My friends Joshua Glenn and Mark Kingwell wrote a gem of a book called The Wage Slave’s Glossary, which was designed and edited by the great cartoonist Seth. They’ve kindly permitted me to run a few entries from their very entertaining little book.
The Wage Slave’s Glossary (Biblioasis) criticizes and analyzes what the Lowell Mill Girls were the first to name wage slavery. Joshua Glenn’s glossary of over 200 terms interrogates not only office jargon (from Bandwidth to Telecommuting) but labor-related slang and workplace terminology (from After-Dinner Man to Workbrickle) used to naturalize wage slavery from the dawn of industrial capitalism to the present day. Mark Kingwell’s philosophical Introduction criticizes the “work idea” itself, and its corollaries — including bureaucracy and bullshit.
