Sheila addresses a group of home-care aides in a room with wood paneling and soft light filtering through the curtains. They are wearing navy blue scrubs and begin with a prayer before introducing themselves and their jobs. Sheila is their manager, and they are speaking to a documentary crew filming their meeting for a mini-series titled "Working: What We Do All Day." Some of the aides describe their close relationships with their clients, while others voice grievances about the payment and time-keeping systems.
This unleashes a flood of resentment that catches Sheila and the viewers by surprise. "Working" is a limited Netflix series hosted by Barack Obama and produced in part by Higher Ground, which aims to showcase the lives of workers from all levels in three different companies. Viewers get to compare and contrast the daily lives of a Manhattan housekeeper and the CEO of the hotel she works for. The show's production value is impressive, portraying the lives of working-class people in an honest and straightforward manner, which is a rare sight on TV.
Watching Sheila's meeting unravel in "Working" feels as subversive and enlightening as Studs Terkel's book. However, the show struggles when explaining the specific reasons why such resentment has built up. It tends to rely on periodic voice-overs, where Barack Obama delivers vast amounts of information through archival footage of domestic workers, the movie "Wall Street," or the economist Milton Friedman. The show touches on broad systemic forces that affect the working class, from the disregard for workers during the New Deal era to the macroeconomics of the shrinking middle class. However, it fails to reflect that America's perception of its workplaces is outdated.
The show aims to understand the hopes, dreams, and contradictions of working people but also wants to showcase America's transformation from an industrial to a service economy. Nevertheless, it scarcely depicts changes like job insecurity, erratic scheduling, or invasive workplace surveillance, which characterized the Obama era. The erosion of the portrayal of working-class people on TV follows a similar trend. The decline is evident through shows like Norman Lear’s, which focused on working-class people in the past and are replaced by shows portraying upscale professionals. The show concludes that even with hours of montage and exposition, the reasons behind the problem are much larger and more complicated than what can be covered even in a few hours of television.