA, under the leadership of former New Jersey governor Christie Todd Whitman, had downplayed and actually misrepresented the hazards in and around the World Trade Center site, stating, in part, “Evidence gathered through government hearings, news reports, public polls, health studies, and our own interviews indicated that the public did not receive sufficient air quality information and wanted more information on health risks.”

At the time, the Giuliani administration did not contradict the EPA’s pronouncements that the air was “safe to breathe.” For a number of years, into Mayor Bloomberg’s tenure, the city steadfastly dismissed the occupational health concerns expressed by the unions representing workers who were on the frontlines of the response and clean-up, which was completed in May 2002. “One incident 23 years later is still killing firefighters due to the toxic environment that was created by the terrorist attack,” Ansbro notes, adding that to this very day, his union and other concerned parties “are trying to get to the bottom of what the city knew — and when — about the chemicals and toxins we were exposed to. Unfortunately, this has eroded the trust that firefighters as well as citizens would have in our government, that they would be honest with them when it came to public health.”

Skepticism about employers in general found expression in what was deemed the post-lockdown “Great Resignation,” with 50 million Americans opting to quit their jobs in 2022. Labor economists have cited multiple reasons for this phenomenon, including a shift in priorities culture-wide, workers’ reluctance to return to the office, early retirement, and some of the federal financial support offered to the general population during the worst of the pandemic.

In recent years, workers, particularly healthcare workers, have been more apt to go on strike. In August of last year, United Steelworkers Nurses Local 4-200 walked out against Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, demanding improved staffing levels. They held their ground until December, when the hospital acceded to their demands, settling the strike.  

In such key sectors as healthcare, the fallout from the pandemic remains stubbornly real, with over one million skilled nurses opting not to practice at the hospital bedside because of what they see as the “moral injury” of the risk they face working in a system that consistently puts profits over people.

Carol Tanzi, RN, has 28 years of experience as a nurse and is USW Nurses Local 4-200’s chief shop steward. “Nobody wants to be complicit with a system that doesn’t value humans,” Tanzi tells the Voice. “What are we doing if we are not giving our best to these humans that are at their most vulnerable? They come to us at the worst times of their lives and look to us with pleading eyes — please take care of my baby, please take care of my mother — and we are failing them, not because we want to but because the system is literally set up to fail. As long as the CEOs and higher-ups are making money, they don’t care about anything else.”  ❖

Bob Hennelly is an award-winning print and broadcast journalist who covers labor and politics for Salon, Work-Bites, City & State, and InsiderNJ. He hosts the Stuck Nation Radio Labor Hour on Pacifica’s WBAI, 99.5 FM, and is the New York City Hall reporter for WBGO, 88.3 FM, NPR’s jazz station, in Newark, New Jersey.