Customer Reviews

Best of Temp Slave!

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Best of Temp Slave by Jeff Kelly Garrett County Press; ISBN: 1891053426

This entertaining little book includes over 30 hilarious essays, along with numerous cartoons and comics about temping. The writing is by temps, who tell the whole truth about temping. They also offer great advice for temps on how to get even with the bosses.

Definitely not a rose-colored-glasses view of temping or work in non-union, corporate dominated America. This book covers the daily grind of insecurity, humiliation, and insult that temps endure. Instead of dream world advice, Temp Slave contains advice based upon real world experience, where neither the temp agencies or their clients give a flying damn about the temp, except for the mega-bucks we generate for them.

It is very refreshing to read a book by temps and for temps that show how many temps feel the abused. Best of Temp Slave lets temps see how they are not alone or aberrant in their feelings of abuse and insult. This book is an excellent contribution to the task of re-creating the worker solidarity that is necessary to overturn abusive working conditions in corporate dominated America.

In an era of downsizing, rightsizing and mergers, American employees have taken a beating. Never has that been more evident than in this supposidly humorous portrayal of temps (temporary employees) in the workplace today. Brief stories, comic strips and essays relay the plight of temps in their own words. Jeff Kelly admirably tries to give temps a voice through his zine and in this book. But what's here are endlessly wining, devious and downright hostile tales of employees, which I found horrifying. You'll read about major supply rip-offs (as if it's okay to steal because you're a temp and not treated like you want); nasty attitudes; plots to disrupt work and harm others; misplaced mail plots, and on and on. You'll also have the displeasure of reading dark comics that are riddled with anger and hate. I've been a temp, and I do think there are plenty of problems with temp agencies and how companies treat temps. But most of the temps featured in this book obviously don't want to do anything constructive about the situation. They just want to squeeze all they can from their assignments and irritate as many people as possible. Okay, one or two of the stories are funny. And alas, at least Kelly has provided a forum for temps, and in doing that, one could argue he's being constructive and his book is serving a purpose. But I found it a real downer.

Brutal and funny from start to finish, Best of TS! showed me office life from the pov of the temps that keep shuffling in and out. There's also some interesting stuff about French labor practices and working construction jobs. Much better than the publisher's description would lead you to believe. Studs Terkel was right on in recommending this book.

It does lose a star, however, for some unfortunate typos.

A very entertaining book......a'lot of it reads like "zine-type" material (loads of typos, etc.).....but, overall a great read.

I like work-related biography-type stuff.....and this certainly fits the bill in all respects.

I found this compilation fantastically funny. I used to get the old paper zines one by one in the '90s so it's great to have a one-stop shopping place for all these tales. Some people are uncomfortable with this kind of humor but personally, I love it! If you do too, you will probably like this one as well:

My Time with Fred: How I survived a 2 1/2 month temp job with no Internet

My only complaint with this book is that its too short! I wish it were longer! I loved the stories, they were so entertaining!

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!

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?