Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do by Studs Terkel

studied law in this town, along the Indiana-Kentucky border. Today the natural landscape of this region is overwhelmed by slag heaps, huge banks of shale. It is strip mine country; one of the earliest.
    He’s been a strip miner for more than twenty. years; his father was one too. He earns about twenty thousand dollars a year. Casually he voices his one regret: he might have been a major league baseball player. He had a tryout with the New York Giants some twenty-five years ago; it looked promising. Marriage plus his jather’s illness cut short the promise. He lost the chance of proving himself a major-leaguer.
    At first he spoke with a great deal of reluctance; his comments short, cryptic. Gradually, he let go . . .
     
    I don’t dig coal. I take the dirt off coal. You have to know how to handle dirt, to get the best advantage of your machinery. You just can’t take a piece of equipment that’s developed to take eighty foot of dirt and go on and get ninety, ninety-five. That’s management, you follow me? All you get over the maximum, that’s gravy. You have to uncover it as cheap as possible.
    From the time you go to work, like eight o’clock in the morning, when you step up on that piece of equipment and get the seat, why there’s not a piece of equipment that’s not movin’ all day. We run around the clock. We’re on a continuous operation, three shifts a day, seven days a week. I work at least forty-eight hours every week.
    You don’t ever stop it. Eighty dollars a minute down time is what they figure. You have an oiler that you break him in to operate. When I’m eatin’ lunch, thirty minutes lunch time, that machine’s still runnin’. The only time the machine stops is when you change shifts. Most machines have even got a time clock on how long it takes you to swing, how long it takes you to grease, how long it takes you to load your bucket and go to the bank, how long it takes you to dump it, how long this and that. I drink coffee and smoke and never miss a lay. There is no break. They don’t pay you for that.
    I know what this piece of equipment’s raised to do. I always try to get that and to better it. Any company, if they’re worth 150 million dollars you don’t need to think for a minute they’re not gonna know what you’re doin’. They didn’t get there that way . . . and if I want to go any place . . . If I’m supposed to move five thousand cubic feet of dirt an hour, if that’s what the machine’s rated at, you know damn well they know it. Sure, you’re gonna get a certain amount of fatigue.
     
    “There’s some dangers to it, yeah. There’s danger if you go out on the highway. If you get 125 deep. If you don’t get this hole tamped right and this kicks out, instead of goin’ vertical it goes horizontal — well hell, I’ve seen it go seventy-five foot high and the house covered up . . . people. It still isn’t as dangerous as underground. But around the tipples, even in strip mining, the dust is tremendous. These people have to wear inhalators to stay on the job. I do. They can be subjected to black lung. ”
     
    We go as deep as ninety-five feet. From the operator’s standpoint it’s more profitable. From the consumer’s standpoint, they stand to benefit by the profit the company gets. The cheaper they produce the coal, the cheaper the electricity gets.
    The company I work for produces five, six thousand ton of coal a day. A million ton a year. Our coal runs from four to seven foot thick. Four-foot coal runs six thousand tons to the acre. We’ll mine an acre a day. You have bastard veins, where the coal runs fifteen foot thick. They’re gettin’ ready to put in three and a half million ton a year mines.
    People’s misinformed about this environmental thing. About your soil being dug up and not put back. Ninety percent of this ground, even twenty-five years ago, was rundown. Ninety percent of the ground I’ve seen tore up, you’d starve to death tryin’ to raise a