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

by Emily Guendelsberger

A modern McDonald’s job, for example, isn’t the leisurely activity implied by “flipping burgers.” Fast food today is intense. In McDonald’s phone-book-size operations and training manual, every task has a target time in seconds, as in the assembly of a burger: Target order display screen reaction time: 5 seconds. Target toast time: 23 seconds. Target sandwich assembly time: 22 seconds. Target sandwich wrapping time: 14 seconds. Target order assembly time: 16 seconds. “Guests should wait no longer than 60 seconds from the time the order is being totaled until the order is presented,” the manual advises, and the total time between a guest approaching the counter and receiving her food should never be more than three and a half minutes. Until pretty recently, it was much too difficult to track and enforce guidelines this specific. Today, though, monitoring equipment integrated into the tools workers use to do their jobs can clock and track nearly any task a worker does in real time. And the street runs both ways—those same systems can be set to harass, nag, startle, or otherwise trigger a worker’s stress response every time she lags behind the desired pace. (The next time you’re in a busy McDonald’s, for example, note the maddening, near-constant beeping of alarms.)