Voices of Silence

By A.T. Baker

WORKING

by STUDS TERKEL 589 pages. Pantheon. $10.

"How do you like your job?" is the basic question that Studs Terkel asks in his much ballyhooed collection of conversations with 135 Americans. The not very surprising answer: "I don't." A virtuoso of the unobtrusive mike, Terkel talked with elevator operators and company presidents, yacht salesmen and bricklayers, firemen and middle-managers, foremen and farmers and hair stylists--with those few who thought they were in control, with those many more who knew they were not. The excellence of the interviews is hard to convey in brief, since it is a stream-of-consciousness flow that gives them their quality. But the interview with Mike Lefevre, a 37-year-old worker in an Illinois steel mill, is a good example:

"It's hard to take pride in a bridge you're never gonna cross, in a door you're never gonna open. You're mass-producing things and you never see the end result of it. How are you gonna get excited about pullin' steel? It's the nonrecognition by other people ... [A fellow with a college degree] saw a book in my back pocket one time and he was amazed. He walked up to me and he said, 'You read?' I said, 'What do you mean, I read?' He said, 'All these dummies read the sports pages around here. What are you doing with a book?' I got pissed off at the kid right away. I said,

'What do you mean, all these dummies? Don't knock a man who's paying somebody else's way through college.' Sometimes when I make something, I put a little dent in it. I like to do something to make it really unique. Hit it with a

hammer. I deliberately it up to see

if it'll get by, just so I can say I did it. Let me put it this way: I think God invented the dodo bird so when we get up there we could tell him, 'Don't you ever make mistakes?' And he'd say, 'Sure, look.' I'd like to make my imprint. My dodo bird. A mistake, mine."

Terkel encounters the usual quota of people who say "I am a machine," "A monkey could do what I could," "I'm an object." Or more poignant because less forensic, the retired truck driver, age 66: "Most of my friends died on the verge of getting pensions. Because the truck driver at 40, his kidneys are beginning to kick up or he's got his whole prostate gland giving him a bad time." There are also moments of revelation. From a black washroom attendant in Chicago's

Palmer House: "I don't enjoy waiting on my peers. I feel that if I'm gonna occupy a position that's menial, let it be to some one perhaps a cut above me."

A onetime law student turned radio journalist, Terkel, 62, is best known for Hard Times (1970), a collection of conversations that showed just how bitter the Depression was. He is a fine inter viewer but a bad analyst and pundit. "This book," he writes, "being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence -- to the spirit as well as to the body ... in a society more conspicuously manipulative than Orwell's." At certain moments in the past, there was a higher proportion of artisans who took pride in their product, and peasants who communed with the land. But for most people through the ages, working has been just a way to earn a living -- often a meager one. Only with the modern revolution of rising expectations has it been generally assumed that work should also be emotionally fulfilling.

Terkel, moreover, tends to treat all his subjects as if they were tragedies. He mentions, but does not seem to notice that his disconsolate elevator operator has sent two sons through college. His disgruntled assembly-line worker is wor rying about finding a berth for his motor cruiser on Lake Michigan. What Terkel seems to forget is that material change comes from human discontent. It is the difference between docility and aspiration. Docility says "Let things be."

Discontent insists "There must be some thing better."

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