By Mark Spearman

I keep wondering what most people are thinking as they watch the images on TV of demonstrations in Wisconsin and elsewhere to protect the right of collective bargaining.

Such a sterile term “collective bargaining” for something as basic and personal as banding with others to establish and nurture a livelihood, and to provide for yourself and people you care about.

As 70,000 people circled the state capitol in Madison recently, my mind traveled back to an auto workers union president named Fred, from whom I learned something about that concept, about fair pay for a good day’s work, and about the politics of human aspiration and the emotions they can stir all around.

Fred was in charge of the union local in the mid-sized Midwest city where I worked as a newspaper reporter 25 years ago. He was essentially a slightly leaner, decidedly shrewder, certainly more diplomatic Wilford Brimley. Fred represented the interests of 3,000 auto workers who stamped sedans, station wagons and light trucks out of the untold tons of sheet metal brought in daily by rail.

I was the upstart reporter who’d periodically come by the union hall adjacent to the plant for comments on contract talks, rumors of contract talks, strikes, rumors of strikes, settlements, rumors of settlements… We seemed to find things to talk about pretty much all the time. Or, rather, I found an inexhaustible list of reasons to pester Fred for stories. I was the latest in a long line of know-it-all, 25-year-old journalism school grads who’d never seen a quarter panel, hood or decklid that wasn’t already neatly painted and attached to a car. We were the instant experts assigned the beat where Fred conducted business, but he took it all with patience and good humor.

No so much his colleagues in the local. I recall watching my Toyota towed from the union hall parking lot as a burly union brother, expressing much schadenfreude, pointed to a sign that read No Foreign Car Parking. It was 1985, and people preached “Buy American,” but mostly it was a matter of the media being considered an enemy.

Sometimes I’d wait by the front gate to get quotes from passing workers about a proposal or pending labor agreement. My questions elicited a spectrum of responses, ranging from indifference to F-bombs.

All of this burnished what I’d frequently heard others say about unions, that they were dominated by contentious, demanding and unenlightened yokels with an inflated sense of entitlement.

I’d grown up in a small Ohio town where unions were the rare exception. I didn’t know anyone who belonged to a union. I didn’t go to school with any kids who lived in union households. On television, labor unions were usually a device to tell stories about corruption and crime. Often, union thugs were the “muscle” when something unpleasant needed to get done.

My only personal experience with a union was the day my dad arrived home in a state of agitation because he’d just driven past strikers on a picket line. One of them had spit tobacco on the side of his sweet, 1965 red Ford Falcon.

You could fire the old Civil War cannon on the Public Square of my hometown and be certain you’d never kill a Democrat or anyone who remotely defined themselves as pro-labor, let alone liberal. Unions were why new cars cost so much, why your electric bill was too high, why in certain fields the incompetent were never fired.  While anecdotes could be cited to support those claims, never mentioned was the role of unions in bringing us the eight-hour workday, minimum wage, employer-provided healthcare, paid vacations, worker safety regulations and a long list of other things taken for granted, things that may never have come about absent collective bargaining as a check and balance on the clout of big employers.

The attitude was embraced by more than a few in the newsroom. Resentment was most evident whenever a new figure was released that was purported to be the hourly rate of pay, including benefits, for an autoworker. I can still hear the squeaky ball bearings of my city editor’s chair as he’d whip around the copydesk to deliver extensive editorial commentary on that subject.

Accuracy of those estimates aside, I’d come to realize that whenever anyone’s income was reported publicly in print—regardless of who they were or what they did—there was a waiting chorus of the incredulous. It was always too much. Perhaps not too much for you, or for me, but certainly for them, for that job. Are you kidding?

A few colleagues who railed about overpaid autoworkers spent their evenings mailing resumes to other newspapers—unionized newspapers—where reporters were guaranteed a minimum rate of pay more than twice the barely livable wage we were paid.

Nationally, union power and public opinion of labor were already in decline. Reagan was in the White House, and a few years earlier he’d fired 12,000 striking air traffic controllers. The action set off a chain of events culminating in the news we’re now seeing in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and elsewhere.

But that didn’t deter Fred from fighting for the local.

One afternoon I was in the union hall conference room, getting Fred’s official response to something or other. This journalistic exercise became rote over time. Summarize the situation in the lede, quote management, quote the union, elaborate, a little history for context, conclusion. I was scribbling whatever it was Fred was saying when suddenly he stopped. Clearly he sensed, not entirely inaccurately, that I was slipping into stenographer mode, not thinking through what he was telling me.

“Listen, you need to understand something,” Fred announced in a rangy, Southern drawl that I’d come to  guess was somewhere out of Arkansas or Texas.

I closed my notebook and put my pencil down.

“Don’t you aspire to a certain standard of living for yourself, for your family? That’s all we’re doing here. That’s all this is about.”

When someone’s talking about something they believe in, it has a certain signature that’s unmistakable. Fred never seemed much of a spin doctor anyway. I could tell he meant it.

In my mind I was contrasting this with the last conversation I’d had with the plant general manager, who’d phoned me at the paper with a request I first interpreted as dry humor: Would I please stop using the term “layoff” to describe the periodic herd thinning of which he was a chief architect. He asked if I could switch to the gentler term of “sendhome,” as in “Today the company issued 147 sendhome notices.” I don’t recall where the conversation went from there. I was polite, but our talk was short.

That day Fred talked about some stuff he didn’t usually get into. He’d been around the plant since the beginning, back in ’56. It was around that time that the union had first persuaded the company to pay half the cost of hospital and surgical coverage for its workers and their families—a benefit that was extraordinary in its day. He’d also seen the union get guarantees against employment discrimination based on race, three years before the rest of the country caught up via the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

His point was that this wasn’t just some zero-sum game played out to see how much each side could get. It was about securing and protecting jobs and income for real people and their families. And, it had a history that was important to acknowledge, one that started with people asserting their rights to some pretty basic things.

Something else happened that summer that changed how I viewed the plant and the people who worked there. The company announced that it had chosen this particular site over several others for a modernization project and a hundred-million-dollar-plus investment. That meant steady, significant work for years, maybe even new jobs. More than 1,000 workers gathered on the grounds outside the plant to hear the announcement.

I’d never seen people look so excited and proud of what they did. Some cheered and hollered. Many of them hugged. Some cried.

I hadn’t thought about Fred or the union or the plant for a long time. On the Web I discovered that the place was still in operation, but just barely, with about a third of the jobs of years past. No trace of Fred, but then he was not a young man in 1985. I suppose one of the old-timers at the paper might know what became of him, but I don’t really want to know.

I prefer to think Fred is still out there, looking after the interests of his union brothers and sisters, and maybe, explaining to some know-it-all kid how you make a quarter-panel out of sheet metal.

Photo provided by Mark Spearman.

More by Mark Spearman

By Norman de Guerre

The psychologist Erik Erikson had some theory about the stages of human development. It’s relevant to Work Stew, but I don’t have time to reacquaint myself with it, which is, I suppose, one of the realities of this phase of my own life that, if memory serves, Erikson referred to as “Industry”: there’s no time to do anything right now. Industry consumes.

I’m about halfway through Industry, splitting 20 to 60 down the middle and in the prime years of my constructive engagement with society. Said another way, I know about half of what actually would be insightful and useful to anyone regarding the topic of “work.” So caveat emptor.

I’ve read with interest the other Work Stew essays and it’s inspiring to read about people who have found their calling and are professionally satisfied. (I call their calling their “calling” because I’m married to an Episcopal priest who found hers; the Episcopalians have lots of special words for things, like, for example, “calling.”) I don’t have a calling yet, but as a closet optimist, I’ve not given up hope. Such is the reader who might find this essay interesting: a person who cares about callings, and wants one, but has yet to find something even approximating it.

Perhaps some context about my current non-calling would frame things, so I’ve sketched out a typical workday (I should acknowledge that while I am about to number many of my good deeds, my wife does her fair share too, like getting our two kids to and from school and a laundry list of other things that sadly, doesn’t include laundry):

• 5:30am – My alarm rings. I get up, make tea for us (lying on the floor and cat-napping through to the kettle’s whistle) and deliver a cup to my wife, with the same words each morning: “Good morning, honey! Here’s your tea!” (The up-lilt in my voice as I rally us for the day indicated by my use of exclamation marks.) I make breakfast for the clan, although I don’t eat any myself. I walk our two elderly, blind, incontinent dogs.
• 7:15am – I leave for the subway.
• 7:45am – I arrive at work where, as a friend once commented apropos of both of us, I get paid to talk to people. These conversations are scheduled back-to-back, typically in half hour increments, and I go from one to the next, talking and jotting down notes in my notebook so I can remember things to talk about with other people, later. I try to remember, when I am deluded into thinking my job is stressful and difficult, that it’s hardly diamond mining in Africa, and I close my eyes and imagine the poor bastards in those Salgado photographs. I don’t want to sell myself short (and I should clarify too that I’m not a counselor)—I manage a P&L, and I am measured on real and objective financial and operating metrics. My job has a scorecard with numbers on it. But we aren’t baling hay here.
• 7:45pm – I leave for the subway. More often than not, I get food en route to the subway and eat dinner on the B or C train.
• 8:15pm – I arrive home. The kids run to the door and jump up into my arms and I hug them and ask about their day. Sometimes I hug my wife and sometimes we just growl at each other, glowering over who is going to walk the dogs. I immediately change into my flannel pajamas, partly because they are comfortable and I need to lose 20 pounds and partly because I have this theory that if I’m in my pajamas, it’s less reasonable to ask me to walk the dogs. I give the kids a bath, I read them a story, and then I play guitar for them as they go to sleep, a regimented song list that at their request runs, in order: The Weight -> Apeman (“I think I’m sophisticated ‘cause I’m living my life like a good homo sapiens…”) -> Love In Vain -> Loving Cup. I try to get in bed before 10pm and read at least one page of something before closing my eyes and almost always immediately falling asleep.

* * * * *

Looking back, I’ve not plotted a deliberate course. After graduating from college, I almost got a Fulbright to The Netherlands, making every cut except the last (arguably, the Committee was wise not to grant me at that age a paid excursion in Amsterdam with no defined responsibilities). So, I took what I could get and became a management consultant. I didn’t particularly enjoy it. I did it for over a decade. Then, I had a surprising and satisfying detour into a field where my skills and passions intersected, but slowly, as the job started leeching the joy from my passion, I left and took a new job, almost wholly for the money. Now, I get up and go to work for the same reason I did when I was 21—because I have to.

A few glorious moments along the way have veered towards something approximating a calling, just enough to taunt me as to how sublime finding one would be. But nothing ever clicked enough to liberate me from notions about work that were firmly implanted in my brain at a very young age and reinforced for many years by many people in ways large and small—and these mental models tend to require pretty strong escape velocities. (By way of example, I was forbidden to become an architect, because my dad was one, and he thought it would end badly for me, and maybe he was right. Go make money! In a similar spirit, my father-in-law’s primary advice to me has been to relay the advice handed down to him by his father: stay on the payroll).

* * * * *

Why do we work? Can something profound and important exist beyond a paycheck and nominal place-in-the-world self-identity? What motivates us, the un-called, to get up every morning and wobble forward without strongly held professional convictions serving as wind in our sails? Can we instead chart a course to spend our precious human life pursuing something of substance and meaning, consistent with our values and disposition, in the service of family and friends and society and ourselves?

With all this in mind, here are six questions I’d suggest as important considerations for people interested in moving from “jobs” to “callings”:

1. What unique qualities do you possess, and what natural vocations flow from them?
2. What is your attitude about generating, spending, and saving money?
3. How important is serving a greater good relative to serving yourself, and how important is it to connect your period of Industry to bettering the world rather than simply your position in it?
4. What serves your soul—the city, or the country? North or south, east or west? Or, does it matter?
5. Can you promote yourself in a rigorous and goal-oriented post-social-media world manner; and if not, is it out of principle, disposition, or insecurity? We live in the Age of Ego and like it or not, there is a high correlation between self-aggrandizement and exterior accomplishment—but probably never at the expense of interior accomplishment;
6. How selfish do you want to be when considering #1-5 in the context of sharing a life with others? (For example, I share my life with a strong, accomplished wife and two bright and energetic kids. Our needs are commingled. I also feel a strong obligation towards new needs that might emerge over time as our parents age).

Like many other things, answers to complex existential questions don’t snap neatly and quickly into place, in Gladwellian ‘blinks’. They require reflection and mature consideration, suspension of prejudgment, and the discipline to allow the questions to percolate. I admire greatly people who create the personal space to ask these types of questions and even more so, those who summon the courage to restructure their life around the answers.

By Samantha Cole

People who graduated from my high school were never supposed to need a tool belt for work. At the small private girls’ school in a wealthy Connecticut town, there were no vocational courses offered. Freshman year, my best friend and I signed up to take wood shop at the affiliated boys’ school, but the course was cancelled once it was clear that we two girls were the only ones who had shown any interest. Parents sent their kids to this expensive and exclusive prep school so they’d have an advantage getting into the very “best” colleges. When I attended in the mid-’80s, the parking lot was full of European imports with college stickers in the back windshields. The more Ivy League institutions you could lay claim to, the more cachet your BMW had. These were not people who built things. These were people who commissioned things to be built for them.

I was always the kid who wanted to know how things worked and why they were put together the way they were. At eight-years-old I could take my bike apart and put it back together. I took the doorknob from the door to my parents’ master bathroom and installed it on my bedroom door, so I could have a lock. Then, to my parents’ dismay, I drilled a pinhole in the door so I could peek out at who was coming up the stairs. The plan would have worked brilliantly except that if the light was out in the hallway and my eyeball was not in front of the peephole you could see my light through the hole—exposing my unauthorized door-modification.

The summer after I graduated from high school, I got a job through a friend’s dad working “hospitality” backstage at an outdoor music festival. At the time, the venue had no running water or electricity, so in order to keep the artists happy (and well supplied with cold beer) we hospitality folks spent an inordinate amount of time schlepping ice in 50-pound bags across muddy fields to the trailer dressing rooms. This was my first experience doing physical labor and I loved it. I loved the experience of knowing that my body would perform when asked to; I loved the admiring and bemused stares of people watching me carry the ice; I even kind of liked the cold water running down my back as respite from the sweaty, grimy August heat. 

Of course, this was not a “real” job. I went to one of those prestigious colleges, and spent summers cycling through a series of Dilbert-esque office jobs. I came to understand that this is what “work” was supposed to be. Work meant learning to type, answer the phone, write boring memos, read boring memos, ignore the bigger picture. Work meant wearing pantyhose in an overly air-conditioned office waiting for the evenings or weekends to roll around. I thought I was growing up. Growing up was turning out to be pretty stifling.

I graduated from college with an English/Chinese studies major, without a clear plan for what to do next. It didn’t feel to me like I had a lot of skills. But I did have two and a half years of college Mandarin on my resume, so I applied for jobs in Taiwan and mainland China. I took the first job I was offered—to teach English in southern Taiwan. I signed a two-year contract and left the day after Thanksgiving 1994. And all of a sudden, I was not spending all day behind a desk feeling like a business impostor. Being a teacher impersonator was much more fun.

In the classroom, no one has any choice but to come out of their shell. One of my classes—the one that eventually became my favorite—was comprised of four-year-olds who were just starting school. Some of them seemed so young I was afraid that they maybe weren’t completely potty trained. Asking little kids if they have to go to the bathroom when they grab their crotches and look uncertain definitely brought me to an understanding of how little decorum I could live with. And with kids who have no common language, if you want to make a “no picking your nose” classroom rule, you need to demonstrate. If you are going to demonstrate a nose pick in front of a whole class of kids, there is no room for inhibitions.

If my pupils thought I was strange, so did everyone else in Taiwan. I found out really quickly that many Chinese people have no compunction about staring at anyone or anything that sparks curiosity. In the United States, undisguised staring at someone can be construed as an act of aggression. But the Chinese have no such reticence.  I was a Caucasian woman, nearly six feet tall, which made me a freak. And so, the Taiwanese stared at me. They stared at me while I was in the grocery store, while I rode a motorcycle through the scooter-crowded street, while I stood in line at the post office, everywhere. If they were not staring, they yelled “Hello. How are you?” with absolutely no interest in being answered in English. Mostly, they just wanted to underscore from across the street or from a passing car that they had seen me, noticed my strangeness, and wanted me to notice that they had noticed.

At first this was annoying. But I also began to find it liberating. If I was the strangest thing that anyone had ever seen and I was just going about my normal everyday business, then I had a little bit of license to make an ass of myself too. So if I wanted directions to the airport I mimicked an airplane. If I wanted to know where the public pool was, I mimed swimming. I mixed up the words for honeybee and honey. Once, instead of ordering a cup of bubble tea from a street vendor, I inadvertently ordered 100. Realizing my mistake, I then had to stop the production line. I sheepishly took ten or so teas back to the school and handed them out to my fellow teachers, feeling both stupid and then magnanimous when everyone was psyched to get an unsolicited drink.

When my contract was up I spent about six months backpacking my way home, where I resumed my string of office jobs that just weren’t quite the right fit. I tried my hand at coordinating slip reservations at a yachting center, bookkeeping at a seafood importer, and managing a theatre company—each from the supposed luxury of an office with computers and phones and all-you-can-drink coffee. 

Then I hired someone to put a bathroom on the second floor of my 1929 bungalow. I had fulfilled the expectations of my expensive education: I had become the graduate who hired someone to build me something. But I didn’t want to go to the office when the roof got popped off my house and the dormer went in. I rushed home every day to see the progress as pipes were routed surreptitiously through a closet and into the newly framed space. The plumbing, the electrical, the tile all went in and I wanted to know how.  Just like I wanted to know how that doorknob came apart when I was eight.

One day when the new bathroom was nearly finished, with the knowledge that the funding for my job as an arts administrator was drying up, I asked the contractor who had built the bathroom if he needed an apprentice. “I’m strong, I’m smart, and I really want to learn this kind of work,” I told him. When he got done being surprised that a client wanted to become an employee, he set about teaching me the trade. 

I embraced the inner laborer I had discovered those years before on a festival field. I shrugged off the curious and incredulous stares on the job site just as I had learned to do in Taiwan. I put on a tool belt and filled it with tools that I learned to use while quieting the disapproving voices in my head that reminded me that I was supposed to want a corner office with a commanding view of the city. Instead I learned a skill that allowed me to build not just walls and furniture, but my own business in which I set the hours, decide the projects, work more when I want and less when I can. It’s not glamorous; I get dirty and dusty and hot. Sometimes old houses have settled and nothing is level and doors will not close. Clients give me vague instructions, like “Can you build me something that’s not too casual?” or they change their minds about the color of tile after it has been installed. But at the end of a day I can see the tangible results.  Sometimes my shoulders ache and I don’t like what I have built, but I now have the confidence to know that I can fix it tomorrow. At the end of a project, I know what I have accomplished and then I look forward to a new venture. No two days and no two projects are ever exactly the same.  The differences were what I was looking for when I left the office behind.

Photo provided by Samantha Cole.