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

by Emily Guendelsberger

Simon Head’s 2013 book, Mindless, on the rise of productivity-enforcing technologies, spends a whole chapter just on Amazon and Walmart. “When I first did research on Walmart’s workplace practices in the early 2000s,” Head writes, “I came away convinced that Walmart was the most egregiously ruthless corporation in America.” In its analysis of the growth of US labor productivity between 1995 and 2000… the McKinsey Global Institute found that just over half that growth took place in two sectors, wholesale and retail, where Walmart “caused the bulk of the productivity acceleration through ongoing managerial innovation that increased competition intensity and drove the diffusion of best practice.”