A little over 50 years ago, the American broadcaster Studs Terkel published an oral history based on interviews with 133 workers across the US. This was a time of automation and global competition, a new era of enormous change, and Terkel wanted to discover how the world of work might offer ordinary people a sense of purpose; of what he described as “daily meaning as well as daily bread”.
What he discovered is that there were people doing “good” jobs, sometimes performed with grace and beauty – the piano tuner, for example, the stone mason, the firefighter – but that most workers were trying merely to survive the day. As one of his interviewees told him: “Most of us… have jobs that are too small for our spirit.”
