Experiential

Lived experience as a source of knowledge. What has the room been through? What do participants already know from the inside?

See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.

Almost everyone in the room has worked, or is looking for work, or is kept from working, or does work that no one pays for. That makes this theme unusually rich ground for experiential study. The point is to establish that the people in the room already know how work is organized, what it costs, and what it feels like to be on the receiving end of an order, before any history or theory enters.

Anchor questions

Sample prompts to open experiential work in this theme. Adapt to your room. See the facilitator guide for general guidance on experiential prompts.

Walk us through a shift. What do you do, what does it take out of you, and what do you get for it?
Who has power over your time at work? What can they make you do, and what can you refuse?
Have you ever been hurt, worn down, or made sick by a job? Did anyone answer for it?
What work do you do that never shows up on a pay stub? Who benefits from it?
Have you ever talked with coworkers about a shared problem? What happened when you did, or why didn’t you?
When you needed the job, what did you put up with that you would not otherwise have accepted?
Who taught you how to work, and what did they tell you it was for?

Materials that may help

Experiential work begins from the room. These outside materials extend or challenge what the room can offer. All are free unless marked otherwise. Use them to prompt recognition (“that is my working life too”) or contrast (“that is not my experience at all”).

Oral histories and testimonio

The WFMT Studs Terkel Radio Archive (interviews 1952 to 1997). Thousands of streamable programs, including Terkel’s own broadcasts around Working (1974), his book of ordinary people describing what they do all day and how they feel about it. The cornerstone experiential archive for this theme. Free: studsterkel.wfmt.com
The Working Tapes of Studs Terkel, restored by Radio Diaries. Previously unheard reel-to-reel interviews Terkel recorded for Working in the early 1970s, several paired with new conversations with the same people decades later. Ready for a session. Free: radiodiaries.org
StoryCorps, Work theme collection. First-person recorded conversations about jobs and vocation, from a retiring transit worker to a bridgetender to a taxi driver’s family. Short enough to play one and talk. Free: storycorps.org
The Triangle Factory Fire online collection (Cornell ILR, Kheel Center). Survivor and witness oral-history audio and transcripts, trial records, songs, and photographs from the 1911 fire. Testimony that turned a lived catastrophe into labor reform, strong when a session anchors itself in one event. Free: trianglefire.ilr.cornell.edu
Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives (Cornell ILR). Around 350 labor oral-history interviews plus digitized union records and photographs. A place to let the room encounter workers describing their own struggles in their own words. Free: digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu

Domestic work and care work

The archives above are strong on mines, mills, and factories. They are weak on the work that happens in other people’s houses, which in the United States was deliberately written out of the National Labor Relations Act, and which the people who do it have always insisted is work.

Oral history interview with Dorothy Bolden (1978, 34 min). Bolden cleaned houses in Atlanta from the age of nine and founded the National Domestic Workers Union of America in 1968, organizing maids from the back of a city bus because that is where they all were. Here she is on tape in her own voice. If this lens plays one recording on domestic work, play this one. Free: dlg.usg.edu
JOMO, Caring on Stolen Time: A Nursing Home Diary (2013). A certified nursing assistant, writing anonymously, on shifts in a nursing home where the residents’ needs and the workers’ own are set against each other by the clock. The rarest thing in care-work writing: not a report on aides, but an aide’s own account of what the job does to a person’s sense of time. Short enough to read aloud to open a session. Free: dissentmagazine.org
Premilla Nadasen, Household Workers Unite (2015). Built on oral histories with Bolden, Geraldine Roberts, Josephine Hulett, and other Black household workers who organized on buses and street corners from the 1950s to the 1970s, without a labor law that recognized them. Nadasen is a historian, so the framing is hers, but the women’s accounts carry the argument rather than illustrate it. Read it with the Bolden tape and she stops being a character in a historian’s book. Free to borrow: archive.org

Agricultural work

Bracero History Archive. More than 600 oral histories with the Mexican men contracted to US fields and railroads between 1942 and 1964, alongside the photographs and the contracts themselves. They describe the recruitment, the medical inspections, the wages, and the housing in their own words. The largest first-person record of guest agricultural labor in this country. Free: braceroarchive.org
Farmworker Movement Documentation Project (UC San Diego). Thousands of unedited first-person accounts from the United Farm Workers movement, 1962 to 1993. Nothing submitted was rejected or edited for tone, which makes it raw and unusually honest about internal conflict. One caution: many contributors are UFW volunteers and staff rather than farmworkers, so read it beside the Bracero archive. Free: libraries.ucsd.edu
Elvia Alvarado, Don’t Be Afraid, Gringo (1987). A Honduran campesina trained by the church to fight malnutrition, who started asking why the people who grow the food are the ones going hungry, and narrates land recovery, jail, and torture in her own plain speech. The book keeps her voice instead of smoothing it into an argument. Free to borrow: archive.org

The informal economy

Most of the world works without a contract, an employer, or a payslip. Almost nothing else in this school reaches these workers in their own voices.

Voices of Waste Pickers (Global Alliance of Waste Pickers with Hasiru Dala and Radio Active CR). Waste pickers from Bangalore and elsewhere narrating their own working lives and arguing their own demands. The project chose audio deliberately so that workers who cannot read are not shut out of their own archive, a decision worth putting to the circle itself. Free: wpvoices.globalrec.org
Women Speak: Workers’ Narrative Videos (WIEGO Delhi, 2019). Seven women informal workers from Delhi, a construction worker, three home-based workers, a street vendor, and a waste picker, telling their own stories in Hindi to a public audience: eviction, the absence of any social protection, and what changed once they organized. Free: wiego.org
Peter Orner (editor), Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives (2008). Twenty-four undocumented people narrate their working lives, much of it the exact work this lens was missing: nannying, cleaning, picking, day labor, and jobs that exist only off the books. Edited for length, first person throughout. The informal economy here is not a category in a report, it is somebody’s Tuesday. Free to borrow: archive.org
Domitila Barrios de Chungara with Moema Viezzer, Let Me Speak! (1977). The founding text of Latin American testimonio, dictated by a Bolivian tin miner’s wife who organized the Housewives’ Committee of Siglo XX and faced the army for it. She insists throughout that the household and the mine are one economy, and says so to feminists at the UN who would rather discuss something else. Shared with the capitalism theme and close to Gender, Reproduction, and the Household; it belongs here because her subject is work and who is permitted to call it that. Free to borrow: archive.org

Dramatized testimony on film

Harvest of Shame (Edward R. Murrow and David Lowe, CBS Reports, 1960, 52 min). The Thanksgiving broadcast that put migrant farm labor on national television and taught many Americans the word migrant. Use it, but be honest with the circle about what it is: Murrow is a famous journalist narrating over these workers, and the celebrated opening framing compares them to livestock, which is his metaphor and not theirs. Watch it against Alvarado or the Bracero interviews and let the group name the difference between being spoken about with sympathy and speaking for yourself. Free: archive.org
Salt of the Earth (Herbert J. Biberman, 1954, 94 min). A blacklisted-artist drama based on the real 1951 Empire Zinc strike in New Mexico, acted largely by the Mexican American miners and their wives who lived it. Lived experience of a strike, and of who does which work on the picket line and at home. Public domain and free: archive.org

Short video

“How Capitalism Ruined Work” (Second Thought, 2021). Roughly 18 minutes, about 573,000 views. On the profit motive, alienation, and why work so often feels meaningless. A strong opener for surfacing what the room already feels about their own jobs. youtube.com/watch?v=3aQgN_7oX0Q
“Chris Smalls: The Man Who Took On Amazon and Won” (The Daily Show, 2022). Roughly 10 minutes, about 866,000 views. An accessible interview with the JFK8 warehouse organizer on the conditions workers lived and how the union began. Bridges the experiential and practical lenses. youtube.com/watch?v=BduzkjBdw_o

A note on method

Experiential work is not a warm-up. Give it real time. Many people carry shame or resignation about their work, and the first task is to establish that what they know from the inside is knowledge, not just complaint. Outside material should be used to deepen what the room surfaces, never to talk over it. When someone describes their own job, that testimony has the same standing here as any book.

Status

First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. Contributions welcome, especially first-person testimony from Filipina and other migrant domestic workers, which was searched for specifically and not found in free form: what exists is mostly journalism and scholarship about these workers rather than by them. Sex workers writing as workers are also absent, largely for the same reason. Both remain real gaps.

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