Yes, he says, but “I worry about the next generation.” “Are you at peace now?” Randi asks the former President. They are comfortable enough to pose candid questions of their own. Equally at ease touring the Pierre and delivering lunch to starstruck office workers, listening to Luke improvise music in his basement and grocery shopping with Randi, he-like Terkel-gets subjects to talk candidly about their experiences. And Obama is a more active participant in the series than you might expect. Suh is wise to take us beyond their daily grinds and into their homes and the family lives that are shaped, for better or worse, by their work. The people Working follows are observant and reflective they articulate eloquent visions for bridging the gap between the jobs they have now and what would ultimately make them happy. “When you have it all,” Obama asks, “what responsibility do you have to other people?” The knowledge workers in “Dream Jobs”-a robotics engineer at Aurora, a lobbyist for At Home Care, the Pierre’s general manager-talk about wanting to “find meaning” through their careers. An experimental musician when he’s off the clock, Luke likes his job, but around the dinner table with his parents, the conversation turns to why he’s having a tougher time than they did achieving such American dream milestones as buying his first home. In “The Middle,” which follows a switchboard operator at the Pierre, an At Home Care supervisor, an hourly employee at self-driving vehicle tech company Aurora Innovation, Obama chronicles the shrinking of the middle class. We learn about how FDR’s New Deal helped organized labor-and also how those reforms rarely extended to farm and domestic workers, a largely nonwhite cohort. Obama’s narration situates the subjects of each episode within a broader economic and sociopolitical context. It probably isn’t a coincidence that they are all women of color and mothers.Įlba Guzmán, right, with a co-worker, in Working: What We Do All Day Working’s subjects represent the service sector a generation later: a newly hired home health aide for At Home Care Mississippi, a longtime housekeeper at the Pierre hotel in Manhattan, and an Uber Eats driver with a list of side hustles and dreams of making it as a makeup artist. Published in 2001, the book chronicles Ehrenreich’s grueling experiences working undercover as a diner waitress, a house cleaner, and at Walmart-jobs that test her patience and punish her body but do not pay her bills. The premiere, “Service Jobs,” is reminiscent of a more recent labor classic: the late author and activist Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. It’s all pretty illuminating-until the bizarre finale, whose sunny portrait of the C-suite comes off as anything but representative. Obama, an executive producer as well as the show’s narrator and a sporadic presence on screen, frames these stories within the context of an American economy that has undergone drastic changes since Terkel’s time. Each episode profiles three workers at the same level of the contemporary workforce, scaling the pyramid of wealth and power from service jobs to middle-class office work to “dream jobs” before reaching the bosses. An admirer of Terkel’s book since college, Barack Obama set out to update the project with Working: What We Do All Day, a 4-part documentary that arrives on Netflix May 17.
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