What Does the Literature of the Working Class Look Like?

Summary

American and French literature offer distinct visions of work, each exploring how cultural contexts shape our understanding of professionalism, drudgery, and class struggles. Claire Baglin’s *On the Clock* vividly portrays a fast-food worker’s struggle in France under systemic inequalities, contrasting the romanticized American portrayal of white-collar success with the harsh realities of blue-collar labor. These literary portrayals challenge conventional views of work, inviting readers to reflect on its role in daily life and societal dynamics.

Additional Summaries

The idioms of languages often reflect societal views on work, portraying it as tedious. While English and French idioms highlight work's drudgery, American literature explores the negatives of white-collar life, while French works like *Who Killed My Father* focus on blue-collar struggles. A recent novel, *On the Clock*, humanizes working-class existence by depicting a fast-food worker's struggle to balance work and personal life, inviting readers to confront the harsh realities of working-class existence.

Fiction, meanwhile, can upturn such collective attitudes by conveying the specificity of actual working lives and workplaces, recognizing that even the most monotonous labor can shape the self. Over the past two decades, the U.S. has seen a wave of books preoccupied with our working lives, many of them focused on white-collar office jobs. Even more nonfiction on the subject has been published, notably David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs, which examines the rise of what he sees as meaningless, administrative office work. Many of them are set among and told from the perspectives of the French working classes, focusing on blue-collar labor rather than office work. The narrator’s critique focuses on how the restaurant pits her colleagues against one another, rather than a wider-scale look at France’s class politics.