Published in 2001, the book chronicles Ehrenreich’s grueling experiences working undercover as a diner waitress, a house cleaner, and at Walmart-jobs that test her patience and punish her body but do not pay her bills. The premiere, “Service Jobs,” is reminiscent of a more recent labor classic: the late author and activist Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. It’s all pretty illuminating-until the bizarre finale, whose sunny portrait of the C-suite comes off as anything but representative. Obama, an executive producer as well as the show’s narrator and a sporadic presence on screen, frames these stories within the context of an American economy that has undergone drastic changes since Terkel’s time. Each episode profiles three workers at the same level of the contemporary workforce, scaling the pyramid of wealth and power from service jobs to middle-class office work to “dream jobs” before reaching the bosses. An admirer of Terkel’s book since college, Barack Obama set out to update the project with Working: What We Do All Day, a 4-part documentary that arrives on Netflix May 17.
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