Strategic Communications and Marketing News Bureau

New book explores complicated relationship between workers and their work

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. —A new book by a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign labor historian explores how workers characterize their relationship to their jobs using their own personal mini-narratives, mining that material to ultimately advocate for a more humanistic-centered future of work.

Robert Bruno, a professor of labor and employment relations at Illinois, is the author of “What Work Is,” published by the University of Illinois Press

The book’s title is a reference to a Philip Levine poem of the same name, which details the speaker’s working-class struggles to earn a living as a day laborer. But the title in Bruno’s book functions as a thought exercise for his students to describe their relationship to their work using no more than six words: “Work is _______?”

“For nearly 30 years, my work as a labor studies educator has allowed me to teach and interact with working-class people as students – unionized workers representing all trades, crafts, occupations and sectors, and different nationalities, races, genders and political orientations,” Bruno said. “The one thing they all have in common is nobody ever asks them about their relationship to their work. In writing this book, I really wanted to understand how they experience their work. How are their lives realized through the work they do? How does it affect the multiple aspects of their lives? How do they see themselves through their work? How do they define their work, and how does it define them?”

The thousands of student responses collected range from the profound to the profane, the banal to the intimate. But they serve as a springboard for Bruno to interrogate and explore five larger categories: work and time; the space workers occupy; the impact of work on their lives; the sense of purpose that motivates workers; and the people they work for.

“I sifted and sorted through thousands of these personal narratives, curating and analyzing them, looking for the common themes,” Bruno said. “And from those granular, personal accounts, I could then zoom out and talk about larger issues in the contemporary U.S. labor landscape, such as class issues and economic dynamics that are redefining and changing the way we work. If we listen to workers and take their experiences seriously, we begin to see a path to make their work more impactful, more valuable and ultimately more satisfying for them.”

The book is not meant to be a final statement on labor or as a capstone for his three-plus decades of studying labor, but “an evocative and powerful encapsulation of how I’ve come to understand the way that workers experience work,” said Bruno, also the director of the Project for Middle Class Renewal, a research-based initiative tasked with investigating labor policies in today’s economy.

One of the advantages of having the students write a six-word “essay” is that “it usually cuts right to the core of what work is for most people,” Bruno said.

“Work is so fundamental and so basic to people’s lives that it undergirds just about everything,” he said. “One of the less obvious realizations I had while writing this book was the way that work connects us to others. Work makes other people’s lives possible.”

The dominant theme throughout the vast majority of the responses was that “people work for others,” Bruno said.

“When you ask someone about their work, it’s as if you asked them ‘On whose behalf do you work for?’” he said. “And they would say, ’I’m working for my family.’ ‘I’m working for the greater good.’ ‘I’m working for my country.’ ‘I’m working to make my union stronger.’ ‘I’m working for my kids.’ It’s rare that they say, ‘I’m working for my employer.’ There is this extensive web of relationships surrounding work, and if you dig below the surface, you can see it’s often the connective tissue of people’s lives. At the same time, we don’t often spotlight the person who does the work itself. We see the product, but not the hands that made that product.”

Bruno also is the author of “Justified by Work: Identity and the Meaning of Faith in Chicago’s Working-Class Churches”; “Steelworker Alley: How Class Works In Youngstown”; and “Reforming the Chicago Teamsters: The Story of Local 705.” He is co-author of “A Fight for the Soul of Public Education: The Chicago Teachers Strike.”

Editor’s notes: To contact Robert Bruno, call 630-487-0013; email bbruno@illinois.edu.

The book “What Work Is” is available to purchase online. Follow the book on Instagram.

Read Next

Announcements Marcelo Garcia, professor of civil and environmental engineering at The Grainger College of Engineering.

Illinois faculty member elected to National Academy of Engineering

Champaign, Ill. — Marcelo Garcia, a professor of civil and environmental engineering in The Grainger College of Engineering, has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

Social sciences Male and female student embracing on the quad with flowering redbud tree and the ACES library in the background. Photo by Michelle Hassel

Dating is not broken, but the trajectories of relationships have changed

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — According to some popular culture writers and online posts by discouraged singles lamenting their inability to find romantic partners, dating is “broken,” fractured by the social isolation created by technology, pandemic lockdowns and potential partners’ unrealistic expectations. Yet two studies of college students conducted a decade apart found that their ideas about […]

Engineering Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor Nishant Garg, center, is joined by fellow researchers, from left: Yujia Min, Hossein Kabir, Nishant Garg, center, Chirayu Kothari and M. Farjad Iqbal, front right. In front are examples of clay samples dissolved at different concentrations in a NaOH solution. The team invented a new test that can predict the performance of cementitious materials in mere 5 minutes. This is in contrast to the standard ASTM tests, which take up to 28 days. This new advance enables real-time quality control at production plants of emerging, sustainable materials. Photo taken at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign on Monday, Feb. 3, 2025. (Photo by Fred Zwicky / University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

Researchers develop a five-minute quality test for sustainable cement industry materials

A new test developed at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign can predict the performance of a new type of cementitious construction material in five minutes — a significant improvement over the current industry standard method, which takes seven or more days to complete. This development is poised to advance the use of next-generation resources called supplementary cementitious materials — or SCMs — by speeding up the quality-check process before leaving the production floor.

Strategic Communications and Marketing News Bureau

507 E. Green St
MC-426
Champaign, IL 61820

Email: stratcom@illinois.edu

Phone (217) 333-5010