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

by Emily Guendelsberger

The weeds make us crazy. The weeds make us sick. The weeds destroy family life. The weeds push people into addiction. The weeds will literally kill you. And people fortunate enough to have good jobs making policy or writing op-eds seem to have no idea how crippled a life with no escape from the weeds is.

Nearly everyone with influence in this country, regardless of political affiliation, is incredibly insulated from how miserable and dehumanizing the daily experience of work has gotten over the past decade or two.

From a boss’s point of view, though, the weeds are where workers should be—at maximum productivity, all day, every day.

Numbers and statistics just aren’t up to communicating how something feels, even though that’s often extremely important information.

“Locating in Louisville gives your company the ability to move your products to 80% of the world’s population in less than 48 hours”

“I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: My Brief, Backbreaking, Rage-Inducing, Low-Paying, Dildo-Packing Time Inside the Online-Shipping Machine.” The 2012 first-person account in Mother Jones2 detailed the week reporter Mac McClelland spent working in a warehouse for “Amalgamated Product Giant Shipping Worldwide Inc.,” generally understood to be lawsuit-avoidant shorthand for Amazon:

Tony Hsieh later wrote in Delivering Happiness, a history of Zappos,

Despite all my research, I’m embarrassingly unprepared for what “normal” means outside the white-collar world, and I’ve grossly misjudged what $10.50 an hour is worth to a lot of people.

I’d expected the pain. I’d expected the monotony. I hadn’t expected so many people to regard this as a decent job.

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.

“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.

This, Walker says, is why so much of the War on Drugs has been like “whack-a-mole”—it’s only addressed the side effects of our attempts to escape feeling bad, rather than seriously looking at why so many people feel so bad.

I like knowing that however bad the job is, it’s going to end. That’s peace of mind. You can do anything for a couple of months.”

kitchen tarp with Eli. “I’ve been traveling since I was nineteen,” he says. “Not like how these guys do, hopping trains and shit, but I’ve been to nineteen countries. I see jobs as a means to my end. I make probably ten grand a year, and I feel like I’m living like a rich man. How many millionaires go on five-month vacations? I’m giddy as hell about the next five months. I have no idea what it’s going to bring—I have an entry flight and an exit flight and three countries to explore.”

“Amazing! I do shit that makes me happy. You don’t need to worry about anything if you’re happy. My nephews think I’m the coolest uncle on the planet—I’m heading there next, to spend Christmas with my sister and my nephews. I want to teach my nephews this lifestyle—that you don’t need a lot of money to do amazing things. My brother and his wife make a hundred grand a year, and they can’t make ends meet—they’re thinking about canceling fucking Netflix. Really? People get stuck in their lives. They go to work to pay bills for houses they can’t afford and cars they can’t afford, and they hate their jobs and they hate their lives.”

“You hear older people say stuff all the time—like, I’m a company man, you work for the company, and the company provides for you. But the company doesn’t do that anymore, because it’s not company, it’s corporation.”

A good rule of thumb: the more interest management takes in workers’ use of the bathroom, the more that job is going to suck.

The Furniture Wars: How America Lost a Fifty Billion Dollar Industry, a 2009 retrospective by Hickory’s Michael K. Dugan about the industry’s eventful years between 1987 and 2004,

I’ve seen so many ghost towns and shuttered factories in Kentucky, Indiana, and North Carolina—just drive twenty minutes in any direction, they’re everywhere—and it gives me a better understanding of Trump’s appeal. Politicians of both parties are almost universally positive about global trade—the concept was that free, efficient markets know best and that the loss of most of America’s manufacturing jobs would be outweighed by how much cheaper prices would get for everyone. The thing is, the many Americans whose jobs and communities were the collateral damage of globalization don’t feel like anybody asked if they’d like to exchange their functional but inefficient local economy for a much more efficient Walmart. Nobody asked Butch Patty if she’d like to trade her $20-an-hour job making furniture for a $10-an-hour job at Convergys plus the ability to buy a T-shirt for five dollars. And I can’t really blame them for feeling forgotten. Global trade would affect their lives the most and benefit them the least—at $10 an hour, you just don’t have much money to spend. Trump’s the only major politician I’ve heard say plainly that global trade’s benefits weren’t worth it, actually calling NAFTA “the worst trade deal in the history of the world” on the campaign trail. It’s not surprising to me that so many people who’ve spent twenty years watching their communities erode as a result of vast forces beyond their control were so desperately grateful when someone, anyone, finally said w...

least, studies have linked attempts to multitask to a short-term increase in levels of cortisol and adrenaline—the “stress hormones”—and long-term increases in depression and anxiety.

Thick, clot-forming blood is very helpful if a tiger gets a bite of your arm. But if you’re constantly making your blood go all thick and sticky, it’s more likely to clump up into a plug and cause a heart attack or stroke. All that extra sugar-fuel in your blood is exactly what you need for a desperate burst of muscular energy. But regularly flooding your blood with sugar-fuel—particularly if you don’t make a point of exercising it away afterward—makes you more likely to develop diabetes.

In economics, the shorthand for the hypothetical self-interested human is Homo economicus.

So if the constant hustle of the modern economy makes you feel like you’re losing your mind, try not to be too hard on yourself. Depression and anxiety are perfectly normal reactions to the insanely stressful world we’ve built for ourselves. Suppressing our humanity is exhausting. It’s driving us crazy. It’s ruining our experience of life. It’s making us sick and terrified and cruel and hopeless. And it’s killing us.

karoshi, meaning death by overwork

Selected Reading An extremely incomplete list of books that helped shape my understanding of the situation we find ourselves in.

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Barbara Ehrenreich Good Jobs, Bad Jobs: The Rise of Polarized and Precarious Employment Systems in the United States, 1970s to 2000s, Arne Kalleberg The Status Syndrome: How Social Standing Affects Our Health and Longevity, Michael Marmot

Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary, Louis Hyman

The New Ruthless Economy: Work and Power in the Digital Age, Simon Head

Do What You Love: And Other Lies About Success and Happiness, Miya Tokumitsu HyperNormalisation (film), Adam Curtis

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, Brad Stone Fast Food, Fast Talk: Service Work and the Routinization of Everyday Life, Robin Leidner The Furniture Wars: How America Lost a Fifty Billion Dollar Industry, Michael K.

Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory, Cathy N. Davidson McDonald’s: Behind the Arches, John F. Love

The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home, Arlie Hochschild

Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work, Sarah Kessler

The Job: Work and Its Future in a Time of Radical Change, Ellen Ruppel Shell

The Working Poor: Invisible in America, David K. Shipler

Precarious Lives: Job Insecurity and Well-Being in Rich Democracies, Arne Kalleberg The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences, Louis Uchitelle The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, Juliet Schor Free Time: The Forgotten American Dream, Benjamin Hunnicutt

The Betrayal of Work: How Low-Wage Jobs Fail 30 Million Americans, Beth Shulman

“We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now”: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages, Annelise Orleck

Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir

The Mythology of Work: How Capitalism Persists Despite Itself, Peter Fleming

The Economics of Inequality, Thomas Piketty