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.”
