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

by Emily Guendelsberger

Even now, real, respected people with real, respectable jobs express confusion about things that make me wonder how long it’s been since they’ve had a conversation with anyone making less than $100,000 a year. These vexing puzzles include: • Why do American employers complain they can’t find good workers to fill open positions? • Why has the life expectancy of middle-aged white Americans fallen off a cliff in the past decade? • Why is the country ready to riot over jobs—immigrants taking them, trade deals killing them, Wall Street destroying them? • Why are depression and anxiety so widespread when this is one of the best times to be alive in history? • Why do people vote against their self-interest? • If the data says everything’s so great, why is America freaking the fuck out? You can make a lot of money explaining away the gap between data and reality in ways that flatter puzzled wealthy people. But if you’ve had a service job in the past decade, I’ll bet that some of the answers are probably as obvious to you as why millennials aren’t buying yachts. I’ll spend the next few hundred pages trying to make it just as obvious to all you readers, but the short answer? The bottom half of America’s labor market lives in the weeds. All the time.