Privatized Stress

In October 2013 the nameless narrator of Saul Leslie’s novel A Working Title I Want to Change starts a new job at a branch of Tesco, the largest supermarket in the UK. The position is a means to an end. A native of rural East Anglia, he has moved to London to study for a master’s in English literature. He is the first in his family to go to university, and he doesn’t have financial backing; the hours at Tesco are meant to support him while he studies.But it isn’t easy to live in London on Tesco wages. He can’t find an affordable place to rent, and so he must move from room to room, staying with friends or acquaintances on the sofa, on the floor, or, once, in an empty bathtub. His bosses pressure him to take shifts when he has events at the university and lecture him on loyalty to “the Tesco family.” Surveillance technologies are introduced to monitor, rank, and control employees as they work, and he sees coworkers fired on flimsy pretexts. One day the door of a large trolley swings open into his face, bruising his cheek and causing him to spill the food he’d been moving. He is disciplined by his boss for wasting produce.Leslie is a Liverpool-based academic who studies disability an...