Answering the Question “What Do You Do?”
Six years ago I went to a conference to promote a manuscript I had written about my work in the factory. It was a conference for university professors who were trying to get departments of “working-class studies” on university campuses.
I am often faced with the question “What do you do?” which in my culture is understood to mean “What do you do for work?” or, more accurately, “What is your profession?” I never know how to answer this. I went to work in the factory to organize workers, but I usually can’t say that out loud, because I might lose my job if the wrong people knew it. So I tell a half truth: that I work in a factory. That often ends the discussion. People are not interested, or they just do not know how to talk to a factory worker. If I tell them where I work, they say, “What a nice company.”
I thought that in this group of leftists1 it would be a little safer to talk about what I really do, which is organize. But I knew that if I said, “I organize workers,” they would think, “He is a union organizer,” and would ask what union, and I would say, “I don’t have one.” And then the conversation would stop because no one would know what that meant.
I had many Co-Counseling sessions about this. I wanted to describe what I did in a concise way and before people lost their attention. I was pleased with what I came up with.2
The first people I met at the conference were three advanced-level students doing research and writing. I asked them what they did, and they told me about their studies. Then they asked, “What do you do?” I said, “Well, I work in a factory making shoes, but what I really do is look for signs of intelligence and encourage them.” They didn’t know how to respond to that answer, but I was pleased with it. I wonder how many of us do this for our “work.”
Dan Nickerson
International Liberation Reference
Person for Working-Class People
Freeport, Maine, USA
Reprinted from the RC e-mail discussion
list for leaders of working-class people
1 “Leftists” are politically progressive people.
2 “Came up with” means figured out.