The Photographic Unit of the Farm Security Administration / Office of War Information took thousands of photographs during the decade from 1935 – 1945. They reflected all aspects of American life in the period, not just work, but the online collection (of over 160,000 photographs) has a ‘search by subject’ facility. The collection includes, for example, Dorothea Lange’s well-known pictures of a migrant worker family’s living conditions.

The New Deal Administration provided much of its relief to the nation’s unemployed in the form of work relief. The New Deal Network has an extensive collection of photographs, searchable by subject or by agency responsible, as well as other primary source material.

Some of the public work schemes allowed white-collar workers, or those in the creative arts, to use their existing skills. Graphic designers were employed to produce ‘public information’ posters, some directly relating to the world of work. There is a detailed index by subject.

The Federal Writers Project for unemployed writers carried out a number of projects with reference to the world of work. For example, they conducted interviews with ‘ordinary’ Americans to capture their life histories, including information on education, qualifications and work. For an account of the Federal Writers’ Project, and a sample of the life histories they collected, see this online collection.

The same project also interviewed many elderly African-Americans who had been born into slavery, thus offering an important window into the experiences of enforced labour.

The Farm Security Administration ran a number of camps for migrant workers, many of whom were attracted to California in the hope of obtaining seasonal work in agriculture. There is an online collection of various sources describing the daily experience of residents of these camps.

Alan Sillitoe[i], who died today, makes the case for Nottingham being psychogeographically northern better than anyone else. The world of Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night and Sunday morning already discussed on the site, is what my friends’ granddads had when they were back from the war: they were skilled on the production line, got a good pay packet and tipped it up to their mothers, and then to the wife, getting 5 shillings back for fags and booze.

In ‘Mr Raynor the school teacher’, one of the short stories that are part of ‘the Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner’ collection[ii], there are hints as to the changing relations of power in post-war Nottingham: the incipient decline in authority and the rise in women’s employment concomitant with increasing sexualisation in the public sphere. Mr Raynor’s class don’t mind how his attention drifts from teaching, they’re not committed to school. Mr Raynor is one of the few almost-sympathetic authority figures in Sillitoe’s early work; sympathetic because he isn’t quite in control (as the student Bullivant, with his “Teddy boy ideas” susses out). It’s an open secret that Mr Raynor likes to watch the girls working at the department store across the road from his school. The shopgirls come and go; work for them just fills in a space between leaving school and getting married (or getting pregnant). He has his favourites amongst them and the story focuses on his memory of the best:

As she walked she had carried her whole body in a sublime movement conducive to the attraction of every part of it, so that he was even aware of heels inside her shoes and finger-tips buried perhaps beneath a bolt of opulent cloth.

Sillitoe, 2007: 69

The shop worker here is as much the object of consumption as the bolts of cloth and the suits she sells. As the class misbehaves and distracts him, Mr Raynor tries hard to hold onto the image of the nameless girl, who is both the cause of his distraction and the thing that keeps him going through the daily grind. The voyeuristic gaze isn’t enough, though by the time the (married) Mr Raynor has plucked up the courage to talk to his favourite, she’s stepping out with a young man and he’s missed his chance. And then, this emancipated, sexy young woman, earning her living at the coalface of the new consumer society, becomes a woman punished: she’s killed by her young man. Mr Raynor mourns her, but his life continues its cycle of keeping just enough control of the classroom to leave time for more daydreaming.

References

1. Maconie, S. (2007) Pies and Prejudice: In Search of the North. Ebury Press.
2. Peace, D. (2005) GB84. Faber and Faber.
3. Sillitoe, A. (2007 [1959]) The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. Harper Perennial.