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Did politicians participate in all that denial? This issue goes unaddressed, but the series does touch on the idea that popular media has long neglected the workplace.
政客们参与了所有这些否认吗？这个问题没有得到处理，但这部纪录片确实触及了一个问题，就是大众媒体长期以来忽视了职场。
Television, Obama argues at one point, used to be full of representations of working and middle-class people and their jobs -- say, in Norman Lear shows like "Good Times" or "All in the Family."
奥巴马曾称，电视上曾经有很多表现工薪阶层和中产阶级及其工作的内容，比如，诺曼·利尔的《好时光》或《全家福》等节目。
After the Reagan era, though, popular shows tended to follow upscale professionals, or to look more like "Friends" or "Seinfeld," portraying people who lived comfortably despite being vaguely or fancifully employed.
然而，在里根时代之后，大众电视节目倾向于追随高端专业人士，或者看起来更像《老友记》或《宋飞正传》，剧中人物的工作或模糊不清或不切实际，但都过着舒适的生活。
The nation's jobs have shifted from industrial to service work, but even that seismic change -- a work force now epitomized by nurses, waiters, retail clerks, delivery drivers -- is rarely reflected in the stories we consume.
美国的工作已经从工业转向服务业，但即使是这种翻天覆地的变化--现在的劳动力以护士、服务员、零售店员和快递司机为代表--也很少反映在我们消费的故事中。
Neither are developments like the erosion of job security, the rise of erratic scheduling, the invasive workplace surveillance -- changes that marked Obama's very own era in the White House.
工作保障的削弱、日益不确定的工作时间安排、工作监控的入侵也很少得到反映，这些变化都是奥巴马入主白宫时代的标志。
"Obtuseness in ‘respectable' quarters is not a new phenomenon," Terkel writes in his book. He offers the example of Henry Mayhew, whose 19th-century reports on working people in London "astonished and horrified readers of The Morning Chronicle."
特克尔在他的书中写道："‘体面'群体的迟钝并不是一个新现象。"他举了亨利·梅休的例子，梅休在19世纪关于伦敦劳动人民的报道让《早间纪事报》的读者"感到震惊和惊骇"。
The writer Barbara Ehrenreich later cataloged the way journalists and scholars "discovered" poverty in the 1960s after the breathless enthusiasm of the postwar economy cooled. ("We seem to have suddenly awakened," the critic Dwight Macdonald wrote in a New Yorker review of one book on the topic, "to the fact that mass poverty persists.")
作家芭芭拉·艾伦瑞克后来记录了当人们对战后经济的无暇喘息的热情冷却后，记者和学者如何在20世纪60年代"发现"贫困。(评论家德怀特·麦克唐纳在《纽约客》上对关于这一主题的一本书的评论中写道："我们似乎突然意识到，大规模贫困仍然存在。"）
It's easy to sense something similar in the audience for a documentary like "Working" -- a sudden, belated understanding of the indignities creeping up toward even the most insulated professionals, and a growing sense of the workplace as a site of urgent, high-stakes conflict.
在纪录片《工作》的观众中，很容易察觉类似的现象：突然且过晚地意识到即便是对于最受到保护的专业人士，尊严的缺失也在悄然发生，以及日益察觉到职场是一个发生着紧迫的高风险冲突的地方。
In the final episode, Obama suggests his biggest worry is polarization, a fear of the problems that will arise if we cannot pay people enough for them to find dignity in their work.
在最后一集中，奥巴马表示他最大的担忧是两极分化，担心如果我们不能支付足够的工资，让人们在工作中找到尊严，就会出现各种问题。
Terkel's own animating concerns were more jarringly radical and succinct: He began his book with the admonition that since it was about work, it was, "by its very nature, about violence -- to the spirit as well as to the body."
特克尔更具鼓动性的担忧以更刺耳、更激进、更简洁的方式被表达出来：他在书的开篇处警告说，因为本书是关于工作的，所以"从本质上讲，本书是关于暴力的--无论是对精神还是对身体。"
Obama is not quite there. His "Working" wants to show us what America's jobs look like today, and to wake us to the possibility that we have spent too long underestimating their profound, dignity-robbing, politically consequential transformation.
奥巴马没有做到这个地步。他的《工作》想要向我们展示美国现今的工作是什么样子，并让我们意识到，我们可能太久以来都低估了工作所发生的深刻的、剥夺尊严的、具有政治意义的变革。
The series would need hours of explanatory montage to make up for all that lost time; if there's anything it makes clear, it's that the problem is far larger and more urgent than a few hours of television can aim to capture.
这部纪录片需要好几个小时的蒙太奇镜头来做出解释，才能弥补所有那些失去的时间，如果它解释清楚了什么东西的话，那就是工作问题远比几个小时的电视节目所能表达的要更加庞大和紧迫。
