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Labor Forum
Dirty Jobs, Done Dirt Cheap: Working in Reality Television
Gabriel Winant
New Labor Forum 2014 23: 66 originally published online 25 July 2014
DOI: 10.1177/1095796014543953
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What is This?
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Phil Kloer/USFWS
The star and crew of Dirty Jobs, with Mike Rowe, showed up shortly after dawn to start the day’s filming at
Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge.
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543953
research-article2014
NLFXXX10.1177/1095796014543953New Labor ForumWinant
New Labor Forum
Dirty Jobs, Done Dirt Cheap:
2014, Vol. 23(3) 66–71
Copyright © 2014, The Murphy Institute,
City University of New York
Working in Reality Television Reprints and permissions:
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DOI: 10.1177/1095796014543953
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Gabriel Winant1
Keywords
capitalism, conservatism, neoliberalism, working class, deindustrialization
Like clockwork, a crisis in a major social insti- These shows seem to share a nearly social-
tution today produces a monstrous representa- realist preoccupation with the proletarian
tion of that institution’s operations through the decency and stoicism of hard labor. In its press
form of reality television. Given their prolifera- materials for Dirty Jobs the Discovery channel
tion into the hundreds and their enormous suc- actually refers to the show’s host as “everyman
cess, reality shows—the most popular of which Mike Rowe.” If this seems unusual in a culture
regularly draw between five and ten million that tends to demean labor, it is because these
viewers—amount to the most significant novel shows are working at a more indirect angle.
cultural form unique to neoliberal society. While they deal in a rhetoric of working-class
While the emergence of reality television has heroism, they systematically push the human
been driven on the supply side by a straightfor- beings whose labor they nominally valorize to
ward search for cheap and fast production, the margins. They both awaken the set of
something altogether more contorted seems to (largely nostalgic) desires associated with work
be driving demand. What many of these shows before neoliberalism, and they reenact, in each
dramatize is the demoralizing experience of episode, the dynamics of class power by which
neoliberalism itself. work has been destabilized and workers made
invisible.
Many [reality] shows dramatize These, then, are not really shows about
[the] demoralizing experience of workers at all. Coal follows the attempt by
Cobalt Coal President Jim Roberts to make
neoliberalism itself. back the millions he lost in two previous min-
ing ventures, with a third, all-or-nothing gam-
Some of these shows deal with the crisis of
ble on a high-grade West Virginia coal seam.
mass consumption ushered in by the recent
The show presents an obviously dangerous
financial collapse and subsequent anemic recov-
speedup as an exciting drama. (Inspectors for
ery. Others seemingly engage the experience of
the Mine Safety and Health Administration
work—particularly dangerous, physical, and
cited Cobalt for safety violations after watching
dirty work—in the age of the failed job hunt. At
the show’s first episode.) The company’s nar-
a moment of acceleration in the deskilling and
row profit margin and resulting harsh labor
destabilization of the labor market—when the
conditions appear as an adventure, rather than
labor force participation rate is at a thirty-five-
the stuff of muckraking. In other words, the
year low—it makes sense that we would develop
show’s protagonist and subject is capital; the
a televised fantasy life about those exotic jobs
workers are props.
that, as one show has it, “make civilized life
possible for the rest of us.” Some of the last
1
decade’s most prominent entries have included Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA
Dirty Jobs, Undercover Boss, Coal, Ice Road Corresponding Author:
Truckers, and The Deadliest Catch. Gabriel Winant, gabriel.winant@yale.edu
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68 New Labor Forum 23(3)
In these shows, the camera loves the bosses. when the boss, in a fit of noblesse oblige, reveals
They guide us through the exotic operations of the truth to the workers, marvels at their grit,
the workplace. On a show like Coal—a season- and showers them with gifts. Finished slum-
long study of a single company—Roberts domi- ming, Sun calls her former workmates into her
nates the narrative, which centers on how many executive office. “You had talked about how
tons he needs per day to break even. The show’s when you got married four years ago, the kids
attention lingers on his expensive equipment weren’t able to be there, and that was your only
and enlists the workers to criticize each other regret—you’re so family oriented,” she tells the
about who operates it most efficiently. nurse. “And so I’d like to recreate that. I want to
Undercover Boss, an enormously popular send you back to Cancun for a re-do-over of
example of this genre, is perfectly titled, if unin- your vows, with you and your husband, all six
tentionally so, because it personalizes the sur- of your kids, and your two grandchildren. All
veillance regime so common across American ten of you.” Sun also promised to pay her
workplaces. Shelly Sun, the CEO of for-profit employee’s wages while she was gone for the
homecare company BrightStar, explains, “When week, and to cover her mortgage for six months.
J.D. and I first started the business, we were The episode reaches its climax with CEO Sun
involved in every decision. As we’ve grown, on stage in front of her employees, basking in
we’ve become a little bit removed. And we want their cheering at her bravery and generosity.
to make sure that the care we say we’re provid- “Thank you for creating the job,” says the
ing to families is being delivered.” The chief of underemployed nurse, and Sun beams beatifi-
Chiquita Brands International, Fernando cally. Each episode displays the benevolent
Aguirre, going undercover as an unemployed power of the paternalist entrepreneur; it tends to
immigrant to work in his company’s fields and play like a scene out of Mitt Romney’s
factories, lays it on thick: “I’m very disciplined subconscious.
and strict, and I place a lot of emphasis on peo-
ple doing their jobs right. I see this as a tremen-
Each [Undercover Boss episode]
dous opportunity for me to find out if my
employees really perform at the level I expect.” tends to play like a scene out of
Inevitably, the undercover bosses learn a les- Mitt Romney’s subconscious.
son about the hard work and dedication of their
help. Aguirre could not operate a forklift or Like Undercover Boss, Dirty Jobs is episodic
pack lettuce to save his life and relied on his in structure, but it has an on-screen editorial
workmates to keep production moving at all in voice in “everyman Mike Rowe.” Rowe is a
his presence. Sun and her husband, working handsome, wisecracking minor celebrity; imag-
undercover with their employees at nursing ine a cut-rate, slightly campy Clint Eastwood
homes and on house calls, hear about how their with a career hosting and narrating innumerable
company relies on patients to train their own reality shows and commercials. So consider for
caregivers because the workers were spread too a moment what inevitably happens when his
thin to share information. One nurse explains to people arrange for him to show up at a company
the incognito CEO the effects of the unpredict- with a camera crew: it is, of course, not the work-
ability of her wages. “It’s been very hard. My ers who spend the day on camera showing him
husband and I both lost our jobs. We worked for around but the boss. In a telling episode of Dirty
General Motors for over fourteen years, and I’m Jobs Rowe goes to work at a pig farm outside
not getting a forty-hour paycheck from Las Vegas. The day’s task: to turn castoff and
BrightStar. We haven’t had a vacation since we leftover casino buffet food into slop. Through
got married.” Sun—the very agent of this the entire segment, Rowe is on-screen, often
nurse’s precarious circumstances—nods along elbow- or knee-deep in liquefied food detritus
sympathetically. with the farm’s owner, Robert Combs, who is
Whatever dramatic tension accumulates over presented as a homespun yokel. At one point,
an episode of Undercover Boss is discharged Combs instructs Rowe to shovel waste off the
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Winant 69
top of a tower. “That goes to the landfill, it has the social ladder. The on-screen protagonist
no value. You should tell José to watch out.” allows the audience distance from the work,
Who, you might ask, is José—about whom we distance that in turn produces the drama of the
have thus far heard nothing? It seems he actu- show; nothing about packing lettuce or feeding
ally works at the farm. He never appears on- pigs otherwise bears any interest. The basic plot
screen or merits another mention. With labor device—the naïf gets his hands dirty, learns his
disappeared and a hammy celebrity seeming lesson, and, crucially, moves on—depends on
superfluous in the worker’s place, the image of the work itself being monotonous, which allows
the boss becomes distorted. Combs will suffer the viewer to examine experiences that some-
Rowe’s presence with good cheer but evidently what resemble their own, from the safe distance
does not need him. In a typical move for the afforded by on-screen, episodic narration.
show, the boss is thus made to resemble an Imagine if Mike Rowe went back to the same
independent producer, unafraid, as the pig farm to make slop every time; he would be
voiceover says, “to get his hands dirty.” The José, about whom there are no shows. To por-
proletarian glow of Dirty Jobs shines only for tray the real lives of actual workers at any depth
the capitalist; it washes out the actual workers. would evoke the pain of economic insecurity
At their most popular, Dirty Jobs and while offering none of the narrative relief—in
Undercover Boss have commanded audiences distance, in humor—that these programs
of several million viewers—the latter, which require to be watchable.
airs on CBS, often clearing ten million. The
strange thing about these shows is that anyone Reality television stages, and reifies
watches them at all. They are boring. Why into commodity form, a utopia of
would we expect otherwise? Even the most
dangerous and physically grueling jobs are
work.
vastly more drudgery than adventure. For every
Whether in the physical drama of Coal and
moment of excitement racing a big rig over the
Ice Road Truckers or the social drama of Dirty
Arctic ice roads or hauling in crabs in the
Jobs and Undercover Boss, the viewers’ dis-
Bering Sea, there is too much monotony to sus-
tance from the work is the final product. The
tain anything like narrative pacing. For that
work that these shows do is to stimulate the
matter, even the moments of danger and excite-
viewers’ interest in the labor process—an inter-
ment all more or less resemble each other. The
est emerging from the increasingly common
miner operator hits some buttons, the teeth of
experience of humiliation and insecurity on the
the machine dig into the rock, and he stops. The
job—and then to redirect that interest else-
shift changes, and the guy on the next shift does
where: essentially, to deflect it backward in
the same thing. Sometimes, the roof falls in.
time, to a (mainly fictitious) moment when hard
That these workers have lives and cares of gen-
work—particularly manual labor—was recog-
uine human interest is gestured at, but it is not
nized and rewarded. Reality television stages,
what the show is about. The show is about the
and reifies into commodity form, a utopia of
motion of capital, a process that is essentially
work: a long-lost no-place in which capital has
repetitive. The dullness of the work mobilizes
the qualities of labor, workers are invisible,
the viewers’ sympathetic response; without
bosses are heroes, and toil leaves a meaning-
this, the fantasy that the show seeks to stimulate
ful—often physical—impact on the world.
would not succeed.
On the contrary, the fantasy cannot cut too
close to the bone or it would risk undermining
Inside the Reality Factory
the distinctive pleasure it offers: namely, estab-
lishing a relished emotional distance from this In 2010, Undercover Boss was the lead-out pro-
workaday world of monotony and humiliation. gram after the Super Bowl. The year before,
There is, thus, something attractive about fol- that position had gone to another workplace
lowing Mike Rowe or the incognito CEO down show, The Office. The contrast between the two
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70 New Labor Forum 23(3)
is striking. Both are full of sentiment and melo- market express themselves in the production of
drama, but it is the fictional entry, The Office, reality entertainment; the viewers’ own insecu-
that develops its characters with far more depth rity is reproduced in front of them in the form of
and humanity than the reality show, by invest- the union-free show, made on the cheap.
ing years of study into their lives, their relation- As if seeking to clarify this contradiction—
ships with their work, and with each other. The between proletarian rhetoric and precarious
apparent paradox here is resolved by under- reality—the stars of these shows have aligned
standing the political economy of television themselves politically with the power of the
production. The Office was a high-quality prod- boss. When the workers at Cobalt Coal, a scene
uct, made painstakingly over long periods of of televised blue-collar heroism and danger,
time, with union labor; its conceit was that it voted for union representation in 2012 (after the
was a documentary. Within the constraints of show had been filmed), the company refused to
mass culture, short of actual documentary film- bargain, laid everyone off, and contracted out
making, it was as deep an exploration of the operations. In what might be an even more bra-
workplace as one could hope for. If Mike Rowe zen move, Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs has recently
or the makers of Coal really wanted to explore become a spokesman for Walmart. In a
the lives of workers in dirty, dangerous, and voiceover for a Super Bowl ad in which the
unglamorous industries for television audi- retail giant announced its intention to bring
ences, they would not be in the reality business manufacturing back to America, Rowe speaks
at all. The genre’s economic basis is in its rapid in the voice of a personified factory:
turnover and low overhead; its material condi-
tions forbid an actual human engagement with At one time, I made things. And I took
work or working-class people. Reality televi- pride in the things I made. And my belts
sion achieves its purpose, and departs from whirred, and my engines cranked. I
scripted television, by foreshortening the pro- opened my doors to all, and together, we
cess in which sentiment is turned into cash. filled pallets and trucks. I was mighty.
And then one day, the gears stopped
When the workers at Cobalt Coal turning. But I’m still here. And I believe I
voted for union representation will rise again. We will build things, and
build families, and build dreams. It’s time
after the show had been filmed, the to get back to what America does best.
company refused to bargain, laid Because work is a beautiful thing.
everyone off, and contracted out
operations. This is the company that is perhaps more sin-
gly responsible for the degradation of work than
In this way, the material process of making any other. Yet it stakes its brand on the slogan,
reality shows mirrors the dependent and pre- “Work is a beautiful thing.” It is the same con-
carious conditions of the work worlds it drama- tradictory aesthetic embedded in the famous
tizes and distorts. These programs mainly series of rousing, allegorical Chrysler Super
circumvent the various entertainment workers’ Bowl commercials, which suggested that
unions. They are typically much faster and Detroit cars are the best on the market because
cheaper to produce. As one editor active in the of the city’s hard luck and Rustbelt grit: “It’s the
Writers’ Guild put it, “Reality is the Walmart of hottest fires that make the hardest steel.” Even
TV production. Networks pit production com- more explicit is the Levi’s ad set in the old steel
panies against each other and bid production town of Braddock, Pennsylvania titled “Go
budgets down so low that producers often feel Forth to Work.” “A longtime ago things got bro-
that the added cost of union contracts would ken here. People got sad and left,” says the child
cost them, and their employees, their jobs.” The in the Levi’s voiceover. “Maybe the world
same forces that have eroded the quality, secu- breaks on purpose, so we can have work to do.
rity, and availability of work across the labor People think there aren’t frontiers anymore.
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Winant 71
They can’t see that frontiers are all around us.” valorizing a heroic consumerist past. Reality
It is a paean to creative destruction and capital shows about working, on the contrary, mock the
mobility, costumed in overalls and spoken universal instability of life under neoliberalism
through a ventriloquized working class. Here by disguising it in a tribute to labor’s past. This is
the fetishism of commodities—the manner in what Dirty Jobs, Undercover Boss, Coal and the
which market exchange hides the labor con- rest are doing. The true, if secret, subject of these
gealed in the product—eats its own tail. In this shows is capital’s contempt for labor, and its
new mode of salesmanship, the very appeal of attempt, through the culture industry, to rouse the
the product (whether jeans, a car, or a television working class to join it in an act of self-loathing.
show) rests explicitly on the labor that it is To mock the people the genre portrays while pre-
advertised to contain—though this labor tending to honor them is bad enough; to implicate
becomes distorted and mythologized in the pro- the audience in that mockery by drawing on frus-
cess of going on display. trated desire for honorable work is a particularly
Traditional social realism sought to undo hideous form of exploitation. A dirty job, indeed.
fetishization, to pull its audience closer in
toward work and workers. It aimed to close the Declaration of Conflicting Interests
distance between audience and subject through The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of inter-
a de-aestheticizing, grotesque style, full of est with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
bulging muscles and sweating brows. This publication of this article.
amounted, as Michael Denning has argued, to a
“laboring” of the culture, meant to force a polit- Funding
ical reckoning. The ersatz social realism of The author(s) received no financial support for the
reality television, on the contrary, aestheticizes research, authorship, and/or publication of this
labor, polishing its appearance into a smooth article.
and marketable commodity. If 1930s social
realism worked like a splash of cold water, real- Author Biography
ity television presents a mirage. Gabriel Winant is a PhD candidate in the
Reality shows about consumption bait the Department of History at Yale University. He is also
viewer with a fantasy about objects they will an elected member of the Steering Committee of the
never own, but they at least do not deal in such Graduate Employees and Students Organization,
ripe nostalgia—there is little pretense of UNITE HERE.
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