Best of Temp Slave

Rating:
Summary: Didn't want it to end!
Review: My only complaint with this book is that its too short! I wish it were longer! I loved the stories, they were so entertaining!

Rating:
Summary: Dark humor,could use more thought provoking stories.
Review: Thought this book used too many negative incidents, no lessons learned. If you want an original, entertaining, positive and negative look at temping from America's first authored temp (even testified for temps in Congress) read Temporarily Yours by Wendy Perkins. You will love it!

Rating:
Summary: To live outside the law you must be honest
Review: While this book is an excellent recount of the truth of life as lived for most of us (including an essay on what it is like for a real working person to live and work in France, which is no piqnique by any means), literature has a dual duty.

One is to tell the truth about mere suffering and of course Temp Slave does so.

The other is to reinforce the lesson with a committment to truth and Temp Slave does not do so.

That is, it is disingenuous to want to hold the wicked capitalists to schoolbook notions of honesty and plain dealing when within the same essay you recommend an interesting variety of ways of soldiering, goofing off, and stealing time.

Leon Trotsky tried and failed to answer the question of ethics in "Their Morals and Ours." One can read Lev Davidovich as wanting to live justly but ultimately painting himself in a dead end because of a misreading of Marx, and the result was tragic, involving as it did a hammer in the head in Mexico.

The only answer is an absolute committment, from the subordinate side of the job equation, to honesty and fair dealing, leavened with an absolute committment to solidarity with one's fellow workers, extending up into middle management, and, to the extent that CEOs are human, to Jack Welch of General Electric. The lesson of our century is that peaceful change succeeds whereas violent revolution and sabotage does not, instead producing the opposite of the desired effect (as well as good old Fascism.)

The hatred we've seen for people like Mihail Gorbachev seems focused on their verbosity (Gorbachev gets on Russian TV, only to be cut off.) But verbosity itself may only be the process of peaceful change speaking the truth in Taoist fashion, a dripdrop of water wearing away the rock.

The authors in Temp Slave seem anti-intellectual and so exhausted by their jobs and pleasures that they would not sit still for a Gorbachev: but I cannot see how they then have any alternative to today's computerized and prison-like work place.

Human affairs do not follow the rules of machines and soldiering, goofing off and stealing time does not make it hard for the bosses. They have ways of predicting such antics and compensating for them, and one of the most popular ways is cracking down on us fools who try not to goof off.

Human affairs follow the laws of the dialectic, or perhaps chaos theory. Thus bloody-mindedness is not a revolutionary act taking place in a vacuum but dialogic...it sends a message to the bosses, all right, and the message gets an instant response in the form of INCREASED amounts of workplace surveillance and increased crackdowns on The Rest of Us.

It's all very well to feel oh-so-superior to your lifer coworkers when you are a temp of arcane sexual persuasion with an advanced degree in Irish economic history. For it is true that society and the workplace damages people.

But check out your own damage first. While the women narrators of Temp Slave try to maintain a connection with the earth by taking breaks in a nearby park, the male writers seem to maintain a connection with Budweiser in their off-hours.

That's all very well: it is not for me to deny a workingman his pleasures. But it means that we cannot make absolute statements about what pathetic losers fulltime employees are when in many cases they are making the best of a bad situation.

To live outside the law, you must be honest, and I look for a literature of work that is honest all the way down. I do not find it in Temp Slave. Instead, I found it in Ellen Ullman's SLAVES TO THE MACHINE, about what it is like to be a REAL computer programmer, only a cut or so higher on the food chain than the temp.

I know you always say that you agree: so where are you tonight, Sweet Marie?