Our Daily Work / Our Daily Lives

Work shapes our lives. When we meet strangers, our first question is "what do you do?" We are not asking about their non-work activities as much as we want to understand one of the most important ways of defining ourselves and others: what we and they do as "work."

Both on and off the job, we explore the effect work has on us and how we affect our work. We talk, complain, celebrate and struggle. Our relationship to work is not only economic and social, it is cultural as well. Our personal and communal relations to work take many cultural and artistic forms expressed through poetry and narrative, sculpture and painting, humor and drama, craft and representation. Through expressive culture, we integrate our occupation and personal life. "Our Daily Work/ Our Daily Lives" is a cooperative project that focuses on the cultural traditions of workers, workplaces as contexts for the expression of workers culture, and the diversity of historical and artistic presentations of workers' lives. Acting out of common interest, the Michigan Traditional Arts Program ( MSU Museum) and the Labor Education Program (MSU School of Labor and Industrial Relations) established "Our Daily Work/Our Daily Lives" to explore and present the richness and diversity of worker experience and workers culture with exhibits, lectures and presentations; writing and research projects; and reunions, dialogues, demonstrations and discussions.

"Our Daily Work/Our Daily Lives" received a university's Sustained Effort Toward Excellence in Diversity award in 2003.

Diversity has been a hallmark of the "Our Daily Work/Our Daily Lives" program, co-directed by John P. Beck and Yvonne R. Lockwood, since its inception more than a decade ago. The collaboration between the School of Labor and Industrial Relations and the MSU Museum is dedicated to the exploration, preservation, and presentation of the richness and complexity available within "worker culture." While program presentations have included poetry readings, a film opening, and a concert, the most visible activities were three major campus exhibits: the paintings of worker/artist Ralph Fasanella, the art of African American artist and former rail worker Mark Priest, and the memorial quilt honoring federal workers killed in the Oklahoma City bombing. Lockwood and Beck are conducting field research on South African worker culture for inclusion in an upcoming exhibition. The program's diversity focus is also reflected in the presentations offered through the brown bag seminar series in which MSU faculty and off-campus presenters focus on the diversity of worker experience and worker culture across the boundaries of occupation, gender, ethnicity, age, region, nation, and time.

Our Daily Work/Our Daily Lives has been described as a program designed to transform the perceptions and understanding of the greater institution and our student community by establishing a forum for understanding diversity of people in our daily lives. It celebrates diversity through an understanding of the richness and value diversity adds to our daily lives. This program has demonstrated an organizational culture that not only respects diversity and pluralism, but also one that establishes diversity and pluralism.

Lockwood and Beck are a team that represents in an exceptional way efforts deserving of the Sustained Effort Toward Excellence in Diversity award.


Special Event:

Our new Our Daily Work/Our Daily Lives exhibit, “Sun-up to Sundown: Selections from the Our Daily Work/Our Daily Lives Collection” will be featured in the MSU Museum Foyer from April 14 - June 16, 2013; the opening and reception is set for Wednesday, May 1 from 5 to 7 PM.

This exhibition features various two and three dimensional selections from the Our Daily Work/Our Daily Lives Collection of the MSU Museum. The collection features a wide variety of artistic expressions of work and worker culture across a diverse array of media from Michigan, the U.S., and other nations around the world. Two paintings by America’s most renowned worker artist Ralph Fasanella will be shown along with works by Clementine Hunter, Jack Keijo Steele, Andrew Rieder, Nkoali Nawa, Nora Chapa Mendoza, Mark Priest and dozens more. There also will be a number of examples of “government work” or “homers,” pieces of art or craft made from materials from the workplace.


Brown Bag Presentations Winter 2013:

Janine Lanza
History Department, Wayne State University
"Laughing the Master Down:
Artisan Culture and the Meaning of Emotions in 18th Century Paris"
Friday, January 18, 2013
12:15-1:30
MSU Museum Auditorium
co-sponsored by the MSU Center for European and Russian/Eurasion Studies

Amy Bromsen
Department of Political Science, Wayne State University
"'They All Sort of Disappeared': The Early Cohort of UAW Women Leaders"
Friday, February 1, 2013
12:15-1:30
MSU Museum Auditorium

Soma Chaudhuri
MSU Department of Sociology
"Organizing in a Precarious World of Work: The Self Employed Women's Association of India"
Friday, February 8, 2013
12:15-1:30
MSU Museum Auditorium
co-sponsored by the MSU Asian Studies Center

John Baesler
History Department, Saginaw Valley State University
"Disciplining the 'Inaccurate Instrument of Intimidation':
Organized Labor's Campaign Against the Polygraph, 1965-1988"
Thursday, February 21, 2013
12:15-1:30
MSU Museum Auditorium

Gary Jones
History Department, International University
"'Russia in America, Cossacks in Pennsylvania':
The Department of State Police and Early Twentieth Century Conflict in the Coalfields"
Friday, March 15, 2013
12:15-1:30
MSU Museum Auditorium

Dennis Stroughmatt
Writer and Performer
"'French Creole Music and Language from the Missouri Mines: 1723-2008"
Thursday, March 22, 2013
12:15-1:30
MSU Library, Room 449W
co-sponsored by the MSU Library Colloquia Series

Elizabeth Faue and Josiah Rector
Wayne State University
"The Precarious Work of Care: OSHA, HIV/AIDS,
and Women Health Care Workers, 1980-2000"
Friday, April 5, 2013
12:15-1:30
MSU Museum Auditorium

Cancelled
John Baesler
History Department, Saginaw Valley State University
"Disciplining the 'Inaccurate Instrument of Intimidation:
Organized Labor's Campaign against the Polygraph, 1968-1988"
Thursday, April 11, 2013
12:15-1:30
MSU Museum Auditorium

Aaron Goings
St. Martin's University
Gary Kaunonen
Michigan Technological University
"Wage-slaves and Radicals:
Writing a People's History of the 1913-14 Michigan Copper Strike"
Friday, April 19, 2013
12:15-1:30
MSU Library Room 449W
co-sponsored by the MSU Library Colloquia Series

For more information, contact John Beck at 432-3982 or beckj@msu.edu .or Kurt Dewhurst at 355-2370

The “Our Daily Work/Our Daily Lives” Brown Bag Series
(A Retrospective by School Year)

2012-2013	2007-2008	2003-2004	1999-2000
2011-2012	2006-2007	2002-2003	1998-1999
2010-2011	2005-2006	2001-2002	1997-1998
2009-2010	2004-2005	2000-2001	1996-1997
2008-2009

2012-2013
9/5/2012-Joe Grimm
Coney Detroit: Immigration, Work and Hot Dogs in the Mother City

9/12/2012-Fran Shor
The IWW Insurgencies of 1912: Working Class Men and Women in Revolt

9/21/2012-Alex Lichtenstein
Taming the Shop Floor in South Africa: Black Workers and the Struggle Against Apartheir, 1973-1985

10/12/2012-Maria Christina Fava
Drawing a Finer Point on 1930's Era Success: 'Pins and Needles' and the ILGWU's Lesson for the Theater Guild

10/18/2012-Joseph McCartin
Collision Course: The 1981 Air Traffic Controllers Strike and the Decline of Collective Barganing in the U.S.

10/26/2012-Tom Marvin
Occupy the University: Putting Student and Labor Activism in Perspective

11/9/2012-Anthony DeStefanis
Creating a Killer: The Colorado National Guard, U.S. Empire, and the Ludlow Masacre

11/16/2012-Sparky and Rhonda Rucker
Changing the World One Song at a Time: Songs of Work and Struggle

11/28/2012-Dylan Miner (cancelled)
The General Motors Strike: Reflections on the Flint Sit-Down Strike and Anti-Capitalist Art

11/28/2012-John P. Beck
The Way We Worked: The Culture and History of Work, Workers and the Workplace

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2011-2012
9/22/2011-Gary Morgan
Occupational Masks: Real, Assumed and Imagined

9/30/2011-Tony Roko
One Autoworker/Painter's Art: From the Factory Floor to the Gallery Wall

10/6/2011-Diana Twede
Shaking Our Mode of Living to Its Very Roots: Workers, Consumers and the Packaging Industrial Revolution

10/13/2011-Leslie D. Bartlett
Give Me Your Hands: the Legacy of the Barre Stone Sculptors and Their Stone

11/3/2011-Doug Noverr
Two Versions/Visions of Irish Immigrant History: Ron Howard's 'Far and Away' (1992) and Martin Scorsese' 'Gangs of New York' (2002)

11/18/2011-Michael Honey
From Wisconsin to Memphis: King's Gospel of Labor Rights on the Rebound

12/8/2011-Candacy Taylor
The Lives of Career Waitresses: Rethinking Work and Identity

1/20/2012-Mindy Morgan
Visions and Visages: Transforming Images of American Indians in "Indians at Work"

1/27/2012-The Centerpieces
The Centerpieces and the People's Party: Creating a Workplace Holiday Tradition

2/6/2012-Susan Eisenberg
On Equal Terms: "Respect, Opportunity and Dignity" for Women in the Construction Workplace

2/17/2012-John McCutcheon
Culture and Community: Orgainizing Hearts and Minds

2/24/2012-Jennifer Stinson
The Work of Race: African American and African-Indian Farmers, Farm Laborers, and Identured Servants in the Old Northwest

3/16/2012- Jeffrey Rothstein
When Good Jobs Go Bad: Globilization, De-unionization, and Declining Labor Standards in the North American Auto Industry

3/22/2012-Matthew Birkhold
Whites Don't Act Like Proletariats, The Act Like Racists: Race, Labor and the Struggle for Shopfloor Peace, 1915-1945 cancelled

4/13/2012-Lisa Fine
Exploring Power and Place: The Enrico Fermi Atomic Energy Plant and the Workers of Downriver Detroit

4/20/2012-Paul Lawrie
"Doin' time in the White Man's Army:" African Americans and Penal Labor in the American Military 1917-1919

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2010-2011
9/16/2010-Peter Limb
'A Very, Very Wide Influence, Even When.....Dead': The Early ANC and Black Workers in South Africa Before World War II

9/24/2010-Ronald Cohen
Was There Ever a Singing Labor Movement?

10/11/2010-Kevin Breen and Patrick Cook
How Things Work at the Post Office: Postal Worker Fiction and Poetry

10/22/2010-Robert Zecker
'The Enraged People are Many': Race, Immigrant Newspapers, and the Creation of Working-Class Whiteness

11/5/2010-James Keeleghan
Small Rebellions: Canadian Labour in Song

11/11/2010-Micalee Sullivan
Made of Muscle and Blood: Mineworkers of Clifton-Morenci, Arizona and Kimberely, South Africa, 1880-1910

11/22/2010-Jennifer Burd and Lad Strayer
In Line at the Daily Bread: Without Home or Work in Lenawee County

12/3/2010-Ron Carver
Bringing Workers Culture to a Broader Audience: Painter Ralph Fasanella and the Public Domain Project

1/7/2011-Thomas Summerhill
Mob Rituals and Workers Culture: Rethinking Anti-abolistionist on the Eve of the Civil War

2/7/2011-Joanna Bosse
Salsa Dancing and the Working Calls Mexicans of Central Illinois

2/14/2011-Jim Hoesterey
Building the Islamic Work Ethnic?: Tailoring Global Capitalism for the Indonesian Workplace

2/18/2011- Leon Fink, Ph.D.
Cooperation and Cash: Global Seafarers and the 'Race to the Bottom' in the Twenty-First Century

2/28/2011-Cynthia Edmonds-Cady
Defining Welfare, Work, and Motherhood: Women's Participation in the Welfare Rights Movement in Detroit, 1964-1972

3/25/2011-Emily L. Altimare
Putting Out Small Fires on the Shop Floor: Conflict and Compromise in the Automotive Workplace

4/8/2011-Gordon Bok
Working New England Maritime: A Musical Tour

4/28/2011-Timothy Messer-Kruse
The Enduring Power of the Haymarket Square Bomb: Uncovering the Hidden History of a Failed Revolutionary Uprising in America

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2009-2010
9/17/2009-Ann Folino White
Performance and Protest: Gender and Labor in the 1935 Detroit Housewives Strike

9/23/2009-Steve Lehto
When Lies Becomes History: The Seeberville Murders, the Press and the 1913 Michigan Copper Strike

10/2/2009-Peggy Seeger
A Feminist View of Women and Work in Anglo-American Traditional Songs

10/8/2009-Martin Desht
Faces from an American Dream: Photographing the Post-Industrial Landscape

11/13/2009-Dylan Miner
Joe Hill Ain't Dead!: Wobbly Visual Culture and Its Impact on Contemporary Radical Graphics

11/20/2009-Kirsten Fermaglich
Becoming Someone Else: Jewish Name-changing, Employment and Class Mobility in Mid-Twentieth Century New York City

12/3/2009-Juan Javier Pescador
American Lenses, Mexican Aliens: Photography of the Mexican Experience in the United States, 1930-1965

1/14/2010-Peter Beattie
Working on the Imperial Farm: Convict Labor and Discipline on the Fernando de Noronha Island Penal Colony, Brazil 1830-1897

1/22/2010-Anna Pegler Gordon
Coming Into Focus: Picturing Chinese American Workers in World War Two

2/4/2010-Howard Bossen and Eric Freedman
Images and Voices: 160 Years of Steel and Work

2/11/2010-Peter Rachleff
Pulling the Strings of Race: The Buffalo Historical Marionettes Project of the WPA

3/18/2010-Franco Barachiesi
Precarious Liberation: Workers, the State, and Contested Social Citizenship in Post-Apartheid South Africa

3/25/2010-Gregory Wood
A Constant Menace to All Employed Therein': The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire and Fighting Workplace Smoking in Progressive Era New York City

4/9/2010-Charlie King and Karen Brandow
The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti-a Musical Portrait

4/16/2010-Robert Bruno
The Unhallowed Many: God and Working Class Lives

4/30/2010-Don "Doop" Duprie and the Inside Outlaws
Rocking Blood River: Songs of Working Class Detroit

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2008-2009

9/12/08-Walter Hawthorne
Black Slave Ship Crew: Labor, Bondage and Freedom in the Early Modern South Atlantic

9/19/08-Tamar Carrol
Working-Class Women and Feminism in 1970s Brooklyn

10/23/08-Beth Stewart
The First Rosie the Riveters: The Women of Henry Ford's Phoenix Mill, 1922-1948

11/14/08-Denver Brunsman
Laboring Under the Union Jack: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World

11/21/08-Rosemary Feurer
Mother Jones and the Radical Tradition

1/23/09-Scott Peller
Proletarian Writer Robert Cruden in 1930's Detroit: The Aspirations of a Mass Worker

1/29/09-Lisa Rutledge
Writing as Healing for the Healers: A Reading and Presentation

2/6/09-Dylan Miner
Joe Hill Ain't Dead!: Wobbly Visual Culture and Its Impact on Contemporary Radical Graphics

2/20/09-Richard Fry
Toxic Crisis in 21st Century Alang: Contaminants, Workers, and Community in India's Ship Breaking Industry

3/27/09-Bump Halbritter and Julie Lindquist
Making Meaning on Both Sides of the Literacy Tracks: The Voices of First Year Students at Michigan State University

3/30/09-Elizabeth Faue
Remembering Justice: Labor and the Uses of Memory

4/10/09-Si Kahn
Folksinger, Writer and Social Justice Advocate and Organizer: A Conversation with Si Kahn

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2007-2008
9/21/07-Stephen Rachman
Flash!: Jacob Riis, Social Class, and the Photography of Artificial Illumination

10/15/07-Thomas F. Marvin
Joe Hill and the Making of a Labor Martyr

11/9/07-Heather E. Pristash
Reclaiming Women's Work: Feminism and Protest Knitting

11/12/07-Howard Bossen
Poverty and Wealth in Black and White: Marion Post Wolcott, FSA Photographer

12/3/07-Juan Javier Pescador
Detroit-Tenochtitlan: Utopia, Myth and History in Diego Rivera's Translational Art

3/14/08-Dionicio Valdes
The Search for Democracy: Plantation Agriculture in Hawaii and the ILWU

4/4/08-Jualynne E. Dodson
Spiritual Work in Cuba: Political-economy of Religion and Tourism

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2006-2007
9/15/06-Daniel Bender
Fit for the Factory: Race, Gender, and Evolutionary Thought in the Early 20th Century

10/20/06-Peter Alegi
Rewriting Patriarchal Scripts: Trade Union Beauty Pagents in the South African Textile Industry, 1970s-Present

12/1/06-Daina Ramey Berry
'Reap in the Harvest What YOu Sow.' New Directions in Slavery Scholarship

2/9/07-Coreen Derifield
Negotiating the American Dream: Industrial Manufacturing and Working Class Community in Burlington, Iowa, 1960-1980

3/12/07-Susan J. Bandes
American Images and the Workers' Lanscape

4/6/07-Doug Rademacher
Life and Work in the Shadow of the Verlinden Plant: UAW Local 602 Oral History Project

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2005-2006
9/24/05- Howard Bossen
Behind the Big Top: Luke Swank's Photographs of the Working Circus
108 Kresge Art Center

10/21/05- Ken Ross and Louis Galdieri
1913 Massacre': The Woody Guthrie Song and the Michigan Copper Strike Tradgedy that Inspired It

11/11/05- Lisa Fine
Laying Claim to the Land: Exploring the Relationship of Workers, Leisure and the Environment

12/2/05- Phil Schertzing
Whacking the Wobblies: The Michigan State Police vs. the IWW, 1917-1922

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2004-2005
9/9/04- LuAnne Kozma
Smiling through Danger on the River: Worker Humor on the Westcott Mail Boat

10/5-Dolores Huerta
A Conversation with Dolores Huerta.
4th Floor Conference Room, MSU Library

10/21/04 - Douglas Noverr
Dirty Uniforms, Dirty Money, Dirty Business:Labor and Class as Elements of Baseball's Black Sox Scandal

11/12/04 - Wilson Warren
‘I’m Glad I’m Not a Hog’: Workers’ Lives and the Ethics of Animal Slaughter

12/6/04 - Rossina Hassoun
The Kufiyya and the Smokestack: The Lives of Working Class Arab Americans in the Midwest

1/21/05 - David Stowe and Derek Vaillant
Sweet Home Chicago: Work and Spirit in the Music of 20th Century Chicago

2/1/05 - Maria Montoya
Work, Women, and Wobblies: The IWW Strikes in Colorado's Coal Fields, 1927

3/18/05 - Lolita Hernandez
Living and Writing the Pulse and Rhythm of the Line: One Autoworking Woman's Experience
This presentation was co-sponsored by the Motorcities/Automobile National Heritage Area/Lansing Area Stewardship Community.

4/1/05 - Gregory Miller
Fighting the Blue Collar Blues: The 'Guerrilla War' at GM's Lordstown Plant, 1971-1972
This presentation was co-sponsored by the Motorcities/Automobile National Heritage Area/Lansing Area Stewardship Community.

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2003-2004
9/4/03 - Danielle DeVoss
Formidable Females: Cultures of Resistance in the Pink Collar Workplace

10/16/03 - Jim Daniels and Larry Smith
Writing and Publishing Our Working Lives

11/3/03 - Teresa Pool
You Feel Like a Psychiatrist Sometimes: Emotional Labor in a Chain Hair Salon

1/16/04 - Cynthia Vagnetti
The Other Toiler on the Farm: From 'Go Fer' to 'You Go Girl'

2/2/04 - Ann Larabee
The Technologies of Revolution: Radical Bombmaking in 19th Century America

3/1/04 - Marietta Baba
Anthropology on Work/Anthropology at Work: The Workplace as a Terrain of Anthropological Inquiry

4/2/04 - Sherry Linkon and John Russo
Steeltown USA: Rethinking the Study of Class and Place

4/15/04 - Tim Sheard
Union Work Can Be Murder: A Mystery Novelist Shop Steward Detective Blends Fact and Fiction

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2002-2003
9/13/02 - Kimberly Little
Blitzkrieg on the Waterfront: Competing Visions of Businessmen and Everyday People for St. Louis, 1900 - 1940

10/4/02 - Anna Pegler-Gordon
Imagining and Imaging Immigrants: Photographing Chinese and Mexican Laborers in the United States, 1880- 1930
This presentation was co-sponsored by MSU’s Julian Samora Research Institute and MSU’s Chicano/Latino Studies Program.

11/4/02 - Charles Blackman, Sandra Clark and Arthur Mullen
Celebrating Michigan's Autoworkers, Automobiles and Auto Communities: The Program of the Automobile National Heritage Area

12/2/02 - Joe Grimm
Great Lakes Sailors, Their Work and Songs in the Schooner Era

1/24/03 - Julie Lindquist
Telling Shit from Shinola: The Culture of Argument in a Working Class Bar

2/24/03 - Howard Bossen
Lost Childhood: Lewis Hine, Child Labor and the Progressive Era

3/14/03 - Darlene Morris and Lynn Marie Smith
Music in Work Life and Union Life

4/25/03 - Jocelyn Riley
Work Talk: Filming Women in Non-traditional Careers in Their Own Words
This presentation was co-sponsored by the Women’s Resource Center and the Women’s Studies program.

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2001-2002
9/10/01 - Julian Van Dyke
Images and Letters from the Lost Delivery Person

10/15/01 - Andrea Stupka
Vistas Del Campo: The Photography and Writing of Migrant Workers' Children
This presentation was co-sponsored by MSU’s Julian Samora Research Institute and MSU’s Chicano/Latino Studies Program.

11/19/01 - Manuel Pena
Folklore, Machismo and Everyday Life: Writing Mexican Worker Culture
This presentation was co-sponsored by MSU’s Julian Samora Research Institute and MSU’s Chicano/Latino Studies Program.

11/26/01 - Elena Herrada and Others
Los Repatriados: Exiles from the Promised Land
This presentation was co-sponsored by MSU’s Julian Samora Research Institute and MSU’s Chicano/Latino Studies Program.

1/17/02 - Peter Way
Belaboring Military History, Militarizing Labor History

2/15/02 - Thomas F. Adams
The Rise and Fall of Buick City

3/18/02 - Matthew Daley
Welcome to the Boomtown: Building a New Worker Community in Detroit, Brightmoor, 1922 - 1942

4/8/02 - Isaac Kalumbu and Michael Largey
Music and Class in the United States, Haiti and Zimbabwe

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1999-2000
9/16/99 - Kevin Asman
British Film, Mike Leigh and the Poitics of Working class Embodiment

10/14/99 - John P. Beck
Exploring South African Workers Culture and Art

12/9/99 - John Dirkx
Spirituality of Work: The New Opiate or a Modern Quest for Meaning in Life

1/31/00 - Vivian Scott Hixson
Cartooning the Academic Life

1998-1999
2/24/99 - Rick Houghton
What's Under the Helmet?: Life on the Job as a Firefighter

3/24/99 - Susan Stein-Roggenbuck
Michigan Workers Without Work in the 1930's: The View from Van Buren County

4/21/99 - Nancy Brigham, Eric Freedman and Louise Knott
Journalistic Labor: Writers Working/Workers Writing

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1997-1998
9/26/97 - Richard Olson
Touring the Labor Museums of America

10/14/97 - Luanne Kozma and Yvonne Lockwood
Capturing the Fire: Field Research with Michigan Firefighters

11/14/97 - Lisa Fine
Killing Informants; What to Do with the Results of the REO Factory Oral History Project?

1996-1997
9/20/96 - Yvonne Lockwood and John P. Beck
In Search of a Workers’ Culture in the United States

10/21/96 - Paul Mishler
Workers Stories into Labor Culture: The Experience of the Bread and Roses Conference on Workers' Culture

11/21/96 - Clarence Hooker
Reminiscences from the Model T Assembly Line

4/17/97 - Elizabeth Davey
Stop Talking Poetry and Talk Sense: Political Poetry in Defense of the Scottsboro Boys

3/20/97 - Nora Roberts and Others
A Poetry Reading by Michigan Worker/Writers

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