What does opportunity look like in the 21st-century American workplace? Adelle Waldman’s novel Help Wanted begins with an organizational chart: a brief, inverted T, stacked three names high above a row of nine names at the bottom. This is the world of the Movement department—formerly known as Logistics—in a down-market New York state branch, Store #1512, of an upmarket big-box store called Town Square.
The normal condition of Movement is stasis: each day, at four A.M., there’s a new truckload of merchandise to unload—in one hour or less, no matter how much is on the truck. After that arbitrary performance target has been met (or missed), the team may, or more likely may not, get the goods properly distributed around the warehouse and onto the sales floor by the end of their four-hour shift. There aren’t enough people or enough hours to do the job right, but the part-time schedule keeps the workers from qualifying for benefits or overtime. It also wins them the nickname “roaches” from the rest of the Town Square staff, “because they descended on the store in the dark of night, then scattered at eight, when the customers arrived.”
And then, one morning of slinging goods like all the other mornings—“dish soap, soap dishes, a drip coffeemaker, a Keurig coffeemaker, pots for planting, pots for cooking,” in the reckoning of the young and jaded Nicole, who runs the scanner—comes the news that the top of the chart is opening up. Their likable store manager, Big Will, has won a transfer to a nicer, more prosperous store in Connecticut, closer to his family and higher-ranking in Town Square’s corporate estimation.
Here is what passes for hope: if Big Will’s store-manager job were to go to Movement’s executive manager, Meredith, then Meredith’s spot could go to their group manager, Little Will (two inches taller than Big Will, but lower on the chart). And then someone—one ordinary roach—could move up to get Little Will’s job and its “guaranteed forty hours a week,” with “health insurance, 401(k), paid vacation, sick days.” The Movement team just has to convince the higher-ups, when they come to inspect Store #1512, that Meredith deserves the promotion.
The trouble is that Meredith doesn’t, and the roaches despise her. She may fit Town Square’s corporate vision—a college dropout who “came across as middle class”—but to Movement she’s abrasive, condescending, and incompetent, an interloper who transferred to their department strictly to broaden her credentials. When Val, a leading aspirant for Little Will’s job, suggests the team work together to get Meredith promoted, Nicole is outraged: “Meredith didn’t deserve to be rewarded. She deserved to be punished.”
But abstract justice yields to the demands of the here and now. If nothing else, promoting Meredith would remove her from day-to-day warehouse life. And for one lucky winner it would mean something more: enough income for Val to afford child care, so she and her wife “wouldn’t have to work opposing shifts”; or enough stability for Diego, who moved to the United States from Honduras as a teen, to get a car loan, to drive to a better-paying second job, to move his family out of their basement apartment; or enough cash for Travis to pay off the court fees from a string of low-grade offenses down in Virginia.
There aren’t enough people or enough hours to do the job right, but the part-time schedule keeps the workers from qualifying for benefits or overtime.
And so the Movement members pull together toward their perverse goal: taking overnight shifts to clear out Meredith’s disastrous backlog of merchandise from the warehouse, and scheming to undermine her chief in-store rival, Anita from Softline Sales. The action is both funny and engrossing, and the backside of big-box operations immersively real, as they apply their wits to productivity (sorting the undistributed clothes in advance, for easier stocking, only to be rebuked by Meredith for creating clutter) and to sabotage (spreading rumors that Anita wants to end holiday meals) and to some combination of the two (dumping unsorted bras straight from the warehouse into the changing-room bins, as if customers had tried them, so the changing attendants have to put them on the racks).
The plan is petty and the potential payoff meager, but the stakes are decidedly not low. Waldman observes her characters with the hilarious, remorseless precision real people use on real people: in a meeting, “the people who always asked questions, the ones who thought not having a question would be a humiliating acknowledgment of their own cosmic insignificance and eventual nonexistence, raised their hands”; one monologue-prone crew member’s “own reality was generally too vivid and overpowering for him to imagine other people’s.” Living and working in the depressed town of Potterstown—abandoned by its anchor industry, IBM, and now partly, seasonally propped up by summering New York City dwellers—the Town Square staffers, smoking by the parking lot with its view of the Catskills, are haunted by the sense that they just need some small thing to break their way, for once.
The workers live in an era when insecurity has a grip on nearly everyone—including Waldman herself, who took a warehouse job in a big-box store in the Hudson Valley while looking for inspiration and extra money in the long gap following her best-selling 2013 debut, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.
Waldman’s briskly roving point of view captures the constant squeeze on everyone, in the warehouse and on up the chart, to get that one incremental improvement—to meet the price of college courses, of a child’s sixth-birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese, even of getting their nails done. “It was important to her that her kids and her daughter-in-law saw her a certain way, as a person who could afford a manicure,” Waldman writes of one worker, Ruby, who borrows cash from another. “But she was short.”
A little help is what they need. But Waldman’s title is a bleak gag: HELP WANTED banners are what Town Square corporate puts up in the store to “keep customers from recognizing that the lack of employees on the sales floor was a deliberate choice.” The company has mastered giving everyone less, internally and externally, while signaling it cares. Its H.R. surveys find that its employees “preferred Town Square to their second jobs, the ones they worked because Town Square didn’t give them enough hours or pay them enough to live on.”
But the roaches still want solidarity and purpose, even if the only outlet for those desires is the ridiculous effort to get their bad boss a better job. “Even if they did catch us meeting like this,” one of them tells his fellow conspirators, “the last thing they’d think is that we were trying to help Meredith. They’d probably think we were trying to start a union.”
“Don’t even joke,” another one replies.
Behind the sham, despite everything, is real effort. With corporate coming, the extra overnight shifts give the team—sleep-deprived though they are—a glimpse of what it might look like for the hours to match the work. Despite Meredith’s objections to the extra mess, the warehouse is at least briefly organized. “Whatever Little Will thought about Town Square, he felt real satisfaction in this,” Waldman writes. “He liked to see things done well.”
Tom Scocca is the former politics editor at Slate and the editor at Popula