Sheila steps into a wood paneled room and addresses a ring of home care workers in navy blue scrubs. Soft light shines through the curtains as they begin with a prayer: “Father God, as we go through this meeting, open our minds, open our ears, that we may hear, that we may see. Amen.” The assistants take turns introducing themselves and giving brief sketches of their work. Sheila is their manager. They are employed by At Home Care, LLC, a southeast Mississippi company, and they speak to a camera – to a documentary crew filming their meeting for a miniseries called “Working: What We Do All Day.” Some describe the connection they have with the people whose bedpans they change, whose medications they administer. One, Caroline, with her hair combed back with speckled gray, says she probably knows the clients she cares for better than their own children, then asks Sheila, “Do you have any questions for me? Any comments for me?”
This innocent question opens a floodgate of discontent that surprises both Sheila and the viewer. There are questions about time tracking and payment tracking systems. An assistant named Amanda says a customer had her drive 10 miles to pick up a pizza: “Is the GPS picking up all of that?” No, Sheila says sympathetically, assistants don’t get paid for extra driving. “It doesn’t seem right,” she admits, “because you burn your gas.” None of this releases the pressure in the chamber; if anything, it just keeps building. “How should we live and survive?” a woman asks. “We have children to take care of, houses to take care of.” Caroline notes that she has been with the company for almost three years without seeing a raise. Sheila stares down, as if closing her emotional shutters.
The scene is documentary gold. It requires no commentary, no interviews. It’s a simple, powerful illustration of an American workshop, boiling like a pot of tomato sauce, ready to spew hot streams of grievances at anyone who stirs it. We sympathize with the workers. We sympathize with Sheila, who seems caught in a crossfire and doing her best. We feel a justified anger at the one who could be to blame for all this dissatisfaction. But who is that exactly? This is one of the many big questions that “Works” may not have enough time to answer.
“Working” is a limited Netflix series hosted by Barack Obama and produced in part by Higher Ground, the production company he and Michelle Obama founded. In a voiceover, the former president tells us that the production was inspired by Studs Terkel’s seminal 1974 oral history, “Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do,” a hearty book that thoughts and stories of a large number of Americans, juxtaposing their words democratically. The show’s four episodes, which became available last month, aim for something similar, spending time with employees at all levels of the three companies it focuses on — letting viewers viscerally compare, say, the lives of a housekeeper in Manhattan. and the CEO of the conglomerate that owns the hotel where she works. Clearly money has been spent on this program. The cameras are slick, the angles creative, the songs with expensive licenses. This is perhaps the most important value of the production: it’s shockingly rare to see the daily life of working-class people so clearly and honestly on TV, let alone on such a budget.
In that context, it feels almost as subversive and revealing as Terkel’s book to see Sheila’s meeting spiral out of control. The problem arises when the show tries to explain what specifically went wrong to make that outburst possible. No matter how close you try to stay with the workers, the series can’t resist the intermittent voiceovers in which Obama delivers industrial amounts of information over flashy archive footage of domestic workers or the movie “Wall Street” or the economist Milton Friedman. The scripts touch on a variety of systemic forces, from the workers left out of the New Deal to the macroeconomics of middle class decline.
The fact that the show has to go all the way back to the New Deal era underscores an important problem: America’s perception of its own workplaces is perhaps astonishingly outdated, steeped in denial about how profoundly things have changed. The series wants working people to sit around, as Terkel did, to understand their hopes and dreams and contradictions. But it also wants to make an argument about what happened to American workers, catching the viewer up to date on decades of complex change – all presented by a politician who, you notice, happened to be in charge of the country for a important part of the time spent exploring.
Have politicians participated in all that denial? This issue is not addressed, but the series does touch on the idea that popular media has long neglected the workplace. Television, Obama argued at one point, used to be full of images of working and middle-class people and their jobs, for example on Norman Lear shows like “Good Times” or “All in the Family.” After the Reagan era, however, popular shows tended to follow luxury professionals, or to be more like “Friends” or “Seinfeld,” which depicted people living comfortably despite a vague or fanciful job. The country’s jobs have shifted from industrial to service work, but even that seismic change — a workforce now embodied by nurses, waiters, store clerks, delivery drivers — is rarely reflected in the stories we consume. Nor are developments such as the erosion of job security, the rise of erratic schedules, the invasive surveillance of the workplace – changes that marked Obama’s own era in the White House.
“Stupidity in ‘respectable’ neighborhoods is not a new phenomenon,” Terkel writes in his book. He gives the example of Henry Mayhew, whose 19th-century reports of working people in London “amazed and horrified readers of The Morning Chronicle”. The writer Barbara Ehrenreich later cataloged how journalists and scientists “discovered” poverty in the 1960s, after the breathless enthusiasm of the post-war economy had cooled. (“We seem to have suddenly awakened,” wrote the critic Dwight Macdonald in a New Yorker review of a book on the subject, “to the fact that mass poverty continues.”) It is easy to feel something similar in the audiences for a documentary like “Working” — a sudden, belated understanding of the indignities that stalk even the most isolated professionals, and a growing sense of the workplace as a place of urgent, high-stakes conflict.
In the latest episode, Obama suggests polarization is his main concern, a fear of the problems that will arise if we can’t pay people enough to find dignity in their jobs. Terkel’s own animating concerns were more shockingly radical and succinct: he began his book by admonishing that since it was about work, it was “naturally about violence—of mind as well as body.” Obama is not quite there yet. His ‘Working’ aims to show us what American jobs look like today, and raise awareness of the possibility that we have too long underestimated their profound, dignity-robbing, politically consistent transformation. The series would require hours of expository editing to make up for all that lost time; if there’s anything that makes it clear, it’s that the problem is much bigger and more urgent than a few hours of television can try to capture.
Audio produced by Kate Winslett.
Opening illustration: source photos from Netflix
