Ten Thousand Working Days [Paperback]

Robert Schrank is a Project Specialist at the Ford Foundation, and he holds a master's and doctorate in the sociology of work. He serves as consultant to the New York City Mayor's Productivity Council, the National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. Department of Labor, other governmental bodies, and universities. So another academic specialist has written another book about the values and goalsor the lack of them, or their decline, or whateverof working stiffs, about which he knows from nothing, right?

Wrong. This particular academic specialist didn't get to college until he was over forty, and earned (the right word for a working man) his doctorate when he was in his fifties. For more than forty yearsten thousand working daysfrom the age of fourteen on, he has held down an astonishing variety of jobs that cover both a wide occupational range and just about every level, from the top to the bottom, in the organizational scheme of things. He has been a plumber, a city commissioner, a plant manager and engineer, an auto mechanic, an antipoverty program bureaucrat, a machinist, a union official, a coal miner, a foundation professional, a farmhand. Not in that order, but the point is that the experiences, commingling in the memory, all have an equal value in human terms. Always onward-and-upward, the American-Dream-come-true, is exactly not the point.

Robert Schrank writes about each of these jobs in a personal, chronological, specific, narrative way, but always from a perspective that has been enlarged by the scope of his professional training and and commitments. His memories give his experiences uniqueness. His sociological insights lend them a kind of universality.

But this author is his own best advocate: I was moved to write this book as a result of listening to and reading about what behavioral scientists, academics, and other literati had perceived at places of work. I felt thatlÓÎ