Bonjour Laziness: Jumping Off the Corporate Ladder

Your company wants you to be loyal. You should feel lucky–after all, your job is a privilege (think of all those who would like to have it). And you know (despite what you’ve read about Enron and WorldCom) that management has your best interests at heart. Your goal is to devote yourself to the pursuit of corporate profit, make your company number one, and reap the benefits of its success.

Or is there something else you want to do with your life?

Bonjour Laziness dares to ask whether you really have a stake in the corporate sweepstakes and whether professional mobility is anything more than an opiate, and it proposes steps you can take to regain control over what you want to do.

It shows you how to become impervious to manipulation and escape the implacable law of usefulness–in short, it explains why it is in your best interests to work as little as possible.

"The press release explains this book's presence on our shores: 270,000 and counting sold in France; 70,000 plus in Spain; 3,000 — 4,000 copies a day on release in Germany; and rights sold in at least 19 other countries. Bonjour Paresse is not quite an update of Steal This Book for the age of corporate globalism, but the intent is similar: personal satisfaction and cultural change through the sabotage of capital. Maier's passive version, whereby one disengages from one's job and floats through work minimally, is already in active practice by any number of American workers. And the set of justifications for it she offers over six chapters isn't new, whether outrage at the corporate degradation of language or ire at the planned obsolescence of workers. But it's not the familiarity of the ideas that's the problem: what's off is Maier's gently ironic sense of proposing an honorable response to big governments and businesses that have mishandled big responsibilities. While Americans argue about big government, there has never been anything comparable here to the recently decimated social welfare states Maier laments. The inert revenge that she proposes comes off as plain lack of gumption, annoyance or sour grapes. The book will do better in Canada. Agent, Beth Vesel. (June 1)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Corinne Maier works part-time as an economist for EDF, a French corporation. She is also a practicing psychoanalyst and the author of nine books. She lives in France.