What Work Is

“It is time that the study of human intellect be broadened to embrace Joseph Levenson’s admirable definition of intellectual history as “the history not of thought, but of men thinking” (ix). So observed historian Lawrence Levine in the introduction to his now-classic work on “Afro-American folk thought, ” Black Culture and Black Consciousness (1978). Although neither Levenson, a renowned historian of Chinese intellectual history, nor Levine, a cultural and intellectual historian of the United States, fits neatly into the genealogy of modern labor and working-class history, their interest in combining social and intellectual approaches certainly contributed to the development of the New Labor History (NLH) and its progeny. On the one hand, it’s easy to see the influence of a Levenson or Levine in the NLH’s emphasis on scouring sources for the words and thoughts of working-class people, or the methodological turn to reading sources “against the grain” in pursuit of workers’ ideas. On the other, with a few notable exceptions, most scholarship in this vein (recent or not) has tended to use such words and ideas as historical evidence rather than as the focus and subject of analysis, much less as the inspiration for creative work. Robert Bruno’s innovative new book, What Work Is, flips this script in a way that Levine would have likely recognized and appreciated. While the book seeks to describe and explain a particular historical reality—the nature of work, especially paid, productive work, in the United States since roughly World War II—it does so largely through a very unconventional source base. The book is based on “thousands” of responses to micro “essays” produced by Bruno’s “worker-students, ” mostly union members enrolled in labor education classes at the University of Illinois, where Bruno taught for over two decades. According to Bruno, “As part of the classes, I asked my students to do an exercise where they completed the following sentence, using no more than six words emphasis added: ‘Work is _______? ’” (4). In the book, Bruno divides the students’ responses into five chapters organized around a series of “concepts” or “themes” (time, space, impact, purpose, and subject). He then weaves together the responses with “other diverse academic and philosophical sources, including music and poetry, ” as well as biographies of his parents, and autobiographical reflections. The product is a distinctive book that reads at various times like sociology, philosophy, economics, labor studies, and memoir. At its best, Bruno’s approach allows him to place his students in conversation with the likes of Aristotle, John Locke, and Marx; to give the students the opportunity to talk back to academics and politicians who would treat them like numbers or pawns; and to sing their experience into the record alongside figures like Robert Frost and Bruce Springsteen. For example, in a representative passage, Bruno writes (first quoting the responses): Under the best circumstances, my students viewed working for a living as a “daily grind” and a “necessary evil. ” Workers’ essays shared, in part, Mark Twain’s belief that “work is a necessary evil to be avoided. ” But importantly, my students always left off “to be avoided. ”. . . How could a job be both rewarding and evil? My students explained that it wasn’t the actual work that was evil. It was the rules of the political-economic system that coerced workers into jobs they needed to survive that was evil. (90) Although Bruno is clear that “the questions raised in this book are about paid labor with workers employed in various occupations, ” he also makes a brief but significant foray into the debates regarding public and private spheres and productive and reproductive labor (3). Bruno draws on both his memories of his mother’s experience and his students’ essays to describe gendered divisions of labor, in and outside the home, as well as the “double duty” of women’s work (65). At the same time, however, he argues that, on the whole, his students did not appear to imagine the paid/productive “workspace” in the same bifurcated “gendered terms” as the home. Instead, he writes, “A number of my students acknowledged, ‘Work is a second home’ and a place ‘where my family lives’” (66). Without denying the ways that gender shapes work, he argues that “the workplace” (referring to the paid jobsite) is more complex than some scholars have suggested. Rather than “separate spheres fulfilling different functions, ” it constitutes a “job-home nexus” that is “both a site of production and reproduction” (65, 66). Overall, Bruno’s book makes an original and important contribution to workers’ intellectual history and emphasizes the need to place workers’ individual and collective subjectivities at the center of industrial and public policy. In particular, the book picks up on themes in recent work by James Barrett (on workers’ biography) and Tobias Higbie (on workers’ intellectual life). Indeed, all these scholars’ connections to the University of Illinois is a reminder of that institution’s important role in nurturing some of the best labor and working-class scholarship of the last several decades (at least before the center of the field decamped to the coasts). Although some readers are likely to find Bruno’s treatment of reproductive and unpaid labor unsatisfying, the book is nonetheless a compelling effort at revealing “the personal poetry” that Levine (borrowing the words of Robert Louis Stevenson) “insisted lay hidden within every human being, ” including (and perhaps especially) members of the working class (Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 443).