In this culmination of his half-century of involvement with American workers and their traditions, Archie Green explores occupational expression---stories, songs, customs, beliefs, artifacts---on the job and in institutions such as trade unions.

Combining ethnographic description with analysis drawn from folklore, history, literary criticism, art history, linguistics, and philosophy, Green presents ten case studies in which he reflects on single words as social texts ("Wobbly," "fink") and clustered words within anecdotes, tales and ballads.