Is it all coming together? Thoughts on urban studies and the present crisis: (21) Work and action: from The Wire to Hamlet

摘要

It is common to suppose that hands-on blue-collar work is coming to an inevitable end in a necessarily globalising world. Only a romantic who has never engaged in hard labour, it is said, could regret the passing of that world. If there is a price, it is the price of progress. And yet Reg Theriault, a 'fruit-tramp' (a highly mobile fruit-picker) who went to Berkeley, gave up on university, returned to fruit-tramping, and then became a longshoreman, 'spending a third of a century on the San Francisco waterfront', does not agree. He finds much for (not unqualified) celebration in that work, for 'the life and ethic it engendered'. He sees a loss, a void, a tragedy that 'did not have to happen.'