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

by Emily Guendelsberger

I knew the numbers about how massive SDF8 was. The actual building is twenty-five acres, thirty if you include the truck bay. It’s as long as seven New York blocks, has more than four times the interior space of the world’s largest cruise ship, and can hold thirty million items.

That’s another thing about Fred Taylor—he often claimed to respect and feel kinship with the men he’d labored alongside during his apprenticeships, but he constantly talks shit about them, and seems to regard them as almost another species: One of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation [is] that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type.… He is so stupid that the word “percentage” has no meaning to him, and he must consequently be trained by a man more intelligent than himself.

Nearly every drop of “brain work” has been wrung out of this job, like so many others. Cashiers used to have to be able to do math in their heads to give people change; today, many registers automatically dispense the appropriate coins. Call-center workers rely on elaborate scripts instead of understanding the systems they work within. London’s taxi drivers, who once had to study for years to pass the Knowledge, are being displaced by Uber drivers with GPS maps. As more and more skill is stripped out of a job, the cost of turnover falls; eventually, training an ever-churning influx of new unskilled workers becomes less expensive than incentivizing people to stay by improving the experience of work or paying more. And so we get the modern low-wage workplace, where Capital has had Labor in a headlock for quite a while. I can’t think of a better example of what happens when employers have total control of what “an honest day’s work” means than “time theft,” pain-med vending machines, and the neverending countdown of my scanner.

I can’t overemphasize the presence of the opioid crisis in the Louisville area. It’s everywhere—from the front page of every newspaper to the billboards along my commute to the bed I sleep in. It used to belong to Katie’s younger brother, who’d gotten addicted to Oxycontin after a difficult brain surgery and made the classic transition to heroin after his prescriptions ran out. His room was only available for me because he was in jail after a years-long downward spiral. The pain of the situation was omnipresent in the McPherson household. 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.

“Like, in Appalachia—if anyone wants to take this substance abuse problem seriously, they will build an interstate and a decent highway system through the area so that people can build businesses there. It’s ridiculous to think that treatment or greater law enforcement is going to have any effect on the drug abuse problem there, because it’s driven by core economic and life issues. It’s a depressing place to live. And people don’t like to stay depressed, so they do things to get away from it.”

Q: Your customer-service representatives handle roughly sixty calls in an eight-hour shift, with a half-hour lunch and two fifteen-minute breaks. By the end of the day, a problematic number of them are so exhausted by these interactions that their ability to focus, read basic conversational cues, and maintain a peppy demeanor is negatively affected. Do you: A. Increase staffing so you can scale back the number of calls each rep takes per shift—clearly, workers are at their cognitive limits B. Allow workers to take a few minutes to decompress after difficult calls C. Increase the number or duration of breaks D. Decrease the number of objectives workers have for each call so they aren’t as mentally and emotionally taxing E. Install a program that badgers workers with corrective pop-ups telling them that they sound tired Seriously—what kind of fucking sociopath goes with E?

For example, at my old newspaper—god, it seems like forever ago—I made $36,000 a year as a thirty-two-year-old senior staff writer with a decade of experience. That number is sort of doubly embarrassing—on one hand, I cringe imagining colleagues from the journalism world reading that I was willing to do so much for so little. On the other hand, I cringe imagining coworkers from Amazon, Convergys, and McDonald’s reading that I was paid so much for such comparatively easy and rewarding work.