All work done well deserves our utmost respect

By Tim Mulherin

Sun contributor

In 1974, an important book about an obvious yet quite overlooked subject was published: Studs Terkel’s Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do.

An NPR piece on September 6, 2004, called it “the quintessential book about Labor Day.” Terkel, the renowned Chicago radio broadcaster, interviewed more than 130 “ordinary men and women about their jobs,” NPR reporter Susan Stamberg said. Thanks to Terkel’s deft interviewing and storytelling, the ordinary turned out to be extraordinary. Indeed, people often don’t realize how interesting their work is to others, no matter how mundane it might appear to be at first glance.

At the time I read Working, back in the mid-eighties while working full time on an English degree in nonfiction writing, I was a bar manager in Indianapolis. I had also remarried and had two small children. Indeed, I had a visceral understanding of what working was all about.

Yet Terkel’s book had me riveted. His interviews proved insightful, humorous, and touching. His painstaking oral history took readers along on a remarkable cultural anthropological exploration of a common undertaking most all of us experience, for at least 40 hours a week. (Of course, this doesn’t include the time spent getting ready for work, commuting, and emailing and texting work-related messages before and after the workday.) Our duration in the workplace can last up to 50 years, sometimes more. Too often we undervalue this marathon making-a-living experience. So, in my mind, Terkel’s book concept was simply brilliant.

I was certainly driven to succeed as a nontraditional college student. My definition of success, though, had little to do with money; after all, I was an English major. And though I was getting little sleep slinging whiskey, attending classes, studying, being a parent and a spouse – as was my highly motivated wife, who worked part time while enrolled in dental hygiene school – those were the best days of my life. Working felt good. It gave me purpose and helped to forge my identity. Back then, I developed a solid work ethic and a great respect for those who gave their daily labor their all, whatever their job description.

I ended up teaching college writing part time during my graduate schooling in journalism and for some years thereafter. In my first semester as an instructor at Indiana University Indianapolis, I taught two 8 a.m. classes. Never again, I quickly decided. The kids – and they were kids – would generally roll in bleary-eyed from a night of partying and primary research of the amorous kind, unable to generate the energy to engage in scholarship. Many of them weren’t even working. So, the following semester I switched to teaching night school and weekend college courses, a permanent arrangement for the remainder of my teaching career. I had found my people.

As remains the case in higher education today, every class I taught had more female students than male. Generally, women were much more attentive and involved in the coursework (sorry, guys). For the single moms, of which I typically had several in each of my classes, being a nontraditional college student was a welcome reprieve from the demands of childrearing and working, a precious timeout to feed their intellectual curiosity. Earning a four-year degree was their ticket to a more promising future, and so they took their studies seriously.

Regardless of gender, however, most every one of my night school and weekend college students held down a full-time job while pursuing their bachelor’s degrees. Some were on probation from IU Bloomington and Purdue University in Lafayette, Ind., where they previously performed poorly though partied hardy. Notably, many were older than I.

Terkel interviewed a wide range of working people. Among them, a long-distance trucker, a cleaning lady, a stonemason, a taxi driver, a waitress, a piano tuner, a firefighter, a prostitute, even a 14-year-old boy with a newspaper route. My class rosters reflected a similar diversity (though no 14-year-olds). I was in awe of my working students’ stick-to-itiveness and love of learning. And I became one of their greatest fans.

Although I had the honor of standing in front of college students several times a week to share my limited though passionately professed knowledge about the practice of writing, still, I held a blue-collar job at night as a bartender until I turned 40.

Contrary to what many bar customers believe, bartending is not a glamorous profession. You’re on your feet for hours on end and must deal with a wide range of personalities and behaviors – which is even more challenging when people are under the influence. And when the bar is busy, you’re hustling nonstop to keep thirsty customers satiated. At closing time, the bar gets thoroughly cleaned, an effort requiring plenty of elbow grease, something of an injustice after a long night of serving the public. At shift’s end, a beer never tasted so good.

At some point during the semester in my business communications course, I would talk to my college students about the nature and dignity of work. Notwithstanding its cost, I told them they were privileged to be attending college. Not everyone gets that chance, whether due to affordability or aptitude for classroom learning, and not everyone should. There are other gifts and talents better suited to other lines of well-compensated, personally rewarding work. Of course, there are jobs that are just plain difficult and sometimes painfully monotonous, and yet they’re unquestionably essential.

By way of example, I would tell them how much respect I had for the line cooks toiling in hot kitchens who prepared my food orders for my bar customers. And for the dishwashers who labored tirelessly in conditions most of us would never consider working in, while the dirty plates, glassware, silverware, and kitchen cookware kept coming. Our time together in the service industry bonded us as lifelong members of a special fraternity who knew the value of hard work.

I would be sure to emphasize to my now engrossed students that earning a college degree makes you no better than anyone else. Further, I would strongly suggest, such a significant self-improvement accomplishment also carries a responsibility to contribute to the betterment of the world.

Now, decades later, I’m writing books and columns like this. I sit and think and type. No physical demands required (the downside is that I burn way fewer calories). It’s a return to a dream deferred more than 30 years ago, a late-in-life opportunity I don’t take lightly. Yes, it took a while to get here. But first I had to earn it.

So, this Labor Day reflection is a tribute to all who work hard each day to put bread on the table and a well-earned beer or two in their bellies. Because a job well done, whether informed by a college degree and/or the School of Hard Knocks, deserves society’s respect. I’m confident Studs Terkel would certainly agree.

Tim Mulherin is the author of This Magnetic North: Candid Conversations on a Changing Northern Michigan, published by Michigan State University Press. He is currently writing a book about wildlife in Michigan and Indiana.