Iain Levison's story of his life as a wage slave is better characterized as memoir than manifesto. A Working Stiff's Manifesto, though unflinchingly honest, is long on job gripes you might overhear around the water cooler, short on rhetoric and calls to revolution. Levison certainly pulls no punches when it comes to recounting tales of woe from his many jobs.

Levison claims to have had 42 different jobs so far (30 of which he quit, nine of which he was fired from, and he can't recall what happened on the other three). He's worked the "slime line" (a fish processing plant in Alaska), moved furniture, catered posh parties, driven big rigs. Those with similar experience will find plenty to relate to here, but the reader should be warned: Levison's world is a buddy-buddy macho male bonding kind of place. Levison is unrelenting here, and hardly inclined toward examining his own biases.

Levison is a decent storyteller, if a rather unreflective one. He leaps - often very abruptly - from one wild tale to another, keeping the focus on his gripes, with minimal introspection about, say, how the system affects job choices under industrial capitalism (at the macro level). Those with a taste for deeper analysis, or who may be hoping for an exploration of the role of social, cultural, or economic factors, will be disappointed--Levison gladly leaves that territory to the philosophers, academics, social critics, and deep-thinker types. In all fairness, he does display a reflective impulse or two here and there, but the analysis doesn't delve too deep:

"It wasn't supposed to be like this. There was a plan once, but over the years I've forgotten what it was. It involved a house and a beautiful wife and a serviceable car and a fenced-in yard, and later a kid or two. Then I'd sit back and write the Great American Novel. There was an unspoken agreement between me and the Fates that, as I lived in the richest country in the history of the world, all these things would just come together eventually."

Levison's flippant, thumbing-nose-at-the-world tone permeates the entire book, even the rare moments of contemplation. In his concluding remarks Levison admits that having a four-year university English degree has made him impatient with job hunting, given the few jobs he is able to get. "It's filled me with a sense of entitlement," he goes on, as if we couldn't have guessed. Most college students suspect that a liberal arts degree isn't a fast-track ticket to success, and tailor their expectations accordingly. Few seem to share Levison's pervasive sense of entitlement. Perhaps more widespread, albeit less openly acknowledged, is Levison's not-too-subtle expectation that the rewards for succeeding as a heterosexually inclined man on the job should include "a beautiful wife." This calls out for a gender analysis, but it's nowhere to be found. Furthermore, feminists who may be hoping for a nod or two to the woes of working "pink-collar" wage slave jobs held by mostly women (such as waitressing or administrative work) will have to look elsewhere. Levison doesn't pretend to speak for women's experience of wage slavery, and rightly so, but he alienates his female readers unnecessarily with wisecracks that smack of misogyny. To wit:

"I'm as sick of work as the next guy, but I'm still practical enough to recognize the need for it. Without work, where would all the new breed of millionaires that I read about in Time magazine get their dry cleaning done? Who would fix their cars? Who would strip for them when they unload their trophy wives for the evening and go out for a night on the town?"

The glib tone works best when Levison leaves the sexism aside and sticks to tidbits that any wage slave can relate to, regardless of gender, such as when he describes a resume as

"a french term for 'page full of bullshit,' which glorifies three or four of the last forty-five jobs I've had and ignores the others."

In the same vein, he decides early on in his job-hunting trials that

"…they always want something more than just what the classified ad tells you. They want a good ass-kissing. I might be capable of it, if it wasn't demanded of me…she [the manager] thinks I have a bad attitude."

Indeed! Who among wage slaves hasn't felt this way after enduring a stern reprimand by a boss for something laughably trivial? Most anyone would end up with a "bad attitude" after enduring day after day of pasting on customer-friendly smiles.

Levison continues with scornful sarcasm, observing that in restaurant work

"…shift leaders are the corporate restaurant world's answer to prison trustees. For an extra fifty cents an hour, you become responsible for everything, basically performing management functions for cook's pay. This frees the managers up to do the more important things, like wander around and look stressed, or sit at a table and wait for the night to end so they can start in on the hard liquor when there's no one around."

On to drug testing. Levison's opinion is that

"Drug testing is hilarious stuff, the last stand in America's love-hate relationship with drugs…what drug testing accomplishes is to strike fear into the hearts of bank tellers, meat packers, assembly line workers, desk clerks, football players, and fish processors. It's a great eliminator. The words "WE DRUG TEST" tend to keep out the riffraff, people who know they'd fail."

Without the constant sarcasm and glibness, this kind of comment might, reasonably enough, invite further questioning of the status quo in which drug testing (which Levison admits is completely ineffective) is commonplace. But questioning the politics of it all is hardly Levison's specialty. Things get worse later in the book, where the increasingly bitter Levison comes off as not just flippant, but clueless, snarky, and shockingly insensitive. For example, he tolerates and fails to discourage the blatant racism and venomous homophobia of a bunkmate he encountered during his time in Alaska, a Ku Klux Klan member named Billy. Remarkably, most of Levison's annoyance with Billy the Klansman focuses on Billy's habit of showering only once a week. "It's not his politics," Levison quips," it's the way he smells". Don't count on this author to examine male privilege, racism, sexism, and homophobia, or to consider how his following the "path of least resistance" (as Allan Johnson would say) by tolerating Billy's racism, avoids challenging the very system (industrial capitalist patriarchy) that helps to perpetuate the deplorable job conditions he complains about. The reader might reasonably expect Levison to employ those critical thinking skills he supposedly acquired in college, perhaps even apply them to his own situation. No such luck.

At one point, Levison attends a sales recruitment meeting, resulting in a group attempt to suck him into the world of water filter sales. Understandably, he is put off by the fakery, the false enthusiasm, the likelihood that any doubts about this "opportunity for financial freedom" he might voice would likely be dismissed by "corporate blather." So far, so good, until he reveals his glaring lack of perspective with this hyperbole:

"It is the sales version of a gang rape."

I seriously doubt that gang rape victims would agree.

Most horrifyingly of all, he claims that he wishes he could have the "blinders-on" approach to his work that he often observes in the people he meets. This way, he could ignore the importance of what he's doing for money in the larger scheme of things--he could simply go to work, make money, and go home, without much further thought about the social or political implications of his actions.

"It would make everything so much easier," he grumbles with his usual petulance. "It doesn't matter what you spend the day doing, as long as you're moving up in the company. Making cars, selling beeswax, gassing Jews. A job's a job. That's how you move up in the world. Maybe I'll give it a try."

If I were to give Levison the benefit of the doubt here, I might assume this was a (feeble) attempt to demonstrate the nonsensicality of a work situation where it doesn't matter what you do, only what kind of money you make and/or how you climb the corporate ladder. But the humor leaves a very sour taste. It's hard not to conclude that Levison already has his blinders on, morally speaking. It's certainly doubtful that he has been influenced by the work of, say, C. Wright Mills, Zygmunt Baumann, Arno Gruen, or Derrick Jensen. Jensen, for example, argues that bureaucracy and other repressive forces have combined to create a world where people "just doing their jobs" are capable of committing atrocities with impunity. The fact that Levison doesn't even attempt to deepen his analysis sufficiently enough to be appalled by this state of affairs is plenty frightening enough. Adding the sarcastic reference to Nazi Germany on top of that is appalling and completely inappropriate.

Story after story of hard-driving gambling and boozing, especially by the fishing boat workers, accompany the endless sarcasm. These accounts, too, are hard to take, and Levison doesn't even hint at the tragic element they have in common. It's understandable what drives these men to the taverns and such after work--after all, wage slaves need ways to let off steam--but it's difficult, almost painful, to hear time and again of how these hardworking men fritter away their hard-earned money. Apparently they are wholly resigned to their fate as wage slaves, not even entertaining the faintest glimpse of hope for a way out of the hell-hole. Bit by bit, they are gambling and drinking away the money that might be saved toward the eventual goal of future freedom from working soul-killing jobs. It's not that I'm unsympathetic to their plight, however. If I were in similar circumstances, I too would probably drink pretty heavily. But it's heartbreaking to witness one worker after another succumbing to a pernicious catch-22 of full-time work under industrial capitalism: work saps the energy for making future plans (including saving money), but making future plans (and saving money) is exactly what might provide an eventual road out of wage slavery.

Levison eventually resigns himself to a life of drudgery. He seems to have a special bone to pick with those who've found a way out of the wage economy, however temporary. One of his favorite targets is Henry David Thoreau. After snidely quipping that Thoreau's credibility to speak on topics of self-reliance is strained because he relied on his mother to do his laundry (applying his quintessentially American "make it on your own" standard blindly, ignoring the possibility that there may be a healthy kind of interdependence here), he then proceeds to take Thoreau to task for the cardinal sin of having an inheritance:

"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams, Thoreau said. Later, he added that most men live lives of quiet desperation, indicating that few, if any of us, were taking his advice. Fuck him, he had a trust fund. Who the hell else but a rich man could afford to spend a summer sitting by a lake thinking about life?"

Class differences are certainly worth a closer look here, but we won't get anything that thoughtful from Levison. He seems to prefer spewing venom toward the well-to-do instead of challenging the status quo. Would Levison's own wage slavery end if he came upon a sufficent sum of cash, whereupon the fragmented pieces of his life would all suddenly fall into place? If only it were that simple! To see this, one need only read biographies of lottery winners. Levison fails to appreciate the idea that it takes far more than money to eliminate wage slavery, individually as well as culturally. Of course, money would definitely be of assistance--but, as anyone who's inherited money and spent it all wastefully might say, it's hardly the whole story.

Levison's angry white male adolescent-rebellion biting sarcasm ultimately falls flat. A Working Stiff's Manifesto: A Memoir is little more than a good-ol'-boys gripe session, full of hubris and heaps of scorn. Recommended remedy: Studs Terkel's Working, in savory doses.

(c) Copyright 2003, D. JoAnne Swanson, Creating Livable Alternatives to Wage Slavery. All rights reserved.

CLAWS rating:1