[While it’s always refreshing to see the lives of working people
centered in our media, the docuseries Working: What We Do All Day is
hampered by the limitations of its host and narrator, former president
Barack Obama.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

BARACK OBAMA’S NEW NETFLIX SERIES SHOWS THAT HE HAS CRITIQUES BUT
NO ANSWERS  
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Paul Prescod
June 5, 2023
Jacobin
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_ While it’s always refreshing to see the lives of working people
centered in our media, the docuseries Working: What We Do All Day is
hampered by the limitations of its host and narrator, former president
Barack Obama. _

Barack Obama with Randi Williams in his new Netflix documentary,
Working: What We Do All Day. , (Netflix)

 

The Obamas have found a way to stay culturally relevant. In 2018,
Barack and Michelle Obama founded Higher Ground Productions and
arranged a $65 million deal with Netflix to produce documentaries and
feature films.

Former President Obama has used these films to position himself as a
kind of moral observer of the nation’s problems. In _Our Great
National Parks_, for example, he narrates beautiful scenes of the
country’s most famous national parks while issuing stern warnings
about our duty to protect them.

Now Obama seeks to emulate a professed hero of his, writer and
historian Studs Terkel. In 1974, Terkel published his iconic
book _Working, _which featured powerful interviews with scores of
ordinary working people about what they did at their jobs and how they
felt about it.

_Working: What We Do All Day_ is a four-part docuseries intended to
be an updated version of Terkel’s work for the twenty-first century.
While it is always refreshing to see the lives of working people
centered in our media, this series is hampered by the limitations of
Obama’s worldview and political imagination.

The series focuses on three industries that are prevalent and growing
in the US economy: home health care, tech, and hospitality. These
industries are undoubtedly important for the US working class today,
and inevitably the filmmakers would have had to make choices about
what to cover in a limited amount of episodes.

Still, the industry focus of the film plays into a misguided notion of
what our economy looks like today: that we are mostly a society of
knowledge and service workers now, with blue-collar industrial workers
becoming a relic of a bygone era. However, reality tells a much more
complicated story.

Industrial employment remains an important part of the economic
landscape. In particular, the logistics industry is a growing and
dynamic sector of the economy. Workers in the United States move a lot
of commerce through the ground, air, and sea. At companies like
the United Parcel Service (UPS)
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exciting labor struggles have been taking place over the last few
years that could have big implications for workers everywhere.

It would have been interesting to hear from workers engaged in
blue-collar logistics work, as well as workers in manufacturing
industries that have been slowly declining like automobiles.

Nevertheless, the series starts out engaging enough as it begins to
profile the featured workers. We meet Elba, an immigrant from the
Dominican Republic who has worked at the Pierre hotel for twenty-two
years. One gets a sense of the monotony of her work as she repeatedly
cleans rooms that look the same.

Viewers quickly get a picture of an economy that doesn’t work for
most working people. Carmen, a delivery driver for Uber Eats in
Pittsburgh, reveals the reality of gig work when she says, “It would
be nice if you could get at least a minimum wage . . . but they
don’t do that.”

Randi, a home care aid in Mississippi, explains, “It’s hard to
find work in rural America.” Her starting pay is $9 an hour, which
makes the $15 an hour she used to make deboning chicken thighs seem
like great money.

To its credit, the first episode does make some positive passing
references to labor unions. The housekeeper Elba enjoys a stable wage
of $4,000 a month and says of the union, “They work very hard for
us.” In one scene hotel workers are in the lounge discussing the
threat of automation. The union delegate Beverly explains that the
union can play an important role in protecting workers’ jobs.

In order to set some context for the conditions of service workers
today, Obama narrates a brief history section about the rise of unions
and workplace protections. He asserts the oft-cited fact that
agricultural and domestic workers were left out of the National Labor
Relations Act and thus shut out of union membership.

He then claims, dubiously, that today’s service workers “are
descendants of the legacy of left-out workers.” This rhetorical
trick is echoed in discussions of black politics, where the
developments of the mid-twentieth century are ignored in an attempt to
draw a direct link between slavery and contemporary dynamics.

Explaining service work today through analogies to agricultural and
domestic workers during the New Deal era is a lazy evasion of
analyzing the crucial changes to our political economy that have taken
place over the last eighty years. It also obscures Obama’s own
failures as president to effectively address labor standards in the
service industry.

Before episode one is over, Obama reveals the limits of his own
political perspective, which weakens the docuseries throughout. While
he can often effectively name the problem, he struggles to carry that
to its logical conclusion when proposing a solution. The audience is
left with equivocating, mealy-mouthed ruminations on what he thinks
should be done.

Toward the end of the first episode, Obama offers this:

Let’s be blunt. There’s always someone at the top of the ladder
and someone at the bottom. That’s especially true with capitalism,
and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. But as a society, we do get to
decide what life looks like for working people. We can make those jobs
better or worse.

While throughout the series he calls for an improvement to working
people’s lives, he can never reckon with the reality that a blind
acceptance of the hierarchies of capitalism prevents this from
happening in a meaningful way.

Episode two, titled “The Middle,” explores the phenomenon of the
middle class. As is appropriate, the topic is discussed with a good
deal of nuance. Like in the broader society, a very wide range of
workers featured in _Working _are labeled middle class.

A data manager at a self-driving car company, a supervisor at a home
care company, and a switchboard operator are all centered in this
episode. At times, probing questions are posed about whether all these
workers should be defined this way, or how the concept of a middle
class can be precisely measured. But this budding investigation
isn’t developed much further.

Again, the series levels general critiques without an overarching
vision of an alternative. Luke, the data manager at the Aurora
self-driving car company, is shown looking for houses to buy that are
completely out of his price range. His parents reminisce about the
days when their town was anchored by a factory that provided
family-sustaining jobs and their mortgage was a manageable $219 a
month.

As narrator, Obama explains that in today’s economy consumer goods
have gotten cheaper but the costs of housing and education have
ballooned exponentially. During these moments one can’t help but
wonder if he’s reflected at all about how his time in office
contributed to these problems. Obama’s tenure as president, during
which he refused to even entertain tuition-free higher education or
reining in the real estate industry, represented a near-complete
capitulation to the forces that have made the middle-class dream so
much more unattainable for working people.

The second half of the series is perhaps the most nauseating. Here the
focus turns to those at the top of the economy: “knowledge
workers” and CEOs. It’s a curious but revealing choice to focus
such a significant amount of limited time on this elite stratum.

It’s true that in the original work, Studs Terkel interviewed some
managers and CEOs. However, this represented a very small fraction of
a book dominated by interviews with workers from almost every
imaginable occupation. Farmers, strippers, bus drivers, waitresses,
mechanics, and so many more were the centerpiece of Terkel’s
attention.

Nevertheless, Obama charges on to find out, “What does a CEO’s
work look like? What are the pressures and responsibilities they
carry?” Though probably not intentional, the series shows that the
answer to these questions is in fact: “not very much.”

There are scenes of CEOs giving TED talks, shaking hands with
employees (who are busy actually working), and in board meetings with
slick slide shows. One hears them utter mindless platitudes about
“adaptability” and “resiliency.” But unlike the other workers
featured in the series, it’s for the most part hard to pin down
exactly what these corporate elites do all day.

The episode contains a historical section that blames the ballooning
of CEO pay on the ideas of free-market economist Milton Friedman. But
soon, inevitably, Obama reveals the real way he looks at the problem.
He opines, “What if a CEO prioritized more than profit? There are
different ways to lead. The CEO sets the tone. Their choices, their
priorities, their values shape how people work together.”

These words explain so much about Obama’s worldview and presidency.
Government has no power to do anything, workers have little agency,
but individual CEOs can make choices to do the right thing. The
relentless whipsaw of competition inherent to capitalism is apparently
no match for do-gooder captains of industry. This ending feels like a
betrayal to the working people this series was theoretically intended
to honor.

It would be an exaggeration to say that there is nothing engaging or
interesting about this docuseries. In our media ecosystem, there are
precious few opportunities to hear from working people directly about
what they do all day and how they feel about it. The stories and lives
featured in _Working _are rare and compelling.

It’s the messenger who hangs like a cloud over the film. It becomes
tiresome listening to critiques of how working people are treated in
our society from a former president who did so little for them. His
refusal to support the Employee Free Choice Act, repeal the George W.
Bush–era tax cuts for the rich, or prosecute the bankers who wrecked
the economy, just to name a few, demonstrated that when it counted the
most he chose to stand with corporate elites over workers.

Hopefully Netflix’s docuseries is a sign that we’ll see more films
and shows that center working people to come. In the meantime,
Obama’s _Working: What We Do All Day _fails to live up to the
gravity of its subject.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Paul Prescod is a Jacobin contributing editor.

 

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