Jeff Kelly, Editor: Best Of Temp Slave!
Temporary employees, from data-entry drones to heavy industrial labor, currently constitute America's largest single group of workers. Like all day-workers since day one, they're not happy about their disposable, interchangeable position in the working world. And since temps usually get the most degrading, dangerous, and undignified jobs, perhaps they shouldn't be. The least happy of them all is Keffo, the nom de plume of Jeff Kelly, whose disgust at what he regards as indentured servitude goaded him into creating Temp Slave!, a zine devoted to hatred of work. This best-of collection, made up of material from TS!'s first 10 issues, is like most zines: spotty, somewhat ragged, sprinkled with iffy art, and not very well written or edited. There's also a certain whiny, droning quality to some of the writing that can become abrasive: So society makes people work at boring or dangerous jobs when they'd rather be reading poetry? So certain middle-class kids aren't getting the most out of their piano degrees? Poor things, the real world is certainly too hard for them. But the best of it goes beyond just complaining about having to work in the first place: An unwanted gig as a mall Santa turns into a genuinely fun experience, a gay temp goes undercover to sabotage a Christian real-estate office, the famous Dishwasher Pete checks in on the old gripe of drug testing. And all of it is honest, if bitchy, about how bad temp-working can be. Anyone who's ever been convinced that they're too good to mop floors will love this book. (Garrett County Press, P.O. Box 896, Madison, WI 53701)