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

by Emily Guendelsberger

I have it so much easier than nearly all my coworkers. At least half the East Mod pickers look past retirement age. Most younger people have kids, and they talk on smoke breaks about doing chores and making dinner after their shifts. There’s even a few very pregnant women picking, which flabbergasts me every time I see one out in the mod. I thought my ridiculous-looking warehouse shoes would help me blend in, but everybody else wears sneakers that are cheap, old, or both. I see an alarming number of Chuck Taylors, which would give me shin splints in thirty seconds. Despite all my research, I’m embarrassingly unprepared for what “normal” means outside the white-collar world, and I’ve grossly misjudged what $10.50 an hour is worth to a lot of people. I’d expected the pain. I’d expected the monotony. I hadn’t expected so many people to regard this as a decent job. Because Amazon does pay better than comparable jobs in the area. And I’d known, academically, that 80 percent of low-wage workers in the private sector don’t get any paid time off. I hadn’t really understood it, though. Unpaid time off still sounded like a laughable benefit to me, but tons of my coworkers were grateful for it, saying it really did give them more flexibility than most other jobs. White and blue badges alike say they’d take the worst job here over the best job in fast food, a sector discussed with a universal shudder. And if you hustle enough to get that blue badge, the health insurance is good, and t...