In A Worker's Diary Risto Jarva examines the disintegration of the marriage between a laborer and a middle-class woman. Juhani, a welder, takes a job in Tampere, on the west coast of Finland, that often keeps him apart from his wife. Eventually he drifts into an affair. Like his factory mates, Juhani attributes his unhappy predicament to a society that has little regard for its workers. But things are more complicated than that, as shown by an uncle who embodies the callous nostalgia of the old guard, still living Finland's War of Independence and ignoring the sacrifices of the generation that had to clean up after the cruel realities of that war. Considered by some critics to be the most important Finnish film of its decade, A Worker's Diary ushered in a modern treatment of themes of work, class, and the divisive effect of the recent past. Jean-Pierre Gorin wrote, "In Finland as elsewhere it's well known that the working class has a hard time going to Heaven. Risto Jarva's chronicle of (a) working class hero is closer to Brechtian chamber music than to John Lennon analytical rock'n'roll."