Intro, Dante, and Stallings

The introduction to this section struck me as particularly interesting since I'm a junior and starting to think about what I want to do. What really struck me was how Terkel sorts out what is important from what's not. He talks about each worker as a human with a life, instead of a number. Shouldn't everyone be treated as a unique individual? Payed as such? And not treated as unique in the condescending, mommy-still-loves-you sense, but as an intelligent person with ideas and dreams and hopes, as were the two workers I read about. I guess it's the whole idea that someone has to do the work, and if it's necessary, then why shouldn't it be rewarded as such? What first got me thinking about this was his paragraph about turning your work into an art. Just because a person is a spot welder doesn't mean he loses all of that intensely human desire to make beautiful things. Dolores Dante mentioned in passing that she studies guitar in her free time. When I finish college and decide where to go from there, I will want to do a job that is satisfying in and of itself, not something that requires that I practice guitar in my free time, although given my current inclinations, I most likely will anyway.

When a person does a job he or she doesn't like, it begins to dull their minds. Stallings, from his description of his job, basically spaces out for eight and a half hours each day. He says that his job would be more interesting if he could try his hand at different jobs on the assembly line, and why shouldn't he? Certainly, there would be a few bad cars as each person learns a different role, but eventually the line would have a whole lot of "utility men," as he calls them. If someone gets sick, someone else can pick up their position. And, to boot, everyone would be more interested in their job because it would be a different perspective each day. I think that hearing about Stallings and Dolores really helped me understand from an emotional standpoint why workers were striking and protesting under Carnegie and the other "steel tyrants" of the early 1900s. They realized that those terrible conditions and horrible injustices were the rest of their lives spread out in front of them. Who wouldn't want something more? Who wouldn't be angry with that? Dante enjoys what she does, and Stallings justifies his staying with the job, but in the conditions of the Carnegie steel workers, it can be hard to do either.