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

by Emily Guendelsberger

That’s why I decided to go experience this brave new world myself—so readers can get an idea of what the modern experience of low-wage work feels like. I went to work at an Amazon warehouse, a call center, and a McDonald’s—three places that are fairly representative of the future of work in America. I spent between one and two months at each, and I worked them for real, with every ounce of my Dad-infused work ethic. And at each one, productivity-enforcing technology constantly corralled me and my coworkers into the weeds like a sheepdog snapping at a herd’s heels. Working in an Amazon warehouse outside Louisville, Kentucky, I walked up to sixteen miles a day to keep up with the rate at which I was supposed to pick orders. A GPS-enabled scanner tracked my movements and constantly informed me how many seconds I had left to complete my task. Working at a call center in western North Carolina, I was lectured about how using the bathroom too often is the same thing as stealing from the company, and had the minutes I spent in the bathroom tracked in a daily report sent to my supervisor. Working at a McDonald’s in downtown San Francisco, we were underscheduled to the point of a constant, never-ending line of customers—everyone worked at the frantic speed of those in-the-weeds waitresses of my youth all shift, nearly every shift. I did plenty of research beforehand, and I’d heard crazy things about how stressful each job would be—each in its own special way, like Tolstoy’s unhappy...