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While each adaptation stands on its own merit, based on the strength of the individual artists’ interpretation, in the end, after reading all 28 adaptations, one cannot help but wonder what is Terkel’s point in Working?  What is the author trying to tell us by presenting these seemingly random interviews together in one book?

Working includes several dissertations’ worth of research, but Terkel’s analysis of these conversations is lacking.  Besides the Introduction, the author remains frustratingly silent regarding any conclusions he may have drawn from these oral histories.  As Marshall Berman wrote, “one of the difficulties with this book is that Terkel loads us down with so much exciting and problematic material, but himself does hardly anything to help us assimilate and integrate it all … He is like some sort of magician or genie, bringing an incredible abundance of marvelous beings before our eyes, yet as soon as we reach out to grasp at any one, he whisks it away from us and replaces it with another and another, in dizzying and exhausting succession.  What the book needs is a more active intelligence, giving some sort of structure and coherence to the marvelous material.”

Yet careful readers will pick up on certain recurring ideas.  One persistent theme that many of Terkel’s subjects talk about is the power struggle between labor and management.  It’s easy to want to dismiss this as an issue of the past and assume that the world we live in today is vastly different.  After all, labor unions and workers advocacy groups have been so disempowered and weakened in favor of the endless pursuit of corporate profits that we rarely hear about labor disputes in this country any more.  But, were Terkel around today to conduct follow-up interviews, he would likely find similar results.

The general importance of job satisfaction, and its inverse relationship to the drive for increased productivity, is another major theme that runs throughout these oral accounts.  According to a study cited on the New York Times website in 2004, “in a recent two-and-a-half year period, corporate profits surged 87 percent, while wages rose just 4.5 percent.  Not surprisingly a study last fall by the Conference Board found that less than 49 percent of workers were satisfied with their jobs, down from 59 percent in 1995.”  As the foreword to the revised version states, “The oral histories in Working are wistful dispatches from a distant era … when management practices and computers were just beginning to transform the American workplace.  In the last 30 years, productivity has soared but job satisfaction has plummeted.  It is hard to read Working without wondering what has gone wrong.”

One thing is clear; 35 years after its initial publication, Terkel’s book still resonates, and the issues raised still apply directly to the current generation of American workers.

In the end, it would be wrong to conclude that Working is merely a random collection.  Working remains an important piece of literature because it helps us to understand better what work is and how it enables society to function.  The book also offers honest and candid insight into the role that an individual’s job plays in constructing his overall identity, and emphasizes the critical importance of feeling respected for the work that one does.  Marshall Berman wrote that “(Terkel) uses the discussion of work to get at so much of what is deepest and most intimate in so many people’s lives, to understand work as Freud understood it, as the individual’s firmest connection with reality.”  But Terkel himself put it best.  In the Introduction, Terkel simply defined work as “a search, sometimes successful, sometimes not, for daily meaning as well as daily bread.”

By interpreting many of the finest pieces from Terkel’s book into this new format, the artists involved have helped reintroduce Working to a new generation, and with the previously mentioned rise in pressures to increase productivity coupled with the decreasing attention spans brought on by mass media saturation, the choice of comics as the medium for adaptation seems somehow perfect.  Working is undeniably dense, and it will take several hours to digest all of the adaptations included in this collection, yet, whether one reads it straight through or periodically grabs it off the shelf and reads one or two pieces at a time, the essence of Terkel’s original vision is preserved.  Stud’s Terkel’s Working: A Graphic Adaptation is a rich, deeply moving collection and even the weaker entries are beautiful and thought-provoking in their own way by virtue of Terkel’s writing alone.  If nothing else, the book will heighten awareness and deepen appreciation for the sometimes invisible people (to borrow a phrase from Eisner) whose hard work greases the wheels of commerce and culture in this great country of ours, and for that reason alone, it is worth reading.

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