The Book That Keeps Growing New Forewords

Working already contains a review of itself. Adam Cohen's foreword, written in 2001 for a reissue, does exactly what this space is supposed to do: measures the 1970s testimony against the intervening decades, notes what held and what didn't, cites "The New Ruthless Economy," quotes a Conference Board satisfaction survey, and signs off with appropriate gravity. It is, in miniature, a hindsight review of Working from a quarter-century closer to its subjects than I am. Which means this review is not the first layer of sediment on this book. It's the third. Terkel's interviews sit at the bottom, Cohen's 2001 assessment sits on top of them, and now there's this, looking down through both.

That structure matters more than any single prediction the book made or missed, because Working was never in the prediction business. Terkel didn't ask his three-hundred-odd subjects to imagine the future. He asked them what they did all day and how they felt about it, and the closest thing to prophecy in the whole book is incidental — Ralph Helstein, packinghouse-union president emeritus, telling Terkel in the introduction that "learning is work, caring for children is work, community action is work," and that a cybernetic economy has "no excuse for mules any more." That sentence could be dropped into Four Futures or Fully Automated Luxury Communism without anyone noticing the seam. But Helstein isn't forecasting. He's diagnosing what the men and women in the book already knew about themselves, which is the harder and stranger thing: Phil Stallings the spot-welder saying "I'm a machine," the bank teller saying "I'm caged," the receptionist saying "a monkey can do what I do." Terkel counts up the self-descriptions in his introduction like a man cataloguing a wound. None of these people had touched a large language model. They were describing themselves in the vocabulary of automation before automation had come for their jobs, because the feeling arrived first and the machines were just the metaphor everyone reached for.

The metaphor has since gone literal, and not in the direction anyone in these pages expected. The steelworker Mike LeFevre imagines the choice as violence — "who you gonna sock? You can't sock General Motors" — or, in the other current running through the book, as leisure: a twenty-hour week, time enough to know his kids. Nobody imagined the actual sequence, which is that the labor scraped from transcripts exactly like these — the switchboard operator's ad-libs, the waitress's choreography, the barber's diplomacy — would become training material for systems built to reproduce the judgment those workers felt they'd been reduced beneath. Terkel's subjects called themselves robots to name their humiliation. Their words are now, plausibly, somewhere in a dataset teaching an actual machine to sound like a person. The irony isn't that the book got the destination wrong. It's that it never claimed a destination, and got outflanked by one anyway.

What's left, cross-shelved against Bastani and Frase and the automation theorists who came after, is Working's oddest credential: it isn't wrong about anything, because it isn't arguing. It's deposition. Cohen's foreword already tried to make it prophetic and had to import a decade of separate statistics to do it. I'd need the next twenty-five years of statistics to update his update. The book itself just sits there, un-argued, refusing to be either right or wrong — which is a harder thing to shelve than prescience, and a harder thing to outgrow.

What happens to a record of discontent once the discontent it recorded has been repurposed as the raw material for its own replacement?