Review of Robert Bruno, What Work Is, 2024

Bruno Robert, What work is. Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2024. ix + 220 pp. (pbk).

Published in Journal of Industrial Relations, online first

Robert Bruno is professor of labour and employment at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and director of the labor education program in that university. This book is a summation of over 25 years of teaching leaders and members of the labour movement in his state. Given the book’s origins, “work” here has a restricted meaning. It refers specifically to the labour carried out for a wage under the authority of managers and business owners, where the wage is the single most important source of income. The book does not consider the work performed by people in positions of power, or professional work, or the new forms of income-earning activities that are available in contemporary labour markets (typically gig work). Care and volunteer work are mentioned only in passing as important forms of work, which are however outside the purview of the book. Similarly, the book’s outlook is restricted to the American working class. There is no consideration of the role of migrant work in modern economies, or of the ties, dependencies and power asymmetries that connect workers across borders in global value-chains. The book’s purpose is to articulate the multidimensional meaning of work as it is experienced by the contemporary working-class in the United States. Its fundamental goal is to respond to what it clearly defines as a structural contradiction of the modern economy: namely, that the productive efforts of the workingclass are the direct cause for the material reproduction of society, and yet the voices of those who ensure this social reproduction are consistently silenced, and the voices that dominate public discourse are of those who have the power and privilege to set up the rules under which work is performed and in the end who decide “what work is”.

In seeking to render visible the interests and concerns of the American working class, the book in fact combines a plurality of voices. An apt subtitle could well be “symphony for the working class”, or indeed “a symphony of the working class”. The primary voices are those of Bruno, the teacher, and his students. Bruno transcribes and expands upon class discussions sparked by an original essay assignment: to define “what work is” in no more than six words. The book’s main substance is thus the author’s discussion, informed by a large body of scholarly literature, of a wide selection from the thousands of student responses gathered over his career, using this simple question to explore the key dimensions of the work experience. Other important voices are those of Bruno’s parents. The scholarly analyses of student reflections are complemented by biographical and autobiographical passages where the multifaceted dimensions of working-class labour are captured from an intimate perspective. To these direct expressions of work experience are added several external voices. Bruno often cites American poets who also wrote about working life. The book’s title is borrowed from a prize-winning collection by former car factory worker Phillip Levine. And the analyses of student answers are framed by the classical theories of work from the Western tradition, for instance Arendt or Locke, as well as important sociological inquiries, such as Rose Hackman’s Emotional Labor or Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s Deaths of Despair. Amongst those scholarly references, Marx in particular is particularly prominent, as Bruno finds his seminal analysis of capitalist exploitation and the domination of labour in capitalist regimes consistently preempted and confirmed by the statements of his student workers.

The polyphonic nature of the book reflects the different aims it sets out to achieve. It is a reflective, retrospective contemplation of the many lessons learnt and dispensed over a long career of teaching and writing about work. It is also a homage to parents whose major goal in dedicating their life to work was simply to care for their children. Beyond the personal, the book wants to be a celebration of work in the American popular conversation. It seeks to performatively elevate work as a topic to be celebrated in everyday culture. It is also an original, experience-based vindication of large bodies of philosophical and sociological studies of work which have thematised and theoretically explored its significance for individuals and communities. The importance for individuals of the skills and knowledges acquired through their occupation and the pride in the expertise thus achieved, of autonomy and agency in fulfilling tasks, of recognition for efforts and achievements, of the relationships created through work, of the contribution one makes to others and to the community at large, the major impact of work on body, mind and psyche; all these themes raised in the book have been explored at length in specialized academic studies in the last decades. Bruno shows confirmations and illustrations of these findings in the words of the workers. This lends a significant pedagogical quality to the book. Indeed, the book can serve as an excellent introduction to contemporary theories of work, presented in accessible style by an expert teacher, through the lens of everyday experience. From this point of view, the book will be particularly useful for teachers and students in the disciplines where the experience of work and the forms of injustice suffered through work and at work are major topics.

The volume is organised into five chapters, each chapter focusing on a major aspect of work experience: “the time of work” (chapter 1); “work and space” (chapter 2); “work’s impact” (chapter 3); “the purpose of work” (chapter 4) and “the subject of work” (chapter 5). Across these chapters, content overlaps are many and many analyses appear repetitive after a while. On a cover-to-cover reading of the book, the arc of its demonstration seems quite circular. Within each chapter, whilst the conversational tone ensures the reading is smooth and engaging, structure and progression of the arguments seem a little haphazard.

These are minor flaws, however, which are largely compensated for by the book’s many positives. In particular, Bruno’s analysis of his students’ vision of work lets some important themes emerge, which are rarely discussed in recent scholarship on work. This is a particularly valuable aspect of the book. The main theme highlighted across all the chapters is the inherent ambivalence of work, as a place “somewhere between heaven and hell” (164). It is the fundamental condition to create and sustain individual and community life, but also a major means to “shape a sense of self” (33), which can become “the well-spring of a purposeful life” (55). At the same time, work is also a waste of one’s time, and often an indirect, or indeed a direct threat to life. Another major theme is the invisibility of work. Bruno highlights powerfully in several passages how much the work of ordinary people is taken for granted, both the value of their outputs, the skills required to achieve them, and the difficulties attached to it: “the world the workers make is proof of their salience” (54), and yet “even in plain sight workers are invisible to the end users and the passers by” (76). In capitalist societies, “the property relations of work obscure the activity of workers” (79). A third important and original highlight of the book is its emphasis on the “reverential” aspects of working: even in difficult or unjust working conditions, workers “often reserve a sense of sacredness for the worksite itself” (73), and equally for their tools and indeed their craft. These reverential dimensions of work stem directly from its links to life, the life of the worker, of others and of the community, all impacted by and dependent upon everybody else’s work.

The Conclusion reprises the significance of work as it has been delineated through the lens of the five main dimensions (time, space, impact, purpose and subjectivity), to briefly consider the present state of work in the United States, and what political battles will need to be waged in the near future for a healthier and fairer American society. Regarding the present situation, it is of course extremely deteriorated. Reporting the concerns of his students, Bruno bemoans the rise of app-based and agency-based contract work, which drastically increase precariousness, the absence of basic leave and health care provisions that are provided in other rich countries, the rise in technologies of control, the attacks on unions, the weakness of the labour movement, ever-expanding financial inequality based in continually increasing political disempowerment of the majority, the absence of truthful representations of worker concerns and struggles in popular media. Regarding “What needs to be done”, the author offers no concrete suggestion. But this was not the book’s brief. More deeply, with his book Bruno wants to highlight the full existential and social significance of work. He also demonstrates that such deep layers of working are captured equally well by those who think about it as by those who engage in it. The concept that sums up this philosophical depth is that “work is a virtue” (161), in the Aristotelian sense of the word, as a form of knowledge and of being developed through practical experience which ensures a good development for both the agent and the community. “What needs to be done” is not difficult to outline once this fundamental normative status of work is recognised: in each particular case, for each particular issue, it comes down to deciding collectively to organise work in such a way that it is decent and fair.