Ten Thousand Working Days

Robert Schrank is a Project Specialist at the Ford Foundation and he holds a master''s and doctorate in the sociology of work. He serves as consultant to the New York City Mayor''s Productivity Council the National Academy of Sciences the U.S. Department of Labor other governmental bodies and universities. So another academic specialist has written another book about the values and goalsor the lack of them or their decline or whateverof working stiffs about which he knows from nothing right?Wrong. This particular academic specialist didn''t get to college until he was over forty and earned (the right word for a working man) his doctorate when he was in his fifties. For more than forty yearsten thousand working daysfrom the age of fourteen on he has held down an astonishing variety of jobs that cover both a wide occupational range and just about every level from the top to the bottom in the organizational scheme of things. He has been a plumber a city commissioner a plant manager and engineer an auto mechanic an antipoverty program bureaucrat a machinist a union official a coal miner a foundation professional a farmhand. Not in that order but the point is that the experiences commingling in the memory all have an equal value in human terms. Always onward-and-upward the American-Dream-come-true is exactly not the point.Robert Schrank writes about each of these jobs in a personal chronological specific narrative way but always from a perspective that has been enlarged by the scope of his professional training and and commitments. His memories give his experiences uniqueness. His sociological insights lend them a kind of universality.But this author is his own best advocate: I was moved to write this book as a result of listening to and reading about what behavioral scientists academics and other literati had perceived at places of work. I felt that in the pursuit of psychology or sociology they had missed the humanity the poetry and the community of people that is created by the workers at their workplaces. I hope in this book to catch some of that sense of community camaraderie conflict and humor.... I will be tempted from time to time to write in my present profession as a sociologist. But I will do my best to resist that in favor of trying to catch the language and the feel of the workplaces I am writing about. I will try to differentiate between the job and the actual work on tasks. The job I define as the container the institution or the structure in which a person performs something for which he or she gets paid. If we think about the job as a container what interests me in this book is what goes on inside that container. This includes the work tasks physical surroundings the benefits the amenities and most important the social milieu of the community.The author also brings critical acuteness and common sense to his examination of such issues as the quality of work (and of workmanship) work as a means of self-definition and personal fulfillment and the point at which diminishing rewardsmaterial and psychologicalmake the alternative of not working (or working at a minimal level of commitment) the preferred way of life.