Customer Reviews

A Working Stiff's Manifesto: A Memoir of Thirty Jobs I Quit, Nine That Fired Me, and Three I Can't Remember

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book should be required reading for any liberal arts major. Levison does a terrific job detailing, in a hilarious fashion, the teeny-tiny downside to a college education that the glossy brochures never pointed out: Just because you get a degree does not necessarily mean you will graduate with marketable skills an employer would find desirable. Instead, you may be forced to endure, as Levison does, the indignities of a seemingly endless procession of McJobs.

An added benefit to making this required reading is that undergraduates would probably find this book a more enjoyable read than, say, "Nickel and Dimed," a more scholarly piece of nonfiction that makes the same basic point though with nowhere close to the same humor quotient. Levison is clearly a talented writer, and my primary complaint with the book was that it was too danged short; I wanted to hear about more of his 42 jobs.

Employers ought to read this book, too, as it may give them insight to their perennial complaint about high levels of employee turnover. Levison points out with great clarity that people quit jobs when those jobs don't offer reasonable incentive to stay, or when supervisors treat them so demeaningly that unemployment is preferable. I must confess, however, to not buying Levison's rationalization for stealing from one particular employer. Stealing is wrong, no matter how irritating a supervisor is. But the respect I lost for him in that chapter was regained in the chapter describing what he went through working for the Alaska fishing companies. The next time any of my undergraduates whine about my class being too demanding, I will be tempted to hand them a copy of Levison's book and tell them "This is REAL work. And if you don't want to be in the same boat as Levison, you will concentrate a lot harder in your classes and get something valuable out of your college education."

But I have to say that this book has made me exceedingly grateful for my job as a tenured professor that lets me write amazon.com reviews during working hours...

Levison's book belongs to the classic "work sucks" canon, including the film Office Space, Bentley Little's horror novel The Ignored, and Magnus Mills' mysterious novel The Restraint of Beasts. As Levison recounts his hellish jobs, we see a man too smart and too proud to subject himself to Groupthink, "team player" sycophantism, sadistic, arbitrary employers, and jobs that are clearly designed to humiliate, dehumanize, and impoversih the employee. His stories and anecdotes make for compelling, page-turning reading and forces you in the end to question what you're willing to put up just so you can tell yourself you're "gainfully employed."

In this hilarious book, Levinson points out the aburdities of the general workplace with great wit - it may not be Nietzsche, and he may exaggerate his experiences, but the writing would be pretty dry otherwise. To those who decry Levinson for having a poor attitude, I have to say that it's hard to have a good attitude when your bosses treat you like a slave and you're nothing more than a cog in the proverbial machine; it's a nice guilty pleasure to read about his vindictive actions against abusive employers. He has simply not bought into the protestant work ethic that one profits when he or she works hard - in most cases, it's only the bosses that do the profitting. The fact that he has this book published as well as a novel just proves that he has managed to rise above his past situations of brain-dead employment and has found an occupation that he enjoys. I hope to read more of Levinson's works in the future.

I disagree with anyone who says that the author needs to get a "real life" and a job in his field. He tells it like it is. A college diploma often is just a magically expensive flyswatter unless you miraculously picked a field that is still thriving years after you decided on a major.
My only complaint is that he wasn't harsh enough about working in the upper-class store. In my experience, the customers can be brutal and harsh, caring more about "cruelty-free" products than "cruelty-free" employees. Sure, those free-range chickens lived a good life, but what about the bagboy you just insulted?
This needs to be a series, each written by a different author. One book alone needs to be devoted to the world of telemarketing or call centers.

Personally, I found Levison's grandiose sense of entitlement and flexible morality (lying, stealing, etc) utterly reprehensible . . . but at least he never went so far as plotting to get co-workers injured or fired, nor did he stoop to sabotage -- although he could probably "justify" both. Hadta subtract a star just for his poor work ethic, bad attitude, and failure to apply himself. All of the jobs he lists suck, that is true: but he always could've gone back to being an EMT (which is a cool job that pays reasonably well), and since he seemed to think working in an office would be so great he could've avoided entry level manual labor altogether if he wanted to use his English degree to become, say, a copy editor -- or even an over-qualified file clerk. But if he didn't work all those suck jobs there wouldn't be much of a story, would there?

Like it or not, once you get past all the cynicism and silliness, Levison makes two very important observations:

1. Every high school student is stongly encouraged to take on tens of thousands of dollars in Student Loan debt in order to "get a degree" of dubious value. Sure, a degree in Law, Medicine, Business, or the hard sciences can pretty much guarantee you a respectable salary -- but it seems like over 80% of all BA degrees are in Liberal Arts (English, Fine Arts, Literature, Philosophy, History, Sociology, Languages, Music, etc) -- and if one does not have a clearly defined goal, loads of ambition, and a (possibly financially) supportive family that degree will be nothing more than, as Levison put it, "a $40,000 fly swatter." Lots of young people graduate with a worthless degree, crushing debt, and no way to earn money outside of entry level menial jobs that pay little over minimum wage -- and that debt will accumulate interest FOREVER and the creditors will hound them into the grave, using the guvmint's Top Secret Labor Database to track them from job to job, garnishing the wages of each. After rent, car insurance, utilities, and food there just isn't enough left over to pay even the INTEREST on a $40,000 loan. Someone is getting rich off this scam, and it is a national disgrace.

2. The primary cause of employee malaise, absenteeism, poor performance, theft, and sabotage typically is a result of abusive management practices. While I certainly am not excusing bad employees from doing bad things, management (and their Evil Korporate Overlords) needs to realize that many of their methods are counterproductive. Evil Korporate Overlords say that "the bottom line" is the most important thing. Sure -- cutting wages, denying benefits, and trying to wring every possible bit of "productivity" out of cowed and depressed workers may increase profits in the short run; but high turnover, shrink, poor customer relations, and even sabotage will inevitably result from poor employee morale. Levison cites examples of managers whose sole job seems to be to stalk, demean, and harass diligent workers right out of their minds (if not the company). Happy workers = happy customers . . . and "happiness" can not be forced or inflicted upon one -- it is the result of a friendly workplace where stress is kept within reasonable limits. Deliberately increasing stress levels for no discernable reason other than THAT YOU CAN is malicious and counter-productive . . . but that is what many managers seem to excel at.

This work, while not a "manifesto" in any way, is an amusing and enlightening book that should be read after Ehrenreich's brilliant "Nickle & Dimed" and "Bait & Switch."

This was a book I found to be very entertaining. It is pretty short so it is not too much of a time commitment. It does not describe all 42 (30/9/3) jobs that the title suggests, it just goes into detail on several (maybe six or seven, I can't remember for sure) of the jobs from fishing in Alaska to working for a moving company and working for a high end grocery store. An easy read that is worth the time, pretty funny book.

Had the author of this very funny book not written this book, I suspect he would still be surviving on the low wage/hard work jobs that he engaged in and discusses in the book. The litany of jobs that the author held is impressive and a perfect example of why certain college degrees are, in the words of the author, "$40,000 fly swatters."

Not only is the book laugh out loud funny, but it can be a good example for teens. I would read it again for the laughs involved, but would also recommend it to college bound teens that are looking into degrees that have questionable marketability.

A working Stiff's Manifesto, by Iain Levison, was a terrific read. An college graduate with a degree in English, the jobs Levison take are not ones that a degree is necessary. However, Stints in Alaska processing fish,a grocery store, truck driver, heating oil delivery man...

The book is funny. It is also incredibly sad. Levison is obviously smart and wants a good job--he simply doesn't know how to do so. He is part of the working poor and simply cannot imagine how people "make it" in the work world. What it must be like to make real money.

I want to know what the author is up to now. I would love another memoir. If you liked Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, you will love this book.

Iain's funny memoir will strike a chord with anyone who's had to deal with the BS many of us have to deal with on a regular basis at our jobs. He moans about many of the jobs he takes on but not once does he decide to sit back and collect unemployment. I guess that degree in English paid off after all.

Iain Levison can find work but not fulfilment. The frustration of dead-end, deadhead labour induces a frustration syndrome as the realization sets in that his college degree in English literature will gain him little by way of psychic wages on the job. He is adrift in a workaday world where one human is as good as the next and all are expendable. Meaningless promises abound, "like when they were telling us [at commencement that] we were the future of the world". In ten years, Iain Levison has lived in six states and worked at forty-two jobs; from fish cutter in Alaska to furniture mover in North Carolina, film-set gopher, oil deliveryman, truck driver, and crab fisherman. He quit thirty of them, got fired from nine, and has difficulty remembering the other three. Whatever could go wrong often did, hilariously
It is a funny book about the not-so-funny American workplace. The real thing, written not by a high-priced journalist disguised as a counter clerk, or a tenured professor passing as a vagrant, but by a genuine wage-dependent, red-blooded working stiff too "rich" for welfare and too broke to fit a consumer demographic. He works to keep his car running to get back and forth from work. He works to get by and get back for the next day's labours.