It's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Anne Strandchamps.

What does your job say about you?

In an issue of Harper's magazine, Arthur Miller in an article on playwriting,

I wrote,

I do not believe you could tell about a man without telling about the world in which he lives in,

what he does for a living.

Not only what he was like at home, but on the job.

In the 1960s, journalists Studs Terkel spent years crisscrossing the country talking with people

about their working lives.

Now, so many of us would not like to need the jobs we have, but we must get down to

fundamentals.

Certainly it's a necessity that has for so many decades

sent so many men deep down into the bowels of the earth

to the collieries of Wales, the baronages of Belgium,

the soft cold pits of Pennsylvania,

the anthracite mines of West Virginia.

And always in songs there's the old miner who wants others never to send their kids into the mines.

Now some people say a man's made out of mud,

but a poor man's made out of muscle and blood,

a muscle and blood, skin and bones, a mind that's weak and the back that's strong,

he loads 16 tons, and what do you get another day older and deeper in death?

St. Peter, don't you call me cause I can't go. I owe my soul to the company store.

...