What Work Is

Bruno (Justified by Work), a labor professor at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, offers a perceptive exploration of how workers think about their labor. Bruno regularly asks his students—who are all nonmatriculating, mostly blue-collar adults—to finish the sentence “Work is...” with six words or fewer and then discuss their responses. Here, he unpacks the replies and expounds on how they speak to the current state of employment. For instance, he explains that such answers as “work is now and forever” reveal that laborers “experience work as having a permanent hold on their time,” and he discusses how stalled efforts to reduce the workweek to 30 hours in the 1930s have resulted in a modern regime of excessive required overtime. Workers, he contends, often reported that though they recognized their labor was “merely instrumental and obligatory,” they nonetheless “felt their work was connected to their identity and contributed to the ‘fulfillment of life.’ ” Bruno’s humanistic analysis often approaches the poetic (“Work hurts. Work disables and abuses. It exhausts, stresses, and ultimately kills. Work dictates life spans. It also invigorates, inspires, satisfies, and brings joy”), and his shrewd recommendations for improving American labor include strong unions, reducing the 40-hour workweek, and stronger enforcement of overtime benefits. It’s a worthy update to Studs Terkel’s Working. (Jan.)