On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane

by Emily Guendelsberger

If the data says everything’s so great, why is America freaking the fuck out?

The bottom half of America’s labor market lives in the weeds. All the time.

Why can’t they work that efficiently every shift? The answer’s obvious if you’ve covered for a sick coworker at a fast-paced job—because you’re stuck in the weeds the entire day, and just because you can put up with a miserable day once in a while doesn’t mean that the weeds are a sustainable place to live. From a boss’s point of view, though, the weeds are where workers should be—at maximum productivity, all day, every day.

Math and logic are beautiful languages. But it’s so pretentious to pretend that they have adequate vocabulary to accurately describe a human, much less whether a human is happy or miserable.

Still, in industries that rely on skills that robots still aren’t great at—fine motor control, speech and pattern recognition, empathy—the cheapest option is still low-wage human workers.

And so many employers demand a workforce that can think, talk, feel, and pick stuff up like humans—but with as few needs outside of work as robots. They insist their workers amputate the messy human bits of themselves—family, hunger, thirst, emotions, the need to make rent, sickness, fatigue, boredom, depression, traffic—or at least keep them completely at bay.

To people with education and influence, “in the weeds” is something academic, about small, unimportant details. It’s the footnotes. It’s something you observe from the outside. To everybody else, “in the weeds” is something you experience. It’s something you feel. It’s your life.

The real problem, I was told, was the subtler plague of injuries from working through pain for fear of getting fired for low productivity numbers. That’s where Amazon really stood out—repetitive stress injuries.

Here’s a moment I won’t realize is significant until later: I’m being presented with a choice about which rule to break. I can break the safety rule, keep running, and maybe make it on time. Or I can walk the rest of the way and be late, but safe.

I find it hard to explain the needling shame I still feel about this. It’s not a big deal, and I’m positive Darryl wouldn’t hold it against me. But I like to think of myself as someone who’d offer a nice kid a ride home after a truly shitty day of work. Right now, though, exhaustion has shrunk my circle of empathy to the point that it’s barely big enough for myself. I didn’t know that could happen, and it’s not pleasant. I guess I never realized that this might affect more than just my body.

As traffic crawls past the bus stop, I’m overwhelmed by a surge of desperate gratitude—for my car, for the credit card I’ll use at McDonald’s, for my low-interest mortgage, for decades of regular dental care, for my college degree in two impractical subjects, for my husband’s ability to pay our bills while I try to shoot the moon, for my naive ideas about “normal,” for my ability to shrug and think, Fuck Darryl.

The next week, nearly all my notes are just two-second clips of me angrily whispering “Fuck your [product whose existence I resent].”

Doesn’t Jeff Bezos have a right to be mad if you’re clocked in for forty hours but only actually working for thirty? Aren’t you stealing from him? What is an honest day’s work? How long does it last? How hard do you work? What are you owed in exchange?

you McBitches

Work was hard before modern technology, no doubt. But it wasn’t exactly stressful. And there’s a really big difference between difficult work and stressful work that comes down to time to lean, time to clean.

“The natural laziness of men is serious,” Taylor would later write in his 1911 magnum opus, The Principles of Scientific Management, “but by far the greatest evil from which both workmen and employers are suffering is the systematic soldiering which is almost universal.”

Never met this man, hate him

It seemed obvious to me that SDF8 ran on painkillers. And if two Advil could quickly turn into four Advil, how quickly could four Advil turn into codeine, Vicodin, Oxycontin, heroin? Maybe Louisville had been hit so hard by opioids because, with all these warehousing jobs, there was just more… pain here.

“The human mind is designed to not feel bad. It does not like to feel bad. And it will tend to do things that it can to correct for feeling bad. And, unfortunately, things like drugs, alcohol, tobacco, and food—particularly carbs—make us feel better. It’s a native tendency to self-medicate into a better mental state, to get rid of this overwhelming negativity.

“And I love that I go to work, I clock in, I do my job, I clock out. That’s it! I’ve never had a job like that. All the other departments have their shit together! The sanitary team, for instance, cleaning the bathrooms and stuff—I’m a clean person, and every other job I’ve had I always ended up being the unpaid janitor, you know? I tend to take work home with me. Especially the restaurant industry—it’s like you become part of the fibers of the restaurant. But I don’t feel like I’m part of the fibers of Amazon. I know Amazon would exist fine without me, and I kind of like that. I like being a number.”

How much can we get away with mistreating human beings for one single fucking dollar?

“I sometimes wish every person in America had to work fast food for a year,” I say. “Like the Mormons, you know? I bet the world would be a nicer place.”

YES 100%

I’ve been developing a sort of callus over the earnest part of myself that genuinely cares about the customers and wants to do a good job for them. It thickens every time someone says something terrible to me. As it gets tougher, I’ve become increasingly numb to my customer interactions, good and bad. It’s harder for angry people to upset me, but I get much less pleasure from making people happy. This dead, muted feeling reminds me a lot of depression, and it worries me.

I get to leave, I think as I drive past the Baymont Suites. I get to leave, I think, driving past the Walmart, YMCA, and Barnes & Noble. I get to leave, I think, driving past the Chick-fil-A, Hickory Furniture Mart, and all the abandoned factories along the interstate. They all shrink to nothing in my rearview mirror, and the only thing I can think is I get to leave.

“I tied up every portable telephone system in Central London for forty-five minutes at lunchtime,” he said. There was silence, except for the distant swishing of cars. “Yes?” said Hastur. “And then what?” “Look, it wasn’t easy,” said Crowley. “That’s all?” said Ligur. “Look, people—” “And exactly what has that done to secure souls for our master?” said Hastur. Crowley pulled himself together. What could he tell them? That twenty thousand people got bloody furious? That you could hear the arteries clanging shut all across the city? And that then they went back and took it out on their secretaries or traffic wardens or whatever, and they took it out on other people? In all kinds of vindictive little ways which, and here was the good bit, they thought up themselves. For the rest of the day. The pass-along effects were incalculable. Thousands and thousands of souls all got a faint patina of tarnish, and you hardly had to lift a finger.

“I said, What happened to ‘Hello, how may I help you?’” the guy repeats, louder. My smile tightens. Empathy’s well and good. But again, I get that feeling of total certainty: if I force myself to say “Hello, how may I help you?” to this man, a sliver of my soul will be tarnished in a way I’m not sure is reversible.

This is to say: I was pretty ready to go home before the fucking Szechuan sauce.

fast-food workers just weren’t quite real. I think that’s why people stared when I screamed back at Mustard Lady—it was the novelty of seeing a chair lose its temper, or a touchscreen, or a robot.

What right do these fucking children have to be screamers? They have the freedom to wait in line for hours on a weekday—unthinkable to most workers—and, like a pack of inbred French kings, they waste it on frivolous bullshit. Where the fuck do they get the nerve to riot over Szechuan sauce?