We have forgotten what work was like for our grandparents. We don't remember when six-year-old children labored eight-hour days in textile mills for ten cents. Or when the only thing worse than a job was no job at all, and either condition could kill you.

In the century just past, our grandparents left their farms--or left their countries--to labor in city shops and factories. Then, they waged a bitter, bloody struggle to work in conditions that wouldn't kill or maim them. They helped create, but were not part of, the most massive middle class in history.

Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, the great-grandchildren of farmers and immigrants--you and I--work in comfortable, ergonomically correct workstations. Rather than laboring to survive, we consume at record levels. In part because of their hard work, we can afford to ask the existential questions about meaning, purpose, and quality of life.

The Fox family (anglicized from the German) represents this American journey well. The details of their drama are unique, but the global upheavals they experienced--wars, depression, millennial prosperity--were the same for all. Theirs is the story of Everyworker.

The beet fields

George and Katherine Fox came to the United States from Russia in 1908 with Henry and Sophie, their two surviving children. They had already buried three others in Russia.

The Foxes are VolgaDeutsche--Germans who lived in Russia for centuries but maintained their separate villages, their own language, and their Lutheran religion. They were recruited by farmers in Saginaw, Michigan--an area that still has a thriving community of VolgaDeutsche--to work the sugar beet fields. The family was guaranteed work for three years.

Farmers contracted with field workers to maintain a certain acreage throughout the season, from the first thinning in May through harvest in October. Dawn to dusk. Six days a week. Workers were paid according to the number of fields they maintained. No health care. No retirement plan. No pay during the winter. No assurance of work in the spring.

Every family member worked. "We crawled between the rows to do the thinning. Grandma made pads for our knees, but by the end of the season our knees were pretty tough," recalled Gertrude, the Fox's granddaughter. She began working in the fields when she was six. She is now 80 years old. "It was a living, but it wasn't a life. It never let you get off your knees."

Global troubles and family cohesion

In 1929, unemployment stood at a miniscule 3.3 percent. By 1933, it had surged to 25 percent. One-quarter of the workforce was out of work.

Neither the giddy prosperity of the Roaring 20s nor the bitter years of the Depression seems to have perturbed this stolid German family. The Depression only further constricted its already meager standard of living. (There was no such thing as "lifestyle.")

Grandmother Katherine ruled the budget with an iron fist. Even in town, she kept her cow and chickens. She dried her apples and plums.

The Foxes were not among the 13 million unemployed. George worked odd jobs in the off-season and his older sons worked at factories several days a week.

By the time Franklin Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act of 1935, George Fox had given up the beet fields. After working sugar beets for 25 years, through two world wars and a worldwide depression, he could no longer maintain the fields alone. But neither did he benefit from the new-fangled social programs. George Fox died at home of a heart condition at 75. He never took a government penny.

Katherine lived for many more years, supported in her simple needs by her children and grandchildren. She died in her sleep at 87, having just put up a fresh batch of grape jam. She had also managed to save $250 toward her burial.

The factory

Gertrude, born into scarcity and raised by her grandparents after both her parents died in the global influenza epidemic, yearned for more. The lure of work drew her out of high school early and into the factories. "I'm going to work as much as I can," she told her husband. "I'm working to get off my knees."

While her two sons were young, Gertrude took a job on the second shift at Saginaw Steering Gear, one of General Motors' cavernous factories that churned out the front chassis and steering columns for its vehicles.

At first she assembled small parts--1,250 turn signal columns a day on one line. ("I was lucky. I never had to work on the big lines. They went really fast.") The pace was always fierce, but the job could be made either bearable or downright intolerable depending on the disposition of the foreman. "Until the union came, you had to watch your step," said Gertrude. "If a foreman came in and talked dirty, you couldn't complain. He could do anything he wanted."

For Gertrude, the union was a protector, a force that made working conditions more fair and gave workers some control over their environment.

Gertrude worked at Saginaw Steering Gear for 23.9 years and retired in 1976 with a comfortable pension and medical benefits buttressed by Medicaid. She needs no help from her sons. "I thank God every day for my retirement," she said. She knows it was not always thus.

The cubicle

The great-grandsons of George and Katherine Fox inherited the full flower of their forebear's labor. Comfortably ensconced in the middle class, they reached levels of education and income unimaginable in their grandparents' time. Yet, as with the rest of their "hippie" generation, they were restless and discontent.

Greg, the youngest, stayed in school to avoid the Vietnam War, eventually earning a master's degree in education. But after working for a few years as a teacher, he became a real estate broker to improve his income.

His older brother, Edward, started out as an engineer for a Big Three auto company. His career bumped into but did not overlap the PC revolution. His designs for windshield wiper mechanisms and other car parts were hand-drawn. Tolerances and stresses were computed with tables and calculators (but not the slide rules of an earlier time). Full-size models of new cars were still constructed in clay.

Edward also switched careers midstream to improve his quality of life--but not his income. He earned a master's degree in theology and entered the ministry in 1982.

Now, at a new century's dawn, their children, the great-great grandchildren of immigrant laborers, are muscling their way into the workforce with bright ideas and e-IPOs of their own. They are courted by employers hungry for a skilled and technologically savvy worker. Their future seems gilded with opportunity.

Backward and forward

Their future is also uncertain. Work will require more skill and the ability to absorb rapid change. There will be broader diversity in the work force. The struggle to balance family and work will continue and perhaps intensify.

Yet, the past holds lessons that we do well to remember. Bleak as their life appears, George and Katherine Fox were honest and diligent, earning the trust and respect of landowners who employed them year after year. Difficult as the work was, their family worked together. Each person's contribution was valued and directly affected the family's welfare. They managed to raise six children in a foreign land on a field worker's income and keep their faith, their dignity, and their relationships intact. That is a breathtaking achievement.

In these times, the social buttresses that contribute to contentment and meaning--community, faith, and family--have deteriorated. Rebuilding those will take hard work of a different kind. And that work might be the most challenging of all.

KATE CONVISSOR's confused notions about work come from her indigestible ancestry of Scottish Presbyterian ministers and Irish dirt farmers. She writes regularly for Herman Miller and occasionally for Salon and other national magazines.