Help Wanted, by Adelle Waldman.

 

A funny and poignant look at the lives of American retail workers.

Town Square is a big box store in upstate New York, one that sells everything from organic food to electronics. Team Movement is a group of employees who unpack and put out on display all of the store’s goods. It’s an arduous job, involving lots of lifting and running around the store. The hours are not good and conditions worse. Work is precarious, with employees always after more hours, while finding their entitlements and perks being eroded over time. There is lots of bitching and sniping among the workers as they strive, uselessly, to try and improve their lot. At one stage in the novel, as the workers plot, they even laugh uproariously at the hopeless idea of starting a union.

An opportunity to improve workplace conditions happens when the hated middle manager, Meredith, is slated for promotion. The members of Team Movement plot to get her advanced. The idea is that if Meredith is promoted to Store Manager, they can get her of their backs. Spearheading this effort is Val, a plucky go-getter. She signs everyone up to the plan to give excellent feedback about Meredith’s performance when corporate’s head honchos visit the store to conduct employee interviews, and also decide to sabotage her rival Anita’s chances for the position. (Her display work is ruthlessly messed up before the corporate visit.). There is one dissenter, the surly Nicole, who thinks Meredith should die in a ditch. But eventually she too is convinced to come on board.

Val’s strategy is on course to succeed, when things suddenly go pear shaped. Milo, an efficient worker with anger management issues, decides to tell corporate that Meredith is a drug pusher (she offers caffeine tablets during the night shifts). The corporate interviewers become alarmed and must get to the bottom of things. Further complications are thrown into the mix when a store manager also has some interesting revelations about Meredith. 

Help Wanted is Adelle Waldman’s second novel. Her first, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., appeared in 2013. Waldman did a stint as a night worker at a big box store and turned her experiences into a novel. What she offers here is a witty and perceptive satire on modern corporate America, taking a scalpel to crushing contemporary workplace culture. There are plenty of laugh out loud moments and clever zingers. While Help Wanted  most certainly presents a theatre of the ridiculous, there is a deeply humane undercurrent. All of Team Movement’s workers are given fully fleshed out back stories, dealing with lost love, rejection, financial struggles, the difficulties of raising children while working multiple jobs, and the constant drumbeat of money troubles. As someone who has worked in the corporate world, I can attest to the book’s psychological accuracy: the manipulation, spin and stress. There is an aura of terrible impotence as the workers try to improve their lot, the irony being that they decide to try and get someone they hate promoted, while laughing off any idea of starting a union.

Help Wanted explains the desperate lives of America’s poorly paid workers, showing how the middle class has been hollowed out. Given the current grievances of America’s poor and overworked, it probably goes someway to explaining Trumpism. 

A startling portrait of corporate America and how it crushes people.

Help Wanted, by Adelle Waldman. Published by Serpent's Tail. $24.99

APRIL 25