My most frequent Austin experience is finding a small quirky business that I later learn is actually a slightly evil hellhole for its employees. The reasons are myriad: long hours for diminutive paychecks; the owners being Scientologists; no healthcare (relatable!); and always this oppressive feeling that no one in the city cares they’re being exploited. At times, Austin is a sympathetic ear you later learn was stuffed with cotton – the illusion of being heard.
This is the setting we’re dropped into at the start of author Jules Wernersbach’s debut novel Work to Do: a dark and stormy night in 2019, during which a grocery co-op is flooded by customers, wind gusts, and retail discord. Their first fictional effort after two Texas-based nonfiction publications (The Swimming Holes of Texas, Vegan Survival Guide to Austin), Wernersbach splits this tale into three perspectives. A familiar situation to anyone who’s ever worn a name tag and stocked endcaps, only two of the players are in-store during the storm: manager Roz, who longs for GM glory almost as much as she longs for her ex-wife, and longtime jack-of-all-positions, master-of-no-equivalent-pay Randy. Off in Bastrop is owner Eleanor, whose aluminum fist is nonetheless present as she dictates all of Roz’s actions through texts. That includes, of course, demanding the store stay open even when all signs point to disaster.
Thus, the dynamic of the next 245 pages is laid out. Roz desires a place among the semi-powerful with a somewhat naive idea of making things “better,” while only digging a bigger trench for herself in a war against her fellow workers. Those workers, led with shaky solidarity by a soon-to-be homeless Randy, have been meeting at the period-accurate Spider House Ballroom – now 29th Street Ballroom, separated from the coffeehouse the workers congregate at, now called Tweedy’s – in the pursuit of filing for a union contract. See, the Guadalupe Street Co-op isn’t co-operated by its workers, but is co-owned by the customers and a board of investors that includes Eleanor’s ex-wife, with whom she started the business. Other than themes of labor rights organizing, one thing Work to Do is plum full of is ex-wives and ex-girlfriends…