Has Contemporary Fiction Ignored the Working Class?

"There's one thing about work, you can't let it swallow you... You can't let yourself get sucked in otherwise that's it.... Watch out, watch out for work. This warning from Jérôme encapsulates an enduring cross-cultural preoccupation with labor's intractable grip on life, highlighting the seemingly insoluble tension between economic necessity and personal preservation that defines working-class existence."

"Baglin-whose own father worked in a factory-focuses her novella squarely on working-class labor, with exacting attention paid to its grinding toil and the abiding financial instability that its meager paychecks typically yield. Rather than focusing on the sterile impersonality of the corporate office, Baglin illuminates the blue-collar workplace and foregrounds its simultaneous demands and denials of the human bodies that power it."

"In On the Clock, both father and daughter labor in jobs that spurn any claim to bodily sanctity; safety and comfort are privileges conferred stingily, if at all. Jérôme, whose line of work already entails significant physical risk, regularly performs his duties alone, at the formidable heights of a boom lift's far-reaching neck, while his daughter confronts her own set of dodgy working conditions."

Claire Baglin's debut novella On the Clock explores working-class labor through the relationship between a factory electrician father and his daughter. The father warns his daughter against letting work consume her life, a cautionary message that frames the novella's central concern with labor's alienating effects. Unlike contemporary works focusing on corporate environments, Baglin examines blue-collar work with precise attention to physical toll and financial precarity. Both characters endure hazardous conditions with minimal safety protections: the father works alone at dangerous heights operating machinery, while the daughter faces grueling conditions at a fast-food restaurant's fry station. The novella foregrounds how working-class labor simultaneously demands and denies bodily sanctity.

Read at The Nation