What Work Is

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1991

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

Waiting in Line

“What Work Is” defines work as a group “stand[ing] in the rain in a long line” (Line 1), where the line in question functions both literally and symbolically. Part of the working-class labor Levine describes is, certainly, waiting in long employment lines for any kind of work just to put food on the table. However, the employment line also functions as a symbol in the poem for the oppression inherent in capitalism against members of lower economic classes.

The line appears throughout the poem, from its first lines on. When the poem first departs from the image of the line in its early lines, the speaker asserts “Forget you [e.g. the reader]” (Line 6), instead declaring “This is about waiting, / shifting from one foot to another” (Lines 6-7). In a similar way, the poem emphasizes the physical dimensions of the line in the phrase “somewhere ahead / a man is waiting who will say, ‘No’” (Lines 19-20). Here, the long distance between the aspiring working and the hiring manager symbolically highlights the huge division erected by class distinctions.

When the “you”/speaker in the poem is overwhelmed by his “love for [his] brother” (Line 24), the poem purposefully expresses this as him “now suddenly […] hardly [able to] stand” (Line 23). The humanity and love filling the “you” threatens his very ability to partake in the literal and symbolic line of labor that oppresses him, demonstrating their incompatibility. Just as a line is a communal entity, formed as it is of multiple people with the same interest, it is also something that alienates its members. After all, unlike a circle or crowd, a line is composed of individuals with backs turned to one another—all together, yet still alone.

Rain

The “rain” (Line 1) that “fall[s] like mist” (Line 8) appears throughout the poem, even from the poem’s first line. While the rain is an important part of the sensory details of Philip Levine’s setting and imagery in the poem, it also functions as a symbol of economic adversity. It is important that it is not simply waiting which characterizes the need for labor (and labor itself) in the working class, but the rain “falling like mist / into your hair” (Lines 8-9) and “blurring your vision” (Line 9) as well. It is not enough that the “you” in the poem must wait in a line for long hours, they are subjected to the discomfort of a prevalent and unavoidable environment—the very circumstances of his world are against them.

It is of some significance that the speaker mistakes “someone else’s brother” (Line 13) for his own, not merely out of carelessness, but as a result of the rain “blurring [his] vision” (Line 9). The trials faced by the working class (which upper-class office workers can ignore and avoid simply by being indoors) obscure vision. The rain, as a symbol for these difficulties, also blurs each member of the working class into brothers for one another. Put another way, the symbol of the rain is used to communicate that, for Levine, a shared struggle makes a brotherhood of the working class.

Additionally, when the poem describes the brother’s relation to work, it characterizes him as possessing “the sad refusal to give in to / rain” (Lines 17-18). While the phrases that follow build this statement out, its initial grammar—along with the pause created by the enjambment of Line 17—place strong emphasis on “rain” as a symbol of the hardships to which the brother will not “give in” (Line 17). Part of “What Work Is,” then, is a refusal to be defeated by the utterly pervasive difficulties that make up the capitalist system which exist as roadblocks for members of the working class. Rain, in the poem, serves as an important symbolic marker of these struggles.

Highland Park Ford

Levine’s poem takes place at the Highland Park Ford plant, and links workers–of which the speaker is one—to this well-known historical symbol of American ingenuity, capitalism, and efficiency. Henry Ford opened the plant in 1910, and it was there that Ford perfected his groundbreaking approach to manufacturing: It was the first factory to use a moving assembly line to manufacture cars, dividing the labor among workers into specific, repetitive tasks that increased the speed of production. This method drastically brought down the price of manufacturing, creating greater availability of automobiles to consumers (and contributing to the eventual ubiquity of automobiles in American lives). When Levine worked at the plant following World War II, it was the main location for Ford's tractor manufacturing, though at the time of the poem's publication, it was no longer used for assembly or manufacturing.

These pioneering methods in efficiency drove increased sophistication and output in manufacturing. However, they also marked a gradual shift away from skilled jobs for workers. Roles that involved a diversity of tasks were replaced by ones that involved one repetitive task performed on a continually moving assembly line. Workers' jobs became increasingly robotic, and while the Highland Park Ford plant paid more than other factories (at least in the early decades), the nature of the assembly line is to increase profits by making paid laborers redundant. Eventually, as the work became more mechanized, human laborers dependent on these factories for their livelihoods were left outside, as pictured in the poem.

Levine illustrates the reality for unemployed workers who are desperate for the factory work that has dried up because of the increase in mechanization. As in the factory, they remain on an assembly line of sorts, still lined up outside the plant. Ironically, they are workers who do not work, and the phrase "you don't know what work is" (Line 42) can be interpreted as a bitter observation that the listener does not know work because they have been blocked from knowing it. Although they all seem anonymous in the line, and assembly-line work reduces the individual to the faceless, mechanized role, Levine identifies "your own brother" (Line 10) in the crowd, who then becomes "some else's brother" (Line 13) and could essentially be anyone and everyone's brother. So, while the Highland Park Ford plant symbolizes the gradual erasure of the American worker in the name of Capitalist profit, Levine re-humanizes the worker by naming him as someone dear to the reader and dear to everyone: He is a brother who practices singing Wagner, studies German, builds Cadillacs, and who is loved, embraced, and kissed.