Whither Writing Workers?
An unpublished letter to Harper's Magazine on missing American worker's literature.
This essay was originally a Letter solicited by Harper’s Magazine, but ultimately unpublished. Alas. It is the first in a new effort to share notes on reading and literature.
Workers’ literature, books on labor by labor, is having a moment in the United States — but seemingly only in translation. That was my impression reading “The Conscience of the City” by Simon Paré-Poupart, translated by Pablo Strauss.
At my day job, we’re covering a boom of workers’ literature from China. Explosively popular within China since 2020, these books tell of assembly-line blues and sprinting up stairwells, McDonald’s delivery in hand. They’re now the darlings of America’s translated Chinese literature scene: Adrift in the South headlines this year’s class; I Deliver Parcels in Beijing made waves in 2025.
This makes a certain amount of sense. Now that “Made in China” announces geopolitical power, readers want to know, “By who exactly?”
But the fundamental conditions that make workers’ lit popular in China exist in the United States too: alienation from production, COVID-induced recognition of “essential workers,” guilt at stratification, curiosity about the other half. So where is the homegrown American workers’ lit?
There is plenty of recent American writing on labor. Much is in the model of Sinclair’s Jungle: elite muckrakers undercover among the masses. A Rhodes Scholar’s account of unionizing a Starbucks and an academic-activist’s tales of working checkout are salient recent examples. These are, at best, only temporary views from below.
So where is the literature of labor? I posit three possibilities: American workers are either not writing, not writing about labor, or are not writing in English. I’m doubtful that American workers are not writing, though perhaps in his spare time the American lineman writes space fantasies rather than of maintaining the grid. Most likely, I suspect, is that the hardest, most dangerous jobs are done by those who do not write in English and American publishing is ill-equipped to identify and nurture talent not writing in vernacular.
Wherever it is, I’d like to read it. In fact, I need to. If we want to have cities fit for the 21st century, it’s not merely the labor of the Simon Paré-Pouparts of the world that is essential, but their voice too. ∎
