Bonjour Laziness
Why Hard Work Doesn't Pay
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3.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • A “provocative ... highly readable ... refreshing ... [and] practical" book (The Los Angeles Times) that explains why it is in your best interest to work as little as possible.
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, whether professional mobility is anything but an opiate. It shows you how to become impervious to manipulation and escape the implacable law of usefulness.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
