Read Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do for Free Online

better, my wife better. Some kid invited me to go on a college campus. On a Saturday. It was summertime. Hell, if I have a choice of taking my wife and kids to a picnic or going to a college campus, it’s gonna be the picnic. But if I worked a twenty-hour week, I could go do both. Don’t you think with that extra twenty hours people could really expand? Who’s to say? There are some people in factories just by force of circumstance. I’m just like the colored people. Potential Einsteins don’t have to be white. They could be in cotton fields, they could be in factories.
    The twenty-hour week is a possibility today. The intellectuals, they always say there are potential Lord Byrons, Walt Whitmans, Roosevelts, Picassos working in construction or steel mills or factories. But I don’t think they believe it. I think what they’re afraid of is the potential Hitlers and Stalins that are there too. The people in power fear the leisure man. Not just the United States. Russia’s the same way.
    What do you think would happen in this country if, for one year, they experimented and gave everybody a twenty-hour week? How do they know that the guy who digs Wallace today doesn’t try to resurrect Hitler tomorrow? Or the guy who is mildly disturbed at pollution doesn’t decide to go to General Motors and shit on the guy’s desk? You can become a fanatic if you had the time. The whole thing is time. That is, I think, one reason rich kids tend to be fanatic about politics: they have time. Time, that’s the important thing.
    It isn’t that the average working guy is dumb. He’s tired, that’s all. I picked up a book on chess one time. That thing laid in the drawer for two or three weeks, you’re too tired. During the weekends you want to take your kids out. You don’t want to sit there and the kid comes up: “Daddy, can I go to the park?” You got your nose in a book? Forget it.
    I know a guy fifty-seven years old. Know what he tells me? “Mike, I’m old and tired all the time.” The first thing happens at work: when the arms start moving, the brain stops. I punch in about ten minutes to seven in the morning. I say hello to a couple of guys I like, I kid around with them. One guy says good morning to you and you say good morning. To another guy you say fuck you. The guy you say fuck you to is your friend.
    I put on my hard hat, change into my safety shoes, put on my safety glasses, go to the bonderizer. It’s the thing I work on. They rake the metal, they wash it, they dip it in a paint solution, and we take it off. Put it on, take it off, put it on, take it off, put it on, take it off . . .
    I say hello to everybody but my boss. At seven it starts. My arms get tired about the first half-hour. After that, they don’t get tired any more until maybe the last half-hour at the end of the day. I work from seven to three thirty. My arms are tired at seven thirty and they’re tired at three o‘clock. I hope to God I never get broke in, because I always want my arms to be tired at seven thirty and three o’clock. (Laughs.) ’Cause that’s when I know that there’s a beginning and there’s an end. That I’m not brainwashed. In between, I don’t even try to think.
    If I were to put you in front of a dock and I pulled up a skid in front of you with fifty hundred-pound sacks of potatoes and there are fifty more skids just like it, and this is what you’re gonna do all day, what would you think about—potatoes? Unless a guy’s a nut, he never thinks about work or talks about it. Maybe about baseball or about getting drunk the other night or he got laid or he didn’t get laid. I’d say one out of a hundred will actually get excited about work.
    Why is it that the communists always say they’re for the workingman, and as soon as they set up a country, you got guys singing to tractors? They’re singing about how they love the factory. That’s where I couldn’t buy communism. It’s the intellectuals’ utopia, not mine.