Netflix series, Working, features Barack Obama on American jobs

The formerAmerican president follows in Studs Terkel tradition as he talks to ordinary workers about what makes a good job good.

Barack Obama walks the aisles in his new series. Picture: Netflix

It’s a brilliant idea – dispatch the former leader of the free world to interrogate ordinary people in technology, hospitality and home care about their jobs. Even better, position the whole exercise in the context of one of the great 20th century books about the meaning of work.

This linking of Barack Obama – a household name – with Studs Terkel – a cult figure to some but unknown to many – is likely to prove irresistible for millions around the world when Netflix launches its four-part documentary from May 17.

Working: What We Do All Day is a production of Higher Ground, the company set up by Michelle and Barack Obama in 2018 and which has a multimillion-dollar, multi-year deal with the streaming service to develop content.

The series of 45-minute long shows is narrated by the former president who also wanders the corridors and aisles of America chatting to people at all levels of the service sector.

Obama credits his youthful reading of Terkel’s ­famous book, Working, published in 1974, as the genesis of the documentary series and it will be interesting to see how much the new draws on the old in terms of tone and the narrator’s attitude to paid work and capitalism.

Terkel, who died in 2008 at the age of 96, was a colossal figure in the analysis and depiction of 20th century work and left behind an extraordinary archive of books and radio recordings. Lauded as the man who provided a voice to workers in post-World War 11 America, Terkel has also been criticised for seeing work through the lens of his left-wing politics. Was he a communist? Did it matter?

The FBI kept a file on him for more than four decades, a file that is available on the internet, and he was widely seen as applying a Marxist interpretation to the nature of work. His stance on civil rights and immigration contributed to an image that led to him being blacklisted in the McCarthy era,

The Obama show, according to Netflix publicity, asks the big questions: What brings you joy in work? What gives you purpose? In short, what makes a good job good?

The series lands in a receptive zeitgeist. Ever since Covid-19 upended so many of the assumptions about management, productivity and worker discipline, our society has been hungry for debates about jobs – the how, the what, the where but also, more than ever, the why. In the Netflix trailer released last week ahead of the Working launch, Obama says: “We’re all part of something larger than any single one of us, and our work is one of the forces that connects us.”

Now that’s the sort of comment that would not have got a guernsey a decade or so ago, in an era that encouraged individualism and competition. Back then there was little thought of how a person’s paid employment was part of a bigger, human story.

Work as connective tissue? Really?

So much has changed in attitudes to paid work since that Wolf of Wall Street world – and not just because the pandemic proved how possible it is for many people to work flexibly and retain some semblance of a domestic life. Demographic shifts which have hollowed out workers of a certain age in some countries and radical technological development that has transformed the way we work have also helped prompt a discussion about humans and their products. The psychology of workers, the philosophical issues around human purpose, the questions of whether we can draw meaning as well as money from our jobs are now part of the management menu. In a tight labour market like Australia’s, some workers now have real power – not necessarily to achieve a pay rise, but to push their bosses about how they are seen within their organisation, for example. Companies are forced to respond in their effort to attract and retain staff and are increasingly expected to use a new language around purpose and commitment and the dignity of the employee.

It will be interesting to see how much of that language emerges in the Obama documentary. Will we be invited to examine the big philosophical questions, or will we instead be offered gritty, interesting first-person accounts about their work from people at the coal face. One or other, or both, would be interesting because an activity, whether paid or unpaid, can be both pedestrian and existential, often at the same time. Whatever note it strikes, the Netflix show will offer something which Terkel would have backed – the documentation of the experience of work. Trying to understand the detail of a worker’s day was his focus for decades.

At the time of Terkel’s death in 2008, Edward Rothstein wrote in The New York Times of the broadcaster’s long-running (1952-1997) Chicago-based radio show: “The voice is unforgettable, as if each phrase scraped the ear with a scoopful of gravel. What remains in the memory too is the earnestness that could turn both fervent and sentimental … He seemed to be without pretence and compassionate but not terribly revealing or comforting.”

Rothstein wrote that Terkel’s commitment to oral history – on air and through more than a dozen books, including the 1974 Working – had influenced many others, including the renowned US documentary maker Ken Burns.

Rothstein is both intrigued and critical of Terkel’s approach – revealed by the introduction to the 600-page Working: “This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence to the spirit as well as to the body.” Says Rothstein: “This vision of work … is an obvious translation of a traditional Marxist view of the alienation of labour, the sense of disassociation that comes from the capitalist workplace … All this is saying, perhaps, is that Mr Terkel was a man of the political left, something of which he made no secret.

“The difficulty is for readers who presume they are being presented history without perspective, just a ­series of oral histories. But its perspective actually seems to guide its strategy, so one is no longer sure what is being omitted and how much is being fully seen. No part of history or human experience should be ignored, but all of it needs to be placed in a larger context.”

In an essay in the Humanities journal in 2015, Peter Tonguette records the comments of another great broadcaster, Ira Glass, the host of This American Life: “Oral histories were around before Studs started doing them but he pretty much redefined them and did them so amazingly well that anybody who comes after can’t help but be influenced.”

Says Tonguette: “Alex Kotlowitz, acclaimed author of There Are No Children Here, was a friend, and he, too, sees Terkel’s impact as stretching far and wide. ‘You look at (Haruki) Murakami, the Japanese novelist, who wrote a book called Underground, which was a collection of kind of oral histories about the gas attacks in Tokyo, and he gives a nod to Studs at the very beginning of that book,’ Kotlowitz said, adding that Terkel ‘created this genre’.”

Tonguette makes another point about Terkel’s view of work, one which some have labelled romantic: “In an interview with Arthur Miller … one comment by Terkel says more about Terkel than any comment by Miller says about Miller.

“During the otherwise bleak years of the 1930s, Terkel says, there was nonetheless ‘a camaraderie: the passing of a cigarette butt to another, a streetcar transfer changing hands, a morning newspaper handed over to the next guy’.”

That comment might resonate with Obama’s view that work is about something beyond the individual. The former president is a Terkel fan, but this is what Terklel said about Barack in 2008: “I’m very excited by the idea of a black guy in the White House, that’s very exciting. I just wish he was more progressive! … Obama can’t be a moderate! Obama, he has got to be pushed!”

History makes its own determination on that point, but this series shows that the Obamas are keen to do more in their post-White House life than just make money (which they both appear to be doing well enough).

Working is a serious topic for streaming audiences, but is not the Obamas’ first foray into the subject. In 2019, they produced a doco called American Factory – again a piece that resonated with the zeitgeist.

It told the complex story of a Chinese billionaire who opened a new factory in an abandoned General Motors auto building. The promise was jobs for 2000 Americans but the high hopes were dented by the clash of management cultures that emerged.

Still available on Netflix, American Factory is an important record of work and its meaning in the 21st century.