Notes From The Dramaturgs

Work is an extraordinary word because it does so many different things. We do work and we go to a place called work. Work is something we have, something we own, and something we make. There are works of art, architecture, music, and literature. One can admire the work of a surgeon, an accountant, an auto mechanic, or a carpet salesman. We can work a room, a piece of wood, bread dough, or a stuck lock. We can work it out, work out, do good works, work someone over, or get worked up, and if we're not careful, we can even become workaholics. The word work is both a verb and a noun, an activity and a product that comes from that activity.
—Anne Ciulla, "The Working Life: The Promise and Betrayal of Modern Work"

In every record of work, there exists the desire of workers to be respected while doing their job. In modern American culture, it has become common to emphasize what someone does over who they are. But in 2011, the unemployment rate hovered around nine percent.1 Fifty percent of Americans with jobs considered a change of career.2 It is clear that workers struggle to maintain their dignity today as much as they did in 1974 when Studs Terkel published "Working". 

The book is simply a collection of oral histories, yet it satisfied a universal desire to share stories and the hope of many American workers to have their seemingly mundane work appreciated. When Stephen Schwartz began adapting these stories into a musical in 1977, he wanted every audience member to leave with a different perception of at least one of the occupations depicted in the show.3 Neither Terkel nor Schwartz ever shied away from giving voice to the exact words of the interviewees, regardless of intent or controversy. 

A tradition of recording the lyrical stories of seemingly mundane jobs continued after Terkel. Barbara Garson’s 1980s collection of communist-tilted interviews with workers called "All the Livelong Day" followed first, and then in 2000 came "Gig: Americans Talk about Their Jobs at the Turn of the Millennium". Barbara Ehrenreich published her account of spending a year in low-wage jobs across the United States in "Nickel and Dimed" in 2002. The anonymous blogger known as “the Waiter” revealed his name—Steve Dublanica—when his 2008 book, "Waiter Rant", came out. Even websites like www.i-hate-walmart.com allow employees to rail against their workplace anonymously, hoping to gain some control over their own employment. It seems evident that people need to discuss their work as a catharsis. 

The words immortalized in Terkel’s book and this production hold true for everyone who has ever held a job. But to understand how these oral histories became a montage musical, the main example of nonfiction musical theatre performed at high schools and colleges across the country (and in Canada and Australia), here’s a brief history of work and "Working".

What is Work?

The idea that we “should work” reaches back to Sparta and Athens. Sparta, a state centered around war, was the first to establish work as necessary for societal order. When there was no war, there was nothing to do and society would fall apart, due to the lack of discipline. Aesop, the Greek storyteller, sorted working styles into the grasshopper, ant, cicada, and bee. He believed the grasshopper’s lazy habits yielded nothing, the ant’s industrious spirit was admirable but selfish, and the cicada’s freedom from responsibility encouraged fun and nothing else. To Aesop, the bee was the greatest worker, because its work ensured its own survival and contributed to the surrounding society. 

However, Ancient Greeks saw physical work as a curse, a task for slaves. Early Eastern cultures believed work was inferior to spiritual exploration, but necessary
for survival. The first Christians saw work as punishment for humans, retribution for Adam and Eve’s sins in a paradise of leisure. Time on earth decided placement in heaven, so they did whatever work was necessary, trying to avoid greed, gluttony, and the other deadly sins. 

When Luther and Calvin emerged in early 16th century, they celebrated work as God’s commandment, not a curse. Pleasure became deplorable during the Reformation. In time, the Protestant work ethic developed; it was spread to the New World via the Puritans and then promoted by Benjamin Franklin. Based in fairness, personal excellence, and moral goodness, the work ethic influenced much of how Americans feel about their jobs today. 

It was not until the turn of the 20th century, as psychology replaced morality, that industry became a separate entity, capable of exploiting the worker unscrupulously. Wage-based work after industrialization reduced people to commodities able to operate machines. Socialism and communism emerge in reaction to capitalism. 

In the current culture of work, as Ciulla stated in the introduction to her book, 

Employees woke up to the fact that despite all the rhetoric of the caring employer and the improved quality of work life, workers were still commodities that could be replaced with computers, cheap foreign labor, or coworkers willing to do twice as much work for the same pay.

Despite the relative prosperity of the United States over the past half-century, resentment towards “the job” is ever-present. 

During the last millennium, drudgery became toil. Toil then evolved into labor. And labor developed into jobs. In castles, fields, factories, and offices throughout modern history, most people have worked out of necessity and therefore find it difficult to view work as a positive aspect of their lives. 

As Amanda McKenny says in "Working", “Most of us have jobs that are too small for our spirit.”

American Labor
Finding a job today in the United States is becoming more and more difficult. It seems that in order to even be considered for a position, one needs to have at least a college diploma, if not a master’s degree. There is also the issue of over-qualification for certain jobs. Highly educated people may not be able to find work because the only available options require considerably lower grade skills than they have to offer.

Because of mechanization and industrial farming, small farms that once provided the food for our whole country have been almost erased. Companies like Monsanto produce mass quantities of crops such as corn, which is only edible once it's turned into corn syrup, or tomatoes, which have been genetically modified to make them last longer on the shelves. The trend of mechanized mass production is not only true of the agricultural sector but touches many other parts of our workforce as well. America has a very productive manufacturing sector, but it no longer employs a large amount of the population. At the end of World War II, manufacturing accounted for about one-third of the American workforce. Today it accounts for about one-tenth.4 

In terms of employment, the United States has become a service economy. Since it transitioned from producing goods to providing services, the service producing sector has accounted for an increasing proportion of workers.5 However, manufacturing has consistently represented about 15 percent of rapidly growing U.S. economic output.6 Yet overall, the national unemployment rate as of December 2011 is 8.5 percent. Most families with an unemployed member also have at least one family member who is employed.7 

Labor issues have always been present in our culture, from the issues of slavery to the formation of unions to protect worker’s rights. Our world is based on a culture of working. Americans often define themselves by their professions and judge others by the work that they do in our society. They work to live, but some also love their work, and, like Babe Secoli in "Working", they could never think of doing anything else with their lives.

Studs Terkel
“History is so often told from the top down, from the view of statesmen and politicians. But what Studs has done is tell history from the bottom up, through the voices and hearts and stories of us, of regular people, of everyday people.”
—David Isay, founder of NPR’s Story Corps

Studs Terkel did not set out on a career path intending to frame and record some of America's most interesting oral histories. But from the veterans of World War II to the wearied faces of the Great Depression,he captured many of them, all over the United States. 

Terkel did not focus on one group. His first oral history, Division Street: America (1967), honed in on urban life in Chicago. Hard Times (1970) gave the American public a new lens for the Great Depression. After Working, he wrote The Good War (1984) about American veterans of the Second World War, winning him a Pulitzer Prize. Several books later, he disregarded the prevailing climate of political correctness to create "Race" (1992), a look at still-existing race roles decades after the civil rights movement. 

Published in 1974 after a couple years of research, "Working: People Talk about What They Do All Day and How They Feel about What They Do" contained over 130 interviews, mostly in Chicago. The bestseller inspired other collections of oral histories and Stephen Schwartz’s 1978 Broadway musical of the same name, which only lasted 24 performances.

He opened the book with an epitaph:

“Who built the seven towers of Thebes?
The books are filled with the names of kings.Was it kings who hauled the craggy
blocks of stone? In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished, where did
the masons go?”
—Bertolt Brecht

Before Terkel, few valued the stories of ordinary working Americans. But these interviews transformed how historical study, journalism, and theatre looked at lyrical nonfiction and oral histories. His own desire to learn motivated his projects. He once said, “The obvious tool of my trade is a tape recorder, but I feel like the real tool is curiosity.”

Lucy Walker and Amanda Sirois,
Dramaturgs

1. "Unemployment." Bureau of Labor Statistics. United States Department of Labor, N.D. Web. 14 Jan. 2012.
2. Huhman, Heather R. "As War for Talent Heats Up, So Does Employee Poaching." Business Insider. N.P., 11 Mar. 2011. Web. 14 Jan. 2012.
3. De Giere, Carol. Defying Gravity: The Creative Career of Stephen Schwartz, from Godspell to Wicked. New York: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 2008. Print.

4. Meisenheimer, Joseph R. “The Services Industry in the ‘Good’ Versus ‘Bad’ Jobs Debate,” Monthly Labor Review, Feb. 1998.
5. Meisenheimer, Joseph R. “The Services Industry in the ‘Good’ Versus ‘Bad’ Jobs Debate,” Monthly Labor Review, Feb. 1998.
6. Manzi, Jim. “Keeping America’s Edge.” National Affairs, 2 Jan. (2010). Web. 29 Jan. 2010.
7. “Families with unemployed members in 2009.” Bureau of Labor Statistics. N.P., 1 June 2010. Web. 29 Jan. 2012.