In 2021, the average full-time employed American worked 9.09 hours a day, with more than a quarter of all full-time workers spending more than 50 hours a week on the job—ironic, considering that in 1967, a Senate subcommittee declared that by 1987 the average worker would spend no more than 22 hours a week on the job. Well, the Senate be damned: even politicians must now sell their souls from dawn to midnight, weekends and happy hours included.

It’s small wonder that Studs Terkel’s classic oral history Working, published half a century ago, is full of discontentment; workers back then logged just as many hours, though with much more purchasing power for their troubles than workers enjoy today.

Louis Terkel was trained as a lawyer but rebelled at the thought of a daily grind. Instead, with the byname Studs, he became a radio journalist. With decided working-class sympathies and Marxist leanings, he put a tape recorder to work collecting the thoughts of his fellow Chicagoans about matters concerning race, class, war, and other issues. His first book, the aptly named Division Street (1967), explored how people on one side of the ethnic divide viewed people on the other, with Terkel working venues that had him talking with subjects “on the steps of a public housing project, in a frame bungalow, in a furnished apartment, in a parked car.”

Working raised a battle cry of working-class rebellion, for as Terkel defiantly noted, because the book was about work, it was therefore about violence “to the spirit as well as the body.” For Terkel’s workers, just getting up and getting one’s body into the foundry or emergency room or classroom was a heroic effort, a guaranteed means of collecting too-small paychecks and too-large psychic scars. Enacting vengeance on the bosses could mean sneaking an extra smoke break or swiping a paper clip, but it could also have greater implications, as when an automobile worker did a shoddy job of assembly, saying, as Terkel wrote, “Aw, fuck it, it’s only a car.” Every worker, Terkel found, was a saboteur, whether real or potential.

Terkel proceeded by hunches and tips, aware that many people might be wary of talking about matters so sensitive as work and money. He found that he didn’t have to worry. No one held back. Farmers complained that most of the money in agriculture went to the corporations. Steelworkers spoke of long shifts, adding “in between…don’t even try to think.” Maids reviled the class pretensions of their employers. Flight attendants, then as now, had dire stories to tell about demanding, dimwitted passengers.

The world of Terkel’s Working has changed, if only because many of the jobs of half a century ago—stenographer, factory worker, switchboard operator—have disappeared or been offshored. But it’s the kind of book, full of insight and despair, that deserves a follow-up to show us just how far we have come or, depending on your point of view, fallen. It remains a revealing portrait of an era that, while bygone, reverberates with resentments and resistance all these years later.

Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor.