I picked up this book after Elise read it, which followed us listening to an interview with Rose on the "On Being" radio show. Rose is a professor of education at UCLA, and is two degrees of separation from Elise in academic terms (he was her advisor's mentor). His work focuses on vocational education, and this book is on that topic.

The general idea of this book is something like the following. Blue-collar jobs require a variety of meaningful cognitive skills, which are generally not recognized, either in our culture at large or in vocational education programs specifically. The failure to recognize these skills means that these positions, and by extension these people, are undervalued by our society, and that the vocational programs that we create do not serve them very well in the sense of helping them to find meaning and value in work.

I will not go into too much depth summarizing the types of cognitive skills he is talking about here, but to give some of the flavor, one of my favorite examples was from the chapter on hairdressers. Very often, as we all know, an interaction between a client and a hairdresser will start with the client showing the hairdresser a picture of a hairstyle and saying that he/she wants something "like that." As one of Rose's interviewees points out, it would generally end poorly if the stylist simply took this at face value and tried to replicate the image. Instead, she says, the client is usually implicitly after some feeling that is evoked by the image more so than the specific appearance, and it is the job of the hairstylist both to identify what this core sense is, and determine how to translate it into the specific case at hand. This is a complex task involving both emotional intelligence (for the first step, how to "read" the client) and cognitive intelligence (for the second step, how to implement an abstract form in a concrete instance). She also links this objective to the stereotypical "chit-chat" that goes on between hairdresser and client, indicating that this is an important part of how the hairdresser develops an ability to interpret the client's expressed desires. I had never thought of this possibility before, but it made a lot of sense when I read it.

The book has a strong family relation to Studs Terkel's "Working," which communicates similar ideas in a much more implicit way. I thought Rose's book was convincing and powerful, and shared the obvious humanism of Terkel's book. Significantly, I think Rose avoids some of the common pitfalls of upper-class authors writing about a subject like this. He doesn't make the book a paean to the lost values of craft, and doesn't soft-pedal the fact that a lifetime of blue-collar work can take a brutal toll on a person. He avoids the alt-elitism of a book like "The World Beyond Your Head," which argues for valuing manual labor by focusing on rare ultra-master craftsmen and ignoring all of the people who install toilets. Not to bring everything back to Bernie Sanders, but I think it is often lost in our political discourse today that over half of working-age Americans don't have a college degree. It is important that we remember this (people in the elite classes may not know anyone without a college degree), and think about the value of their work to our society, and how we can best recognize that.

Related to this, I also found it refreshing that Rose gives fairly equal attention to the traditionally female blue-collar jobs of hairdresser and waitress--as books like TWBYH tend to focus on macho work like motorcycle repair, I would guess because these already benefit from some positive valence in our culture due to patriarchy.

Rose is obviously very intelligent and a good writer, but I think his book is further enhanced by the way he brings his own personal history into it. The chapter on waitresses focuses primarily on Rose's own mother, who was a lifelong waitress, and there is also a fair amount of discussion of Rose's uncle, who worked as an industrial laborer in railyards. Rose makes it clear that he got interested in this topic in part from reflecting on his own mother's life, and I think the book is stronger for the fact that he doesn't assume some false pose of impartiality. I can see how this would be difficult for an academic writer to do, and I only wish more would do it!

This book is not a "how-to" guide; it is a celebration. O! I sing in praise of the working class, of sweat and blue collars, of physical laborers! Because brawn never comes without brains, and people who work are people first.

3.5 stars out of 5. Impassioned study, in the vein of Studs Terkel, delivered with energy and emotion.

Rose analyzes the cognitive functions necessary to successfully work in a number of fields that are often considered semi-skilled or unskilled labor, such as waiting tables, hairdressing, plumbing, and auto work. I didn't need convincing that these are all intellectually challenging jobs, as I tried my hand at waitressing and found it mentally and physically exhausting. However, the way he breaks down the skills and thought processes is fascinating, and the implications for "vocational education" or what we now call Career and Technical Education are important. I think Rose's book issues a challenge to teachers, not only in vocational subjects but in all subjects to find ways to engage and develop the minds of all of our students, no matter what their post-secondary plans might be. Additionally, we are all challenged to think more highly of our students on the so-called vocational track and to respect the work of their minds, whether or not we think they are excelling in our subject areas. However, Rose also challenges us as a society to overcome the divide between people who more highly value "book learning" and people who more highly value "real work" - in many ways this divide comes from our own defense mechanisms that come into play when we find some work challenging and perhaps beyond us. Our scorn protects us from feeling stupid or untalented. When we can appreciate all forms of intelligence perhaps we can build a happier society. Of course, Rose says all of this much better than I can, so I highly recommend his fascinating book.

There is no such thing as unskilled labor.

I feel a very narrow and specific audience would rate this book as 5 stars. If you happen to be in a graduate program and are focussed towards vocational/trades education, then you may find this helpful for building arguments and developing resources for further research.
Outside of that….probably nothing amazing lies within

Explores the intelligence and cognitive skills involved in blue-collar work, and its implications for education and how we organize society. The author focuses first on a variety of different types of jobs, including waitressing, hairstyling, and a number of construction trades. I found the chapters on carpentry and welding especially interesting. The ideas that the author put forward were ones I was already familiar with, so it wasn't a true eye-opener for me, but it was interesting nonetheless. Although the book is ten years old, it remains relevant, and it would be great to see its insights reflected in the system - no such luck yet.

A great book for insight into areas of work both those of others and your own.