In 2021, Charlie Colenutt left his job as a trainee barrister, which had come to feel meaningless during the pandemic, and “set out on an adventure”, said Christina Patterson in The Sunday Times.
“For the next two years, in coffee shops, pubs, kitchens and front rooms, he talked to 100 people about their jobs.” The result is “Is This Working?”, a “strangely gripping” oral history based on his interviews. The book is structured thematically, so a chapter entitled “Bodywork” is made up of interviews with a panel beater, a warehouse worker, a security guard and a sex worker, while “Talkwork” features a call-centre worker, an estate agent and a therapist. They reveal that while a few people love their jobs, the majority find them a grind.
One of the biggest complaints is the “erosion of autonomy”: the way many people are now “accountable” for every minute, and have to prove what they’ve done with endless box-ticking. A midwife must fill in a form every time she gives a back massage; a soldier-turned-teacher finds the bureaucracy so overwhelming that she remembers her time in Afghanistan as “less stressful”.
Colenutt – whose book is inspired by Studs Terkel’s 1974 bestseller “Working”, based on interviews with US workers – also discovers joy “in unexpected places”, said Ian Cobain in The Observer. A food delivery rider, while regularly exhausted, relishes the freedom of not being “strapped to a desk”. A cleaner describes the fulfilment she feels when looking back on a room she has cleaned.
As one might expect, this book is both “utterly fascinating and thoroughly depressing”, said Ian Sansom in The Telegraph. “By simply listening to people talk about their jobs, Colenutt has created something unique and unexpectedly moving: it’s a choral work of frustration, pride and despair.”