Dean Baker's Reviews > Help Wanted

Always Good to See Ordinary Workers Treated as Real People
This was an entertaining and realistic treatment of the lives of people working in a superstore in upstate New York. Adelle Waldman draws on her experience working odd hours offloading trucks to create a humorous account of workers who conspire to get their awful boss promoted.
The plan is that by pushing her up the store hierarchy, they will get her off their backs. Her promotion will also create openings for the workers to fill her position, and possibly for others to move up. They agree to praise her to the sky to the managers making the decision, completely ignoring what they actually think about her.
The cast of characters is a realistic picture of who we might expect to find working low-paying retail jobs. Young people who either just finished high school or didn’t finish. There are people with criminal records and drug problems who are trying to straighten out and at least be able to afford their own apartment. There are also older women who spent a lifetime working at a low-paying job in retail, who now eagerly await being eligible for Social Security.
The book gives a good glimpse of these people’s struggles. There are people desperately trying to make a relationship work with jealous or impractical partners. There are the problems arranging childcare for young kids, especially when dealing with irregular hours. And there are those who have the important advantage of a parent they can rely on to provide childcare or temporary housing, when needed.
The book also gives good accounts of the interactions with the upper crust, the college-educated supervisors and managers, some of whom are buffoons and some of whom are cunning, and at least outwardly caring.
The great strength of this book is that it does not try to do too much. It is not lecturing us on the lives of the working class. It gives us a realistic glimpse of a life that will likely be largely alien to the more educated and upscale people who will undoubtedly be the primary readers of the book. We see the struggles to get enough hours to make ends meet, to figure out how to get to work when you no longer have a car, and how to deal with childcare when you can’t pay for it. It’s worth peoples’ time.