All the Livelong Day: The Meaning and Demeaning of Routine Work, Revised and Updated Edition Review

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(More customer reviews)The essential argument underlying this book is that human beings want to work. We love work. Work is part of our nature. But human beings don't work with the unstoppable fervor of machines, so the people who dole out work have tried to compress us into the role of industrial robots.
Barbara Garson doesn't pretend to be impartial. She's outspokenly socialist, believing that the people who do jobs are best capable of judging how those jobs ought to be done. She is not looking for a free hand in the world, and she's not looking to loaf on the clock. But when work is stripped of its inherent meaning and reduced to trivial repetetive twists and pulls, this necessarily strips the workers of some of their noble humanity.
Garson began work on this book in the 1970s, and you can tell. Several of her interviewees think they're doing pretty well to be making a buck eighty-five an hour, because that's two dimes better than some of their friends. Her earliest interviewees are bulk industrial workers manufacturing light consumer goods, a field that barely exists in the U.S. these days. Her final interviewees crunch numbers on computers for banks and other institutions, and if anything their work is even more meaningless because they can't see their co-workers and have no idea if the next person on the line is even still alive.
There are a couple of chapters in this book where the author steps back from her interview subjects and draws conclusions. These chapters seem a little preachy, and will offend anybody who believes that the current employment system is the only way it could possibly be. This book is best when Garson stands out of the way of her subjects--cannery workers, auto plant techs, desk jockeys, and more--and trusts them to tell their own story.
If you've ever had a job so trivial that you wonder why you bother, you'll recognize that you're not alone. If you've always been on the top of the heap, you'll gain a broad understanding of what it's like for the people whose shoulders you're standing on. And either way, you're likely to understand why it's so important that workers link arms and stand together, what they lose when they work with blinders on, and what work could be if humanity were restored to its place of honor.

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