Read Online A Working Stiff's Manifesto by Iain Levison - Free Book Online Page A

been hired is no exception. There is a page in the handbook for every step of every process in the preparation of every menu item. It isn’t cooking that I’m doing here as much as production. I’m essentially a factory worker. One of the managers is a cooking school grad who was fired up with new ideas when he was hired six months ago, and has now resigned himself to slapping burgers into molds with a look of disgust. “I’m going to get a real job,” he tells me as he shows me how to use the burger mold. “I’ve applied at Payne Walker.”
    â€œIsn’t that a slaughterhouse?”
    â€œIt’s meat cutting. You get to use a skill.”
    I’ve worked in actual factories, and the workers are happier than the people here. The people here are not allowed to admit that they are involved in a production line, and the managers are in charge of the collective denial. We read weekly bulletins sent to us from corporate headquarters that tell us how well we are doing, how we are pleasing “guests” (the new word for customers), how we must keep smiling, even in the kitchen where the guests can’t see us. Scowls are picked up by the waitstaff, who then scowl at the guests, who leave and don’t come back; and then the restaurant is closed and we’re all looking for jobs. So if we like being employed, we’d better smile. That’s the logic.
    It looks good on paper, but the philosophy fails to take into account the complexity and perversity of human nature. Directives to grin have the opposite effect on me. Smiles come from somewhere else. The end result is waitstaff and floor personnel gripped with a forced neurotic enthusiasm, which they substitute for actual pleasantness. This manifests itself in unnecessarily loud speech, so everyone walks around and screams at each other, and the guests.
    â€œHOW ARE YOU TODAY, DAVID?” a perky female manager asks me at the beginning of my second day. Enthusiasm comes from the top, so the managers have to be the perkiest of us all.
    â€œMy name’s Iain,” I tell her quietly.
    She pumps me on the shoulder and wanders off. Later in the day, after a busy lunch shift, she comes back behind the cook line and looks at us, clearly worried.
    â€œWHAT’S THE MATTER WITH YOU GUYS?” she asks. The other cook, an older Nigerian named Jacques who has worked here for years, stares at her. I’m trying to learn a new menu and to get the ingredients right in a salad I’m making.
    â€œWe busy,” says Jacques. I nod in agreement.
    â€œEVERYBODY’S BUSY,” she yells. “COME ON, KICK IT IN GEAR!”
    I’m convinced this is just silliness, and I’ll get used to it, and I spend the next few days making an effort to learn the menu and get things right. The work is hard, but Jacques is a good teacher and easy to work with. I mind my own business, show up on time, and do everything the handbook tells me is required. At the end of the week, the manager, Marci, calls me into the office for “counseling.”
    â€œYou don’t seem happy here,” she tells me. She isn’t screaming now. She’s looking at me intensely, as if daring me to say the wrong thing, and a hundred wrong things occur to me. What’s happiness got to do with it? That would be wrong. Fuck you. That would be wrong too.
    â€œI’m fine,” I say.
    â€œYou don’t seem fine.”
    What am I supposed to say to that? I’m here. I was on time and sober. What do they want? I stare at her, convinced if I say anything, it’ll come out wrong.
    â€œWhat do you have to say?”
    â€œNothing, really.”
    â€œWould you be happier somewhere else?”
    â€œNo,” I lie. Wouldn’t we all be happier somewhere else? Isn’t that a mainstay of the human condition? I don’t think it was a philosophical question.
    She shrugs her shoulders and throws up her hands, as if to