Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (35 page)

 

I took my first picture five years ago. I was taking pictures long before I had a camera. I always wanted to sit back and watch things. There are times where if I’d used the hidden camera I’dve had things that I don’t have. But I’d never use it. I hate sneaky photographers. There’s no respect.

Sometimes it’s hard to get started, ’cause I’m always aware of invading privacy. If there’s someone who doesn’t want me to take their picture, I don’t. When should you shoot and when shouldn’t you? I’ve gotten pictures of cops beating people. Now they didn’t want their pictures taken. (Laughs.) That’s a different thing.

I hate cheap pictures. I hate pictures that make people look like they’re not worth much, just to prove a photographer’s point. I hate when they take a picture of someone pickin’ their nose or yawning. It’s so cheap. A lot of it is a big ego trip. You use people as props instead of as people. To have people say of the guy, “Oh, isn’t he great?”—that’s easy.

Weegee took a picture of that woman and daughter crying. The sister had just been burned in a fire. It’s one of the most touching pictures in the world. Yet I know I could never have taken that picture. Especially shooting off the flash in their face at the time. And yet I’m glad he took that picture. But that guy in My Lai—I couldn’t have done it.

When I think of that guy taking those pictures. He was part of the army, too. He took a picture of those two children gunned down. He took a picture right before they were massacred, instead of running up to those kids. He just stood there and took the pictures. How could he? I don’t think he had any moral problems at all. Just from what he said and those pictures. How is it possible to shoot two children being shot down without doing something?

There was a time when I was at this stock car race. With a bunch of motorcycle guys there. They were drinkin’ and they were doin’ that whole phony, masculine, tough guy shit. There were these two kids came by in a Corvair. They took these kids and stomped that car and they beat ‘em up so bad. People were standing around lookin’. I was there with my camera. I had been shooting these motorcycle guys up till then. It was cool. But when they were beating up these guys, I found myself running up to the biggest guy, who was doing the punching. I grabbed his arm—one of the kids who was being beaten up had a little camera and it was smashed to the ground. I grabbed his arm and I was hollerin’, “Stop it! Stop it!” That’s what I was doing. I was up all night mad at myself that I didn’t take that picture. Because that’s where it’s at: a picture of people beating up on other people.

I was so mad. Why didn’t I take the picture and
then
grab the guy’s arm? Because that picture is one of the reasons I take pictures. To show: Look at this. (Sighs.) But I didn’t. I would like to if it happens again. (A pause.) I don’t know what I’d do. I hope I can take it.

She is the film critic of
The New Yorker.

 

Work is rarely treated in films. It’s one of the peculiarities of the movies. You hardly see a person at work. There was a scene in
Kitty Foyle,
with Ginger Rogers. It wasn’t really well done, but it was so startling that people talked about it. Any kind of work scene that has any quality at all becomes memorable. The automat sequence in
Easy Living,
the Preston Sturges film. It was done many years ago, yet people still talk about it. It’s amazing how rarely work life gets on the screen.

Television now offers us this incredible fantasy on hospital work. In the movie
The Hospital
you really saw how a hospital worked. (Laughs.) The audience recognized the difference. They started laughing right from the very first frames of that film. Because we all know the truth: Hospitals are chaotic, disorganized places where no one really knows what he’s doing. This pleased the audience as a counterview of the television hospital’s cleanliness and order.

Just think of Marcus Welby. All those poor, sad people are going to this father figure for advice. You know actually that you go to a doctor, he tells you nothing. You’re sent to another doctor. The screen doesn’t show how we actually feel about doctors—the resentment because of the money they make, the little help they give us.

Movies set up these glamorized occupations. When people find they are waitresses, they feel degraded. No kid says I want to be a waiter, I want to run a cleaning establishment. There is a tendency in movies to degrade people if they don’t have white-collar professions. So people form a low self-image of themselves, because their lives can never match the way Americans live—on the screen.

I consider myself one of the lucky ones because I really enjoy what I do. I love my occupation. But I’ve spent most of my life working at jobs I hated. I’ve worked at boring office jobs. I never felt they were demeaning, but they exhausted my energy and spirit. I do think most people work at jobs that mechanize them and depersonalize them.

The occasional satisfaction in work is never shown on the screen, say, of the actor or the writer. The people doing drudge jobs enjoy these others because they think they make a lot of money. What they should envy them for is that they take pleasure in their work. Society plays that down. I think enormous harm has been done by the television commercial telling ghetto children they should go to school because their earning capacity would be higher.
³²
They never suggest that if you’re educated you may go into fields where your work is satisfying, where you may be useful, where you can really do something that can help other people.

When I worked at drudge jobs to support the family I used to have headaches all the time, feeling rotten at the end of the day. I don’t think I’ve taken an aspirin or a pill in the last twenty years. The one thing that disturbs me on television is the housewife, who’s always in need of a headache remedy from tension and strain. This is an incredible image of the American woman. Something terrible must be going on inside her if she’s in that shape. Of course, she’s become a compulsive maniac about scrubbing and polishing and cleaning—in that commercial.

Housewives in the movies and on television are mindless. Now it takes a lot of intelligence to handle children and it’s a fascinating process watching kids grow up. Being involved with kids may be much more creative than what their husbands do at drudge jobs.

To show accurate pictures, you’re going to outrage industry. In the news recently we’ve learned of the closing of industrial plants—and the men, who’ve worked for twenty years, losing out on their pensions. Are you going to see this in a movie? It’s going to have to be a very tough muckraking film maker to show us how industry discards people. Are you going to have a movie that shows us how stewardesses are discarded at a certain age? And violate the beautiful pact that the airlines have with the movie companies, where they jointly advertise one another?

We now have conglomerate ownership of the movie industry. Are they going to show us how these industries really dehumanize their workers? Muckraking was possible when the movie companies were independent of big industry. Now that Gulf & Western, AVCA, Trans-America, these people own the movie companies, this is very tough. Are you going to do muckraking about the record industry, when the record from the movie grosses more than the film itself?

It’s a long time since we’ve had a movie about a strike, isn’t it? You get something about the Molly Maguires, which is set in the past, but you don’t see how the working relationship is now. I’d be interested in seeing a film on Lordstown.

What banks, what banks before us now
As white as any snow?
It’s the banks of Heaven, my love, she replied
Where all good people go.

What banks, what banks before us now
As black as any crow?
It’s the banks of Hell, my love, he replied
Where you and I must go.

—“The Daemon Lover”
Child Ballad #35

He is a spot-welder at the Ford assembly plant on the far South Side of Chicago. He is twenty-seven years old; recently married. He works the third shift: 3:30
P.M.
to midnight.

 

I stand in one spot, about two- or three-feet area, all night. The only time a person stops is when the line stops. We do about thirty-two jobs per car, per unit. Forty-eight units an hour, eight hours a day. Thirty-two times forty-eight times eight. Figure it out. That’s how many times I push that button.

The noise, oh it’s tremendous. You open your mouth and you’re liable to get a mouthful of sparks. (Shows his arms) That’s a burn, these are burns. You don’t compete against the noise. You go to yell and at the same time you’re straining to maneuver the gun to where you have to weld.

You got some guys that are uptight, and they’re not sociable. It’s too rough. You pretty much stay to yourself. You get involved with yourself. You dream, you think of things you’ve done. I drift back continuously to when I was a kid and what me and my brothers did. The things you love most are the things you drift back into.

Lots of times I worked from the time I started to the time of the break and I never realized I had even worked. When you dream, you reduce the chances of friction with the foreman or with the next guy.

It don’t stop. It just goes and goes and goes. I bet there’s men who have lived and died out there, never seen the end of that line. And they never will—because it’s endless. It’s like a serpent. It’s just all body, no tail. It can do things to you . . . (Laughs.)

Repetition is such that if you were to think about the job itself, you’d slowly go out of your mind. You’d let your problems build up, you’d get to a point where you’d be at the fellow next to you—his throat. Every time the foreman came by and looked at you, you’d have something to say. You just strike out at anything you can. So if you involve yourself by yourself, you overcome this.

I don’t like the pressure, the intimidation. How would you like to go up to someone and say, “I would like to go to the bathroom?” If the foreman doesn’t like you, he’ll make you hold it, just ignore you. Should I leave this job to go to the bathroom I risk being fired. The line moves all the time.

I work next to Jim Grayson and he’s preoccupied. The guy on my left, he’s a Mexican, speaking Spanish, so it’s pretty hard to understand him. You just avoid him. Brophy, he’s a young fella, he’s going to college. He works catty-corner from me. Him and I talk from time to time. If he ain’t in the mood, I don’t talk. If I ain’t in the mood, he knows it.

Oh sure, there’s tension here. It’s not always obvious, but the whites stay with the whites and the coloreds stay with the coloreds. When you go into Ford, Ford says, “Can you work with other men?” This stops a lot of trouble, ’cause when you’re working side by side with a guy, they can’t afford to have guys fighting. When two men don’t socialize, that means two guys are gonna do more work, know what I mean?

I don’t understand how come more guys don’t flip. Because you’re nothing more than a machine when you hit this type of thing. They give better care to that machine than they will to you. They’ll have more respect, give more attention to that machine. And you
know
this. Somehow you get the feeling that the machine is better than you are. (Laughs.)

You really begin to wonder. What price do they put on me? Look at the price they put on the machine. If that machine breaks down, there’s somebody out there to fix it right away. If I break down, I’m just pushed over to the other side till another man takes my place. The only thing they have on their mind is to keep that line running.

I’ll do the best I can. I believe in an eight-hour pay for an eight-hour day. But I will not try to outreach my limits. If I can’t cut it, I just don’t do it. I’ve been there three years and I keep my nose pretty clean. I never cussed anybody or anything like that. But I’ve had some real brushes with foremen.

What happened was my job was overloaded. I got cut and it got infected. I got blood poisoning. The drill broke. I took it to the foreman’s desk. I says, “Change this as soon as you can.” We were running specials for XL hoods. I told him I wasn’t a repair man. That’s how the conflict began. I says, “If you want, take me to the Green House.” Which is a superintendent’s office—disciplinary station. This is when he says, “Guys like you I’d like to see in the parking lot.”

One foreman I know, he’s about the youngest out here, he has this idea: I’m it and if you don’t like it, you know what you can do. Anything this other foreman says, he usually overrides. Even in some cases, the foremen don’t get along. They’re pretty hard to live with, even with each other.

Oh yeah, the foreman’s got somebody knuckling down on him, putting the screws to him. But a foreman is still free to go to the bathroom, go get a cup of coffee. He doesn’t face the penalties. When I first went in there, I kind of envied foremen. Now, I wouldn’t have a foreman’s job. I wouldn’t give ’em the time of the day.

When a man becomes a foreman, he has to forget about even being human, as far as feelings are concerned. You see a guy there bleeding to death. So what, buddy? That line’s gotta keep goin’. I can’t live like that. To me, if a man gets hurt, first thing you do is get him some attention.