Abstract
His name is Larry, and he has been around for several decades and could certainly be considered a super-super. Walk down the block where he carries out his daily duties, and his immaculate handiwork is strikingly evident. The plants are well manicured, the sidewalk is cleanly swept, and even the honey locust trees are trimmed. The job of the super is multifaceted and requires performing minor repairs; supervising staff, which includes the concierge, porters, and handymen; strong communications skills, particularly in dealing with tenants; and maintaining the building’s basic operating systems. But to maintain the streetscape outside the building proper is beyond perhaps the call of duty. “My job is basically to work with the people in my building and do what it takes to make the place run smoothly. But the sidewalk is part of the block where I work on other buildings, too,” says Larry, whose working knowledge or “practical know-how,” which is “knowledge in the hands,” began with his father before he came to the city. His father once told him, “When you got to make do, do what you’re told to do, which is to say, when you make the effort to follow the instructions that someone with more skills than you shows you, that’s making do. But one thing for sure in this job, the work shows in your hands.” The manual competence seemingly lost to the present generation is alive and well with supers like Larry and others you will meet. The work they do is meaningful and useful, and Larry expressed his satisfaction with the work every time I spoke with him.
In this job, the work shows in your hands.
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Notes
Douglas Harper, Working Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 18.
Morris Kleiner, Licensing Occupations: Ensuring Quality or Restricting Competition? (Kalamazoo, MI: W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, 2006), 1.
For a summary of state licensing laws, see David Mitchell, “Undermining Individual and Collective Citizenship: The Impact of Exclusion Laws on the African-American Community,” Fordham Urban Law Journal 34 (2007): 833, 850–52, 855, 879, and 882.
George Friedmann, The Anatomy of Work (New York: Free Press, 1961), 12.
Tim Pachirat, Every Eleven Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).
Harry Wolcott, The Man in the Principal’s Office (Lanham, MD: Altamira, 1973), 168.
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© 2016 Terry Williams
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Williams, T. (2016). Doing What Supers Do. In: Harlem Supers. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137439925_4
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