![]() What had most struck me about Enrico and his generation was how linear time was in their lives: year after year of working in jobs which seldom varied from day to day. Then his wife, Flavia, had gone to work, as a presser in a dry-cleaning plant by the time I met Enrico in 1970, both parents were saving for the college education of their two sons. It had taken him fifteen years to save the money for a house, which he purchased in a suburb near Boston, cutting ties with his old Italian neighborhood because a house Work had one single and durable purpose, the service of his family. ![]() He did so without complaining, but also without any hype about living out the American Dream. He carried a computer in a smart leather case, dressed in a suit I couldn't afford, and sported a signet ring with a crest.Įnrico had spent twenty years by the time we first met cleaning toilets and mopping floors in a downtown office building. Lounge, Rico looked as if he had fulfilled his father's dreams. When I lost touch with his father a decade later, Rico had just finished college. Enrico, his father, then worked as a janitor, and had high hopes for this boy, who was just entering adolescence, a bright kid good at sports. I had interviewed the father of Rico (as I shall call him) a quarter century ago when I wrote a book about blue-collar workers in America, The Hidden Injuries ofĬlass. Recently I met someone in an airport whom I hadn't seen for fifteen years. The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism ![]()
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