(FORTUNE Magazine) – Take the popular cartoon Dilbert, pump it up on steroids, multiply it by about a million, and you begin to approach what it's like to work in Washington. It's a warped, wacky world, as portrayed by former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich in his new book, Locked in the Cabinet.

For starters, there's the sheer scale of the government. To be elected or appointed to a high federal post is a promotion of epic proportions. In Reich's case, he made the leap from professor at Harvard, where he shared a secretary with a colleague, to overseeing more than 18,000 employees and a budget of $35 billion. When Reich decided to do a little managing by walking around, he actually got lost in the Labor Department building and needed the help of a security guard to find his way back to his office.

Not surprisingly the office politics that accompanied Reich's outsize job were ferocious. Just to get a moment one-on-one with the boss (read: Clinton) was a coup. Much of the rest of his time was devoted to trying to divine who else--Treasury head Lloyd Bentsen, Fed chief Alan Greenspan, now-disgraced spinmeister Dick Morris--held sway over the President. "The decision-making 'loop' depends on physical proximity to [Clinton]," writes Reich. "Who's whispering into his ear most regularly, whose office is closest to the Oval, who's standing or sitting next to him when a key issue arises."

And then there are the controversies. When you're Secretary of Labor, you get involved in some doozies. Consider the case of little Tommy McCoy, 14-year-old bat boy for the Savannah, Georgia, Cardinals, a minor-league baseball team. An overzealous Labor Department investigator determined that McCoy violated the child labor laws by working past 7 p.m. on school nights and took action to strip him of his job.

Reich wound up in an unenviable position. The people of Savannah were in an uproar, and the national media started sniffing around the story. Yet Reich's top deputies advised him that it would hurt Labor Department morale if he overrode the investigator's decision. Minutes before ABC news was set to take the story national, he made his decision. "I want you to put out a press release right now," he commanded, "saying that the application of child labor laws to bat boys is silly." And you thought your job was insane.

How does Reich, a liberal with a capital L, feel about his tenure as Labor Secretary? He's anything but sanguine. Although he won some victories for the working class--a higher minimum wage, family and medical leave, and school-to-work apprenticeships--he lost on the deeper issue of supplying jobs for America's poor. When Clinton last year signed the welfare bill, it meant, according to Reich, that a disproportionate share of the budget cuts would fall on those least able to bear them, and the poor would not get the training and child care that would help them find better jobs--or any jobs at all. His reaction: "I felt sick to my stomach."