Labor, Work, and Organizing: 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
Dramatized testimony on film
- 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
This lens has a developed first pass for this theme. Resources continue to be added as the project grows. Contributions welcome, especially oral histories and testimonio from care work, domestic work, agricultural work, and the informal economy, which the current set is thin on.