ALL THE LIVELONG DAY: The Meaning and De-Meaning of Routine Work

by Barbara Garson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 12, 1975

While lunching businessmen blame unions for inflation, bright young fashionables converse wisely on loss of pride in workmanship, and sociologists assure us that the color of all our collars is changing anyhow, the American worker goes right on getting screwed. So concludes Barbara Garson (Macbird), who investigated some ten places of employment--from the Bumble Bee cannery in Astoria, Oregon, to the Reader's Digest plant at Pleasantville, N.Y.--by simply hanging around asking people to talk to her. Frankly prejudiced (she found pretty much what she expected to find) and unsystematic, she still puts together a convincingly damning picture of 1984 regimentation, brutalizing sameness, unrelenting tension. At Lordstown, GM neatly reduced the number of workers performing the same number of assembly-line operations at the same line speed (UAW, while happy to negotiate on salaries and benefits, shares the almost universal han&-off attitude of unions toward ""running the plant""--i.e., influencing the circumstances under which a worker's output is to be measured). At Fair Plan Insurance in New York Garson--briefly employed stapling and stamping forms because ""I just couldn't think of any other way in""--is told by a supervisor to ""attend to my personal needs on my own time"" after following a fellow employee to the bathroom to ask about her hospitalized two-year-old. An awful air of schoolroom discipline--what Carson calls the ""infantilization"" of grown people's labor--hangs over most of the factories and offices described. There are a couple of more humane situations from which Carson draws very emphatic morals--the relaxed, cheerful payroll department of a community college, where intrepid Jewish grandmothers hold efficiency experts at bay, and a Helena Rubenstein plant on Long Island, where a dedicated union has fought for some say-so over line conditions. Meanwhile, the less lucky struggle to form psychological defenses against being made into children, slaves, or inconveniently living and breathing machinery. After reading this aggressive, chaotic, biased, maddeningly repetitive, angrily penetrating study you will never feel the same about the taken-for-granted, anonymously packaged products that clutter your desk or bureau or local supermarket.

Pub Date: Sept. 12, 1975

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1975

Categories: NONFICTION