Synopsis
In Floyd Kemske's fourth wryly nightmarish novel about life at work, a young, unconventional union organizer, Gregg Harsh, decides to unionize the staff of a large national union. In order to stop the unionizing effort, the president of the union, Harvey Lathrop, asks that his greatest adversary, Stillman Colby, be brought out of retirement by his union-busting consulting firm. Colby's wife, Frannie, is fiercely opposed to his donning his business suit again and going out to battle. And then their marriage is even more imperiled by the assistant Colby is given to support his work at the union, a young union executive named Kathleen. In Kemske's hands, what sounds like cut-and-dry drama (or possibly farce) becomes a darkly comic labor of lies. Each of the characters bases his life on a set of ideals, but it is hard to tell the difference between ideals and desires as the characters manipulate and undermine each other. Beneath the conflict, humor, and lust, Labor Day is sad in its depiction of what people will do to defend and to spread their psychological turf. Once again, Kemske's entertaining, disconcerting, and deftly structured fantasy gets deep into the realities of the lives we lead at work.
Publishers Weekly
Kemske's previous three novels took on the follies of business management--and his fourth "corporate nightmare" dives into the perennial war between management and labor. The twist this time is that management is a labor union--the Federation of Office Workers in Philadelphia. Since, under federal law, a union can't represent its own staff, FOW's people are not represented, which is how union president Harvey Lathrop wants it to remain. To ensure the status quo, Lathrop hires his old enemy, Stillman Colby, a professional union buster whom Lathrop and FOW forced into retirement in a previous showdown. Colby now lives peacefully in upstate New York with his pro-union wife, Frannie, who objects when he accepts Lathrop's offer. Gregg Harsh is the undercover organizer whom Colby has to stop, a union representative who has taken a job at FOW as a security guard to enlistFOW employees into the International Brotherhood of Labor. Lathrop assigns funky, irreverent Kathleen, FOW's vice-president of Operations, to assist Colby, and here romantic comedy interrupts the satire. Kathleen is somewhat eccentric and sexually uninhibited, first seducing Colby, then rejecting his corporate philosophy and ending up with Harsh, who was forced to lie extravagantly about his identity to keep his cover. In fact, all the characters lie to each other (and to themselves), while at the same time professing their ideals and scruples. Then Frannie shows up, stunning her husband with her knowledge of his affair and the fact that she is IBOL's unofficial adviser. The romantic crisis collides awkwardly with the struggle between union, labor and management, and Colby loses gracefully. Kemske has humorously and humanely welded together farce and postindustrial angst, with charming results. (Sept.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|