Emily Guendelsberger
Author of On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane
About the Author
Image credit: Emily Guendelsberger
Works by Emily Guendelsberger
On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane (2019) 224 copies, 15 reviews
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I have only one recommendation: READ. THIS. BOOK.
Right now. Buy it. Borrow it. I’m not sure I can even stop short of saying steal it if you can’t lay hands on it any other way.
If you’re a Boomer at or near retirement, and you can’t understand why certain job sectors complain that they can’t fill vacancies even as people are falling into homelessness – read this book.
If you’re a Gen Xer whose kids should be entering the labor market but are still living in your basement and you show more can’t figure out why – read this book.
If you’re in Gen Z and you’re struggling to comprehend why the older generations keep preaching the value (and rewards) of hard work but all you’re seeing are soul-crushing, spirit-destroying hell-holes that leave you sick, dispirited, and damaged – read this book.
Emily Guendelsberger has written an absolutely stunning, compelling, and deeply disturbing study of what low-wage work is doing to the blue-collar labor force “and how it drives America insane” – sometimes literally. It’s an update and an expansion on the same themes Barbara Ehrenreich tackled in Nickel and Dimed that goes beyond what it’s like to be caught in the low-wage maelstrom to look at why and how computerization, standardization, and megacorporations have combined to remove every last vestige of humanity from the 21st-century workplace.
After the small weekly newspaper for which she worked went out of business, Guendelsberger conceived a project that involved working for three of the 900-pound-gorillas of American industry – Amazon, AT&T, and McDonald’s, and reporting not just on the difficulty of managing to exist on what appears to be “market standard” (or higher) wages, but on the myriad ways in which corporate policy disrespects and abuses its workers. From Amazon’s restriction of bathroom breaks for its warehouse pickers (apparently ignoring the fact that Amnesty International considers denying or restricting excretory functions a form of torture) to AT&T call centers’ routine “adjustment” of employee timecards so that they are not paid for the minutes per day they may spend between the time they clock in and the time they actually take their first call (a practice which denies individual workers a few dollars per day but saves the corporation billions) to McDonald’s last-minute scheduling and general avoidance of giving employees a full 40-hour week (which gets the company off the hook for paid benefits), the author bucks up and does each job, but admits that the one thing that allowed her to survive was the knowledge that “I get to leave”.
She also looks at various scientific studies on the results of stress in lab animals, and extrapolates many of those same stress responses to contemporary issues and political movements, writing:
Right now. Buy it. Borrow it. I’m not sure I can even stop short of saying steal it if you can’t lay hands on it any other way.
If you’re a Boomer at or near retirement, and you can’t understand why certain job sectors complain that they can’t fill vacancies even as people are falling into homelessness – read this book.
If you’re a Gen Xer whose kids should be entering the labor market but are still living in your basement and you show more can’t figure out why – read this book.
If you’re in Gen Z and you’re struggling to comprehend why the older generations keep preaching the value (and rewards) of hard work but all you’re seeing are soul-crushing, spirit-destroying hell-holes that leave you sick, dispirited, and damaged – read this book.
Emily Guendelsberger has written an absolutely stunning, compelling, and deeply disturbing study of what low-wage work is doing to the blue-collar labor force “and how it drives America insane” – sometimes literally. It’s an update and an expansion on the same themes Barbara Ehrenreich tackled in Nickel and Dimed that goes beyond what it’s like to be caught in the low-wage maelstrom to look at why and how computerization, standardization, and megacorporations have combined to remove every last vestige of humanity from the 21st-century workplace.
After the small weekly newspaper for which she worked went out of business, Guendelsberger conceived a project that involved working for three of the 900-pound-gorillas of American industry – Amazon, AT&T, and McDonald’s, and reporting not just on the difficulty of managing to exist on what appears to be “market standard” (or higher) wages, but on the myriad ways in which corporate policy disrespects and abuses its workers. From Amazon’s restriction of bathroom breaks for its warehouse pickers (apparently ignoring the fact that Amnesty International considers denying or restricting excretory functions a form of torture) to AT&T call centers’ routine “adjustment” of employee timecards so that they are not paid for the minutes per day they may spend between the time they clock in and the time they actually take their first call (a practice which denies individual workers a few dollars per day but saves the corporation billions) to McDonald’s last-minute scheduling and general avoidance of giving employees a full 40-hour week (which gets the company off the hook for paid benefits), the author bucks up and does each job, but admits that the one thing that allowed her to survive was the knowledge that “I get to leave”.
She also looks at various scientific studies on the results of stress in lab animals, and extrapolates many of those same stress responses to contemporary issues and political movements, writing:
So why is America so crazy? It’s the inescapable chronic stress built into the way we work and live. It’s the insane idea that an honest day’s work means suppressing your humanity, dignity, family, and other nonwork priorities in exchange for low wages that make home life constantly stressful, too. Is it surprising that Americans have started exhibiting unhelpful physical, mental, and social adaptations to chronic stress en masse? Our bodies believe this is the apocalypse.show less
And on top of that, people with power seem totally blind to how dire life has gotten for much of the country. The state of the union is always strong. GDP is up. Unemployment is low. Everything’s fine. They’re so insulated from the real world that they don’t or can’t understand that, for most people, our current system is obviously broken. That’s why ‘Make America Great Again’ caught on while Clinton’s counter that ‘America Is Already Great’ didn’t – people aren’t stupid. They know something isn’t right.
Emily Guendelsberger was a moderately successful journalist when her alt-weekly newspaper shuttered in 2015, and she launched a project taking and writing some of the most common and most stressful jobs in America: Amazon warehouse picker, call center representative, and McDonald's cashier. Guendelsberger describes these as "cyborg jobs", a human being filling in for the messy interstices of an imperfect automated system, and blends her personal experiences of how utter exhausting and show more alienating these jobs are with a history of how it got this way. If you're in the 50% of Americans who don't work one of these jobs, who's time isn't tracked minute by minute, you have to read this book.
The primary enemy in Guendelsberger's story is leanness in staffing. Payroll is an expense, and businesses like to cut that to the absolute bone. So to make sure that work gets done, they institute a system of arbitrary controls and punishments, second by second analysis of action, backed up metrics, points systems, and rapid firings.
Each of the workplaces is horrific in its own way. Amazon is notorious for its physically strenuous warehouse work, with pickers walking 15 miles a day, bending over and grabbing items thousands of times, warehouses that are boiling or freezing depending on the season, and vending machines filled with free painkillers. But the real horror of Amazon is isolation. The Algorithm (and as a data scientist, I feel comfortable using caps here) which guides pickers to their targets seems to route them around each other. You're effectively alone in a cyclopean logistics space, occasionally glimpsing other people a few hundred feet away. Conversation is impossible, thanks to the constant thrum of machinery, and workers are also forbidden from listening to their own music or podcasts, for reasonable safety concerns. Amazon work is carefully designed to be just at the limits of human physical endurance. Sanity is a different matter.
Next up is a Convergys call center, doing customer service for AT&T. While most of the time is spent explaining to people data overages on their bill, the actual job is sales, trying to convince people to switch to DirecTV. Call center work is a matter of juggling balls, as doing anything requires navigating through eight different shoddy backend apps, holding personal information in short term memory, selling more AT&T products, and of course trying to actually solve issue whatever brought the person there in the first place. But any call could flip from 'okay' to a terrible Screamer, a torrent of unending abuse that sent Guendelsberger into a panic. After a Screamer, there was no way to pause, just a few seconds until the next call, and it seems like the people on the other end of the phone could sense the weakness like a shark and continue the abuse. Guendelsberger was homeless for this stretch (she stayed with relatives for the Amazon gig), and living out of her car in a North Carolina summer took it own toll. She began spending 105% of her daily paycheck on hotel rooms to maintain a semblance of sanity until a coworker took pity and offered her a cheap spare room. And while this is pre-COVID, another coworker caught MRSA at the same call center and almost died. Good times!
The last job was at a downtown San Francisco McDonalds. Guendelsberger worked the cash register, where her white skin and impeccable English skills served as an asset. McDonalds allowed better human interaction, but was physically dangerous in a way that other jobs weren't. A customer threw mustard at her, she was injured by a broken coffee machine, and she had to kick the homeless out of the store at times. There's open respect for her shift managers at McDonalds, preternaturally fast and efficient women, while immediate superiors at the other jobs are merely fortunate or tyrannical, but in many ways McDonalds was the worst job of them all.
Guendelsberger breaks up her workplace ethnography with delves into the history of Taylorism and scientific management, Henry Ford and mass production, and finally the physiology of stress and how these environments drive you insane and slowly kill you. And as a former The Onion writer, it's pretty funny too. Except for the part where it is utterly horrifying. The history of Capital and Labor has been defined by Capital's belief that Labor is stealing from it by not working as hard as possible at all times, and now with panopticonic workplace surveillance systems, they can finally prove it. Amazon has the glossiest version, with a slick backend and a palpable lust to replace its humans with robots as soon as the tech gets worked out. Convergys is just throwing humans into the a gap of terrible backend systems that won't get reengineered because there's no clear profit in it. McDonalds probably needs humans the most, though they are focusing on eliminating human cashiers in favor of automated kiosks, but they want as few as possible.
All companies have common practices. Time management is draconian, with breaks starting as soon as you clock out even if the bathrooms and smoking areas are ten minutes away, and harsh penalties for being a minute late showing up to work. This was particularly bad with the McDonalds job, with Guendelsberger arriving 20 to 30 minutes early to deal with the unreliability of BART. Convergys wound up editing worker timesheets after the fact, which is illegal, not that wage theft is ever prosecuted. Guendelsberger describes being utterly exhausted day after day, and while she could bail; she needed the paychecks, but not like her coworkers with local ties, kids, health conditions, and no other skills. It's easy to see how these jobs are traps. Almost everything that's gone wrong in America in the past fifty years can be laid at the feet of jobs like these: the decline of families and communities, mental illness, obesity, opiate abuse, politics which are simultaneously disengaged and insane.
Individually, if you ever abuse or shout at a customer service worker you are human trash and should be abandoned in the Great Pacific Garbage Gyre, but systematically what is to be done? It's real bad, Labor is groaning and dying while Capital records the highest profits yet. Off-shoring, union-breaking, and the general abandonment of the working class by the Democrats are all to blame, but financialization and the pursuit of ever high share prices is at the root of this mistreatment of employees, the idea that a corporation is a device for maximizing quarterly returns and not fulfilling a common need. It's self-defeating for these workplaces. Training is a major source of inefficiency, and yet they won't do anything to drop turnover below 100% because the environment is bad everywhere. Guendelsberger ends on an optimistic note, that something will break and an alternative will arise, but I'm less sure about the political weaknesses of Transhumanist Cyborg Capital Hyper-Fascism. show less
The primary enemy in Guendelsberger's story is leanness in staffing. Payroll is an expense, and businesses like to cut that to the absolute bone. So to make sure that work gets done, they institute a system of arbitrary controls and punishments, second by second analysis of action, backed up metrics, points systems, and rapid firings.
Each of the workplaces is horrific in its own way. Amazon is notorious for its physically strenuous warehouse work, with pickers walking 15 miles a day, bending over and grabbing items thousands of times, warehouses that are boiling or freezing depending on the season, and vending machines filled with free painkillers. But the real horror of Amazon is isolation. The Algorithm (and as a data scientist, I feel comfortable using caps here) which guides pickers to their targets seems to route them around each other. You're effectively alone in a cyclopean logistics space, occasionally glimpsing other people a few hundred feet away. Conversation is impossible, thanks to the constant thrum of machinery, and workers are also forbidden from listening to their own music or podcasts, for reasonable safety concerns. Amazon work is carefully designed to be just at the limits of human physical endurance. Sanity is a different matter.
Next up is a Convergys call center, doing customer service for AT&T. While most of the time is spent explaining to people data overages on their bill, the actual job is sales, trying to convince people to switch to DirecTV. Call center work is a matter of juggling balls, as doing anything requires navigating through eight different shoddy backend apps, holding personal information in short term memory, selling more AT&T products, and of course trying to actually solve issue whatever brought the person there in the first place. But any call could flip from 'okay' to a terrible Screamer, a torrent of unending abuse that sent Guendelsberger into a panic. After a Screamer, there was no way to pause, just a few seconds until the next call, and it seems like the people on the other end of the phone could sense the weakness like a shark and continue the abuse. Guendelsberger was homeless for this stretch (she stayed with relatives for the Amazon gig), and living out of her car in a North Carolina summer took it own toll. She began spending 105% of her daily paycheck on hotel rooms to maintain a semblance of sanity until a coworker took pity and offered her a cheap spare room. And while this is pre-COVID, another coworker caught MRSA at the same call center and almost died. Good times!
The last job was at a downtown San Francisco McDonalds. Guendelsberger worked the cash register, where her white skin and impeccable English skills served as an asset. McDonalds allowed better human interaction, but was physically dangerous in a way that other jobs weren't. A customer threw mustard at her, she was injured by a broken coffee machine, and she had to kick the homeless out of the store at times. There's open respect for her shift managers at McDonalds, preternaturally fast and efficient women, while immediate superiors at the other jobs are merely fortunate or tyrannical, but in many ways McDonalds was the worst job of them all.
Guendelsberger breaks up her workplace ethnography with delves into the history of Taylorism and scientific management, Henry Ford and mass production, and finally the physiology of stress and how these environments drive you insane and slowly kill you. And as a former The Onion writer, it's pretty funny too. Except for the part where it is utterly horrifying. The history of Capital and Labor has been defined by Capital's belief that Labor is stealing from it by not working as hard as possible at all times, and now with panopticonic workplace surveillance systems, they can finally prove it. Amazon has the glossiest version, with a slick backend and a palpable lust to replace its humans with robots as soon as the tech gets worked out. Convergys is just throwing humans into the a gap of terrible backend systems that won't get reengineered because there's no clear profit in it. McDonalds probably needs humans the most, though they are focusing on eliminating human cashiers in favor of automated kiosks, but they want as few as possible.
All companies have common practices. Time management is draconian, with breaks starting as soon as you clock out even if the bathrooms and smoking areas are ten minutes away, and harsh penalties for being a minute late showing up to work. This was particularly bad with the McDonalds job, with Guendelsberger arriving 20 to 30 minutes early to deal with the unreliability of BART. Convergys wound up editing worker timesheets after the fact, which is illegal, not that wage theft is ever prosecuted. Guendelsberger describes being utterly exhausted day after day, and while she could bail; she needed the paychecks, but not like her coworkers with local ties, kids, health conditions, and no other skills. It's easy to see how these jobs are traps. Almost everything that's gone wrong in America in the past fifty years can be laid at the feet of jobs like these: the decline of families and communities, mental illness, obesity, opiate abuse, politics which are simultaneously disengaged and insane.
Individually, if you ever abuse or shout at a customer service worker you are human trash and should be abandoned in the Great Pacific Garbage Gyre, but systematically what is to be done? It's real bad, Labor is groaning and dying while Capital records the highest profits yet. Off-shoring, union-breaking, and the general abandonment of the working class by the Democrats are all to blame, but financialization and the pursuit of ever high share prices is at the root of this mistreatment of employees, the idea that a corporation is a device for maximizing quarterly returns and not fulfilling a common need. It's self-defeating for these workplaces. Training is a major source of inefficiency, and yet they won't do anything to drop turnover below 100% because the environment is bad everywhere. Guendelsberger ends on an optimistic note, that something will break and an alternative will arise, but I'm less sure about the political weaknesses of Transhumanist Cyborg Capital Hyper-Fascism. show less
Way back in the 1990s, while I was finishing college, I worked fast food for a couple of years. It was the worst, most stressful, most dehumanizing experience of my life, and when I left I swore that I'd live in a cardboard box on the street before I ever did it again. So I thought I had a pretty vivid idea of just how bad these kinds of jobs are. But I was wrong, because at least back then we didn't have computers monitoring our performance, timing us to the second, and using algorithms to show more schedule workers such that there are always just enough people to almost handle the workload if they work flat-out to the limits of their mental and physical ability all the time. All of which is apparently absolutely standard practice these days, and has completely predictable negative effects on people... especially when you factor in pay too low to live on, lack of health insurance, and difficulty getting time off to deal with the rest of their lives.
Emily Guendelsberger worked three different notoriously terrible jobs in the course of researching this book (although part of that was because she'd lost her cushier journalist gig and needed the money). She was an Amazon warehouse employee over the Christmas rush, worked in a call center doing customer support for AT&T, and did a stint at McDonald's. And, again, even though I thought I knew just how bad this stuff could be, the results were still pretty eye-opening to me. Especially the call center. Hoooo, boy, do her descriptions of how these places work explain a lot about some of my own experiences with customer support. And as terrible as their practices make things for the customer, they're so, so much worse for the people who have to spend eight hours a day on the other end and are forbidden to ever hang up.
It's all infuriating and depressing, and, as Guendelsberger points out, it may also explain a lot about why so many people in America seem to be, not to put to fine a point on it, losing their fucking minds. Half of us are overworked to the point of actual insanity, and most of the folks with the actual power have no understanding whatsoever of what the problem is.
Infuriating and depressing as the subject matter is, though, Guendelsberger's writing is a joy to read. She's candid, thoughtful, warm, down-to-earth, and often funny. She's also not actually interested in doing a hatchet job on any of the companies she talks about here, and, indeed, is willing to credit them when they actually do something decent and to quote both the positive and negative things her co-workers had to say about them. It's the systematic problems with how we view work and the complete wrongness of expecting humans to function like robots that she's more concerned with. And, to that end, she delivers a lot of interesting, engagingly written, easily understandable background on things like the history of companies' obsession with maximally efficient operations or the effects of stress on the human body.
I definitely recommend it, whether you've ever been among the ranks of the burger-flippers yourself or not. show less
Emily Guendelsberger worked three different notoriously terrible jobs in the course of researching this book (although part of that was because she'd lost her cushier journalist gig and needed the money). She was an Amazon warehouse employee over the Christmas rush, worked in a call center doing customer support for AT&T, and did a stint at McDonald's. And, again, even though I thought I knew just how bad this stuff could be, the results were still pretty eye-opening to me. Especially the call center. Hoooo, boy, do her descriptions of how these places work explain a lot about some of my own experiences with customer support. And as terrible as their practices make things for the customer, they're so, so much worse for the people who have to spend eight hours a day on the other end and are forbidden to ever hang up.
It's all infuriating and depressing, and, as Guendelsberger points out, it may also explain a lot about why so many people in America seem to be, not to put to fine a point on it, losing their fucking minds. Half of us are overworked to the point of actual insanity, and most of the folks with the actual power have no understanding whatsoever of what the problem is.
Infuriating and depressing as the subject matter is, though, Guendelsberger's writing is a joy to read. She's candid, thoughtful, warm, down-to-earth, and often funny. She's also not actually interested in doing a hatchet job on any of the companies she talks about here, and, indeed, is willing to credit them when they actually do something decent and to quote both the positive and negative things her co-workers had to say about them. It's the systematic problems with how we view work and the complete wrongness of expecting humans to function like robots that she's more concerned with. And, to that end, she delivers a lot of interesting, engagingly written, easily understandable background on things like the history of companies' obsession with maximally efficient operations or the effects of stress on the human body.
I definitely recommend it, whether you've ever been among the ranks of the burger-flippers yourself or not. show less
Years ago, a journalist named Barbara Ehrenreich wrote "Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting By in America", which Emily Guendelsberger credits as inspiration for her own book. Both are women journalists who "went undercover" (although used their real names and never lied about their journalism backgrounds), taking low-wage jobs to see what it was like. Ehrenreich did Walmart, hotel housekeeping in Florida, and housecleaning in Maine, if I recall correctly.
In the new book, Guendelsberger does an show more Amazon "fulfillment center" (employees are not allowed to call them warehouses) during peak holiday season, a call center, and McDonald's.
I was eager to read the new book because I worked briefly at a call center years ago, and I did about 5-6 weeks of McDonald's drive-through during Covid. Her experiences were much worse than mine, but mine were none too good either.
Some take-aways for me:
1) Apparently fast food deliberately understaffs. Someone figured out that if an employee has called out sick, the other workers naturally band together to cover the gap. So the employers decided "Oh, well clearly they can work at this frantic pace all the time, so we'll schedule even fewer employees!" I will say that in the 5-6 weeks I spent at McDonald's, often doing 8 hour shifts overnight, I think I got an actual meal break only one time, in part because I was covering two drive-through lanes, taking cash at the first window, and was also expected to wash dishes in between customers and mop part of the kitchen.
2) Amazon warehouse workers are so physically taxed that they were lining up at the infirmary for over-the-counter pain meds, which wasn't "productive" for Amazon. So Amazon installed vending machines to dispense free OTC pain meds for workers, who swipe their badges to get the meds. Guendelsberger points out that while an initial reaction might be "oh, that's nice of Amazon to give away the pain meds for free," an *actual* nice way of dealing with the problem might be to give workers shorter shifts or more breaks.
3) Not only do call centers time their employees *to the second* on bathroom breaks, the one she worked at had a lovely little practice of changing employee's time clock records. For instance, an employee clocks in and then walks over to their desk, sits down, and logs into the phone system. Management went and changed the time clock records to reflect when the employee logged into the phone system, with the justification that the time spent walking to the desk and sitting down to log in was not "time on the phones" and was therefore not "time spent working."
I highly recommend both books. show less
In the new book, Guendelsberger does an show more Amazon "fulfillment center" (employees are not allowed to call them warehouses) during peak holiday season, a call center, and McDonald's.
I was eager to read the new book because I worked briefly at a call center years ago, and I did about 5-6 weeks of McDonald's drive-through during Covid. Her experiences were much worse than mine, but mine were none too good either.
Some take-aways for me:
1) Apparently fast food deliberately understaffs. Someone figured out that if an employee has called out sick, the other workers naturally band together to cover the gap. So the employers decided "Oh, well clearly they can work at this frantic pace all the time, so we'll schedule even fewer employees!" I will say that in the 5-6 weeks I spent at McDonald's, often doing 8 hour shifts overnight, I think I got an actual meal break only one time, in part because I was covering two drive-through lanes, taking cash at the first window, and was also expected to wash dishes in between customers and mop part of the kitchen.
2) Amazon warehouse workers are so physically taxed that they were lining up at the infirmary for over-the-counter pain meds, which wasn't "productive" for Amazon. So Amazon installed vending machines to dispense free OTC pain meds for workers, who swipe their badges to get the meds. Guendelsberger points out that while an initial reaction might be "oh, that's nice of Amazon to give away the pain meds for free," an *actual* nice way of dealing with the problem might be to give workers shorter shifts or more breaks.
3) Not only do call centers time their employees *to the second* on bathroom breaks, the one she worked at had a lovely little practice of changing employee's time clock records. For instance, an employee clocks in and then walks over to their desk, sits down, and logs into the phone system. Management went and changed the time clock records to reflect when the employee logged into the phone system, with the justification that the time spent walking to the desk and sitting down to log in was not "time on the phones" and was therefore not "time spent working."
I highly recommend both books. show less
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