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

by Emily Guendelsberger

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.