Revering sweat.

• Author: Ehrenreich, Barbara
• Position: Book Review

The Unmaking of the American Working Class By Reg Theriault New Press. 224 pages. $24.95.

Back around the middle of the twentieth century, when my father was working night and day to escape from the blue collar working class, Reg Theriault decided to stay. He had other options, having been pushed toward college by his mother, an itinerant fruit-picker. After flunking out of an engineering program because his education as a child of migrant workers had not included long division, he settled briefly in English literature, only to return to "fruit tramping"--and then a longshoreman's life--himself. This decision passes by without much comment in the foreword of The Unmaking of the American Working Class, but there is never any doubt it was the right one: When Theriault's sons reach their teens, he makes sure they have at least a summer-long fruit-tramping experience.

There is, as there has to be in any book about blue collar work, plenty of pain and difficulty in Theriault's memories of life on the docks and in the fields of the American West. But what shines through here are the pleasures--and I don't think that's too strong a word--of the kind of jobs he held until an accident on the docks forced him to retire. The pleasure, for example, of mobility: Fruit tramps, who could still recall their anarchist (Industrial Workers of the World) heritage in Theriault's youth, loved the tramping life. Longshoremen could, and perhaps still can, apply for a permit to spend a few months at another port. "For me, it was a good feeling," he writes. "I'm leaving town, heading for a new place, new people, and a job is waiting for me when I get there."

Camaraderie was another attraction of the old style blue collar workplace, which Theriault describes as a "gabfest." "Talk goes on constantly," he reports, "and the conversation can cover just about every topic imaginable," including, in one instance, the nature and fate of the indigenous Tasmanians. And camaraderie shades over into its harder-edged version-solidarity. When Theriault has to raise $2,000 overnight to bail out a son who's been arrested at a fruit tramps' picket line, old friends and fellow workers dig deep into their pockets, no questions asked.

With the talk came politics or, beyond that, an entire culture of egalitarianism and vigorous participation. Among the longshoremen, Theriault reports, "almost everyone, including most of the rank and file, were seriously caught up in politics, both in the...