It’s a problem that many employees face now and then: What should they do if they have a truly awful boss?
Several workers in Adelle Waldman’s Help Wanted share this problem, and they came up with an unusual solution. They’ll help their boss land the promotion that she desperately wants.
In fact, when high-level executives of Town Square, the company they work for, fly in to interview them individually about Meredith, they’ll all give her over-the-top reviews.
There’s a method in their apparent looniness. Should Meredith get promoted, then they wouldn’t need to interact with her much—certainly not on a daily basis. Besides, someone would have to assume her current position, probably the likeable and self-effacing Little Will.
Which means that one of them could then have a crack at Little Will’s job as group manager.
And that position is an honest-to-goodness job—with a guaranteed 40 hours each week, a substantially higher salary on the order of $40,000 a year, and tantalizing perks such as health insurance and help with educational expenses.
Early on, some of them daydream about what they’d do if they’re chosen.
Nicole, for example, wouldn’t have to rely on food stamps or food banks anymore to feed her daughter. Val could then plug into Town Square’s tuition assistance program and earn a degree, maybe in engineering. And Diego, another contender, fancies getting his own car and moving his family from a substandard apartment and into “a place with a yard or even just a porch of their own.”
Typically, the phrase “worker solidarity” conjures up collective action—strikes, boycotts and the like, tactics that aim to improve pay and working conditions for all.
In Waldman’s novel, the corporation’s higher-ups have effectively discouraged union organizing. Those sorts of actions are out of reach. Hence, for all of its downsides as a zero-sum game, Operation Meredith feeds their individual hopes that they might get to a higher rung on this corporate ladder.
Before writing Help Wanted, Waldman spent half a year working in a retail setting, and that experience makes itself felt in her in-depth descriptions of the employees unloading merchandise from trucks and setting up store displays.
Her real-life research brings to mind Nickel and Dimed, a book that appeared in 2001. In that classic study, Barbara Ehrenreich wanted to see how well she could survive when working in so-called unskilled jobs. Over the course of several months, she found employment at a restaurant, a housecleaning firm and a Walmart, along with other sites. The challenges she faced were sometimes surprising and always substantial.
Reflecting on her experiences later, she noted that no job can actually be called “unskilled.” All the ones she got required concentration, and in each one she needed to “master new terms, new tools and new skills.” In addition, each required her to learn about and fit into a unique social world, each with its own particular characteristics. Figuring out how to interact with other workers and her managers was never a simple matter.
Paging through Help Wanted, one can’t help feeling the truth of Ehrenreich’s observations. The jobs at Town Square are demanding. Management, for example, urges the logistics team to unload a full truckload of merchandise within an hour, regardless of how large the load is. And outside of working hours they face additional demands: handling family needs, dealing with transportation issues, sometimes juggling two jobs.
To its credit, the novel also explores and humanizes the managers in this outfit, showing how, even when some try to stick up for workers’ rights and needs, they meet with failure and feel anxiety about how far they can pursue such agendas.
Waldman also shows how the economic climate has worsened the plight of workers in recent decades.
Joyce, one of the older Town Square employees who’s nearing retirement, often laments that the company’s been going downhill for quite a while. Fifteen years ago, she tells her younger co-workers, conditions were a whole lot better. For starters, people working in their store had enough to live decent lives. “‘You wouldn’t be rich, but you could live. If you wanted to make more, you could overtime.’”
Big Will, the store’s manager, also recognizes the downward trajectory. When he’s preparing to phone a dissatisfied customer, he reflects that market forces have compelled this corporate belt-tightening.
Once Amazon appeared and then began its rapid rise in market share, brick-and-mortar operations such as Town Square became an endangered species in the retail landscape. The firm’s investors, however, still wanted to see profits, and so cuts in worker benefits and customer service became important strategies to stay afloat.
When the workers’ plan to catapult Meredith into a better position does get going, parts of it call to mind a Mission: Impossible plot. Raymond, for example, must access the store’s security system and divert some of the in-store cameras so that their actions won’t be detected. The group members also devise a code to use on their walkie-talkies; that way they can covertly let each other know when key phases of the operation need to get under way.
Things don’t quite turn out as anticipated, though. An unexpected plot twist jeopardizes their intentions.
But all isn’t lost, apparently. In the final pages, some scuttlebutt comes their way that gives them reason to feel optimistic again. In the end, they all head back into the store, alive with newfound hope.
Waldman’s novel offers a grim portrait of an onerous work environment that many now face here and abroad, but she provides no glimmer of a path forward.
In this regard, it’s instructive—and sobering—to page through Nickel and Dimed these days, Ehrenreich’s book, as well as the afterword that she wrote in 2008.
Her book’s subtitle is just as troubling as it was back in 2001: “On (Not) Getting by in America.”
As are the final sentences in her afterword: “Ours is an economic culture that reflexively rewards and flatters the prosperous while punishing and insulting the poor, no matter how hard they work. Turning this around is the task of a lifetime, at least.”
