America Needs to Remember Workers’ Role By Studs Terkel

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.aflcio.org/mediacenter/speakout/studs_terkel.cfm

By Studs Terkel


Renowned for his compilations of oral interviews with famous and mostly not-so-famous Americans, Studs Terkel has talked with thousands of people about their experiences on the job, serving their country in World War II, their perceptions of race and most recently, the challenges of growing old and facing death.

Born Louis Terkel, he grew up in the 1920s and 1930s in an environment filled with workers, union organizers and other progressives who gathered in the lobby of his parents’ Chicago rooming house. Starting his career as an actor, disc jockey and radio and television personality, Terkel ultimately turned to documenting oral interviews in a series of books. In Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, Terkel elicited first-hand experiences of workers as varied as bus driver and strip miner, policeman and film critic. Blacklisted in the 1950s by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Terkel went on to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1985 and a National Humanities Medal from President Bill Clinton in 1997.

Terkel, who has been called a “guerilla journalist” and a man “whose name is synonymous with Labor Day,” sprinkles his conversation with references to the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes and American revolutionary Thomas Paine—yet has the unique ability to engage people in a way that draws forth the hopes, dreams and heartfelt experiences of everyday Americans.

The following is an excerpt from an AFL-CIO interview with Terkel in July 2005.

“The thing that’s so ironic, is we are stuck with what I call national Alzheimer’s disease. The general American public, through no fault of its own, but through the media—which is laughingly called, absurdly called, obscenely called—liberal media, which is a joke, of course. But the point is that because of that, day after day after day, putting down of labor organizations, or not mentioning them led to the children not knowing a thing about it.

How did the eight-hour day come into being? It began in Chicago and four guys got hanged for it—the Haymarket affair in 1886. What were they fighting for? The eight-hour day.

FULL article at link.