Category Books

A Working Stiff's Manifesto: A Memoir »

Authors: Iain Levison
ISBN-13: 9781569472804, ISBN-10: 1569472807
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Soho Press, Incorporated
Date Published: July 2003
Edition: (Non-applicable)

Author Biography: Iain Levison

Iain Levison is the author of A Working Stiff's Manifesto, an account of his post-collegiate work experience, consisting of forty-two jobs in ten years, and two novels, Since the Layoffs and Dog Eats Dog. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Book Synopsis

Iain Levison can find work but not fulfillment. The frustration of dead-end, deadhead labor induces a kind of pink-slip payback syndrome as the realization sets in that his college degree 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, the bright shining blah blah blah."

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, 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.

A Working Stiff's Manifesto makes Nickel and Dimed look like chump change. 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 to square one for the next day's labors.

Publishers Weekly

Levison is a "modern-day Tom Joad" who, over the last decade, has worked 42 jobs in six different states, including mover, fish cutter, cook, caterer and cable TV thief. He recalls those jobs in this entertaining, unusual mix of autobiography and social commentary reminiscent of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. Levison imagines himself a new breed of itinerant laborer a college graduate with a $40,000 English degree. His America is a desperate and brutal country, a place where you're hired with a promise of insurance after 90 days, then fired on the 89th; where criminals beat each other to a pulp in Alaska fisheries, and truckers make fraudulent entries in their logbooks in order to keep up with impossible schedules. But Levison's droll sense of humor eases him (and his readers) through the tough times; he recalls catering a party and bleeding into the guests' Merlot, expounds on the definition of "r sum " ("the French term for `page full of bullshit' ") and proposes a new motto for Dutch Harbor, Alaska ("What fatal flaw in your character made you wind up here?"). As both a writer and an employee, Levison can come off as a trifle obnoxious some of his workplace misfortune he definitely brings on himself and he's mercilessly scornful of the corporate yes-men and unscrupulous characters he works with. Yet his moral vision more than makes up for it; he's a sharp-eyed, impassioned critic of the American workplace. (Apr.) Forecast: Although any book that targets itself toward people without a steady paycheck would seem to be doomed, Levison's just might do well, given today's high unemployment rates and the book's undeniable originality. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.