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

by Emily Guendelsberger

I’m barely even grumpy to be assigned to the fourth floor, where I spend most of the morning singing Christmas carols to myself. When I catch a flash of red and white out of the corner of my eye, I wonder if SDF8 has finally driven me mad. But when I backtrack a few feet—yes. Bent over, rummaging in a drawer, is Santa Claus. Perfect natural beard, glasses, hat, red suit—though as a concession to the physicality of picking, the sleeves have been cut off. My scanner nags at me to move along, but it has no power over me anymore. I drop it into my tote and go talk to Santa. He says he does this every year to lighten the mood. He’s actually a professional Santa when he’s not at SDF8. “In fact, I’ve got an appearance tomorrow—the Haven House Christmas party for the homeless. I’ve been their Santa for about three years,” he says. It’s a volunteer gig, he tells me. “But you know what? That’s what it’s all about. All this stuff”—he waves a hand at the shelves—“when there’s so many people in this country that have nothing.” “I get that feeling in here a lot,” I say, smiling at him. “Stuff! That’s all it is. It’s stuff. And if we don’t have people like you with a smile on your face, who know that they’re blessed to be healthy enough to work here, even though it’s hard work… why get upset?” He gestures at the cardboard labyrinth around us. “Some people get so angry with this, the bad things that happen here, and—it is what it is.” Before I can ask what that means, Santa notices his sc...

On my last night in Louisville, I’ve arranged to meet up with Eli’s friend Akasha and two of her friends for karaoke at the Levee, a small smoky bar on the Indiana bank of the Ohio River. All three women are blue badges, and all three like working at SDF8. I drink a beer and watch the news on the TV behind the bar as I wait. I haven’t really been following the election—keeping up with the news lately feels even more like work than my shame-pile of unread books. It’s on mute, but Republican front-runner Donald Trump appears to have issued a Christmas tweet demanding credit for an Obama initiative to deport hundreds of families who’d fled violence in Central America. In other news, Bernie Sanders called Trump vulgar for saying Hillary Clinton “got schlonged” in the 2008 primaries. God, 2016 is really going to suck, I think.

The constant monitoring I found so stressful doesn’t bother these women. I felt like someone was always watching in case I screwed up; they feel like someone’s taking note of the good work they do. All three have had to pick up slack from deadbeat coworkers at other jobs; when it’s obvious who’s working and who isn’t, you never end up doing someone else’s job on top of your own. They also say it’s a relief to really know their place in the organization. Their job duties are clear, their hours are usually reliable, and when they clock out, they leave the job at SDF8. “I go home at six and don’t have to worry,” says Melody.

Lindsay, who worked as a rep on Walmart and Sam’s Club accounts a few years back, told me the stress of her job caused her to develop digestive problems. “Even though I went to the doctor and brought a note explaining what was wrong, my supervisor still insisted on following me into the bathroom to ‘make sure’ I really did have diarrhea every single time,” Lindsay said. “She would stand outside the stall door and listen to me shit.”

Amazon workers complained about the physical stress of techno-Taylorism. But an alarming number of call-center reps mentioned experiencing its mental stress, citing their jobs as the direct cause of intense bouts of depression and anxiety as well as ulcers and other physical effects of stress. I could, unfortunately, fill yet another twenty pages with stories from reps who said their jobs had driven them to seriously consider self-harm or suicide. “I considered driving into oncoming traffic every time I drove and thought of suicide constantly,” said one former worker. “Most mornings I contemplate how much throwing myself down my stairs would hurt, ’cause going to the hospital is the only way to have an absence that doesn’t count against you,” said a worker.

Convergys is a huge company with dozens of sites in the United States—it’s one of the largest call-center companies in the world, and the largest one with jobs stateside. I picked the Hickory site because the area has an interesting history as the furniture manufacturing capital of America, not because another miraculous Aunt Sue offered me a free bedroom there. So I don’t exactly have a place to sleep. At the moment. Again, I looked everywhere I could think of, but all the places I could find would either involve another forty-five-minute commute, a few thousand dollars I didn’t have, or a male nudist roommate. So I figured I’d just go to Hickory and live the Car Life until I could find a reasonable place. My family didn’t like the Car Life idea at all. But it isn’t as bad as it sounds. I’m a pretty small person who, given earplugs and a blackout mask, can fall asleep in nearly any setting—including, on occasion, the backseat of my car. I have rose-tinted memories of crashing at rest stops overnight when I was younger, then using the preposterous amount of money I would have spent on a hotel on things more valuable than a single night of sleep. It’s been eight months since I’ve had a steady paycheck. My savings are gone, and Car Life seems like a mild inconvenience compared to jacking up my credit-card balance even further or having another miserable forty-five-minute commute every day.

EMILY: New hire, white woman, early thirties, glasses. General American accent. Unsuccessfully trying to hide that she’s living in her car. Tends to brush off questions about her odd and possibly tragic personal life with “It’s kind of a long story.” Mediocre but not terrible on the phones. Told in performance review that she has a quirky personality but is making it work for her. Secretly a journalist.

FRED: But listen—if you’re scheduled forty hours a week, what are you trading for forty hours of pay? CLASS: [uncertain, murmurs various answers] FRED: Your life. Do you realize we never get that back? You can’t hit the rewind button on life. It doesn’t go backwards. If you picture who you’re working for every day, that little boy or that little girl, you’re going to work harder. I promise you’ll try harder. But whatever that is, whoever you’re working for—you’re trading your life every day. Your life! I’d make sure you get the most out of it.

I used to live near Philly’s Eastern State Penitentiary, a tourist destination that looks like a few square blocks of medieval castle plunked down into a residential neighborhood. From above, though, it looks a bit like a flower, or a windmill: It’s one of the first physical examples of a panopticon, a concept dreamed up by British philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the late eighteenth century. He imagined a circular prison built so every inch of every cell was visible from a central observation point—hence “pan-optic,” meaning “all-seeing.” A single jailer could watch over an entire prison from this central point, as in the diagram of Eastern State. Prisoners, however, would be able to see neither the jailer nor any other prisoners as they went about their daily labors.* If prisoners could never know whether they were being watched at any particular moment—only that someone could be watching—Bentham thought they would behave as if they were always being watched. A prisoner would watch and police himself, as if his own personal jailer had been installed inside his head.

Though Convergys’s haphazard web of rules sometimes makes me nostalgic for Amazon’s perfectly integrated systems, it’s always short-lived. Convergys can be frustrating, but SDF8 made me feel like I was actually going to go crazy. Here, the inefficiency of the training system manifests itself as time to talk and goof off with my classmates. Even if I were in as much physical pain as I was at SDF8, I’d still take this over Amazon every time. Because I make friends. It’s been a while since I’ve been part of a group of disparate women* thrown together to learn something, and I’d forgotten how nice that bond can be. I rolled my eyes when Kimberly said she wants us to become like a family, but we kind of do; people even consider making class shirts. I make friends, actual friends, people I can smoke and laugh and even go to the beach with, though I still feel I stick out.

The first European settlers set foot in North Carolina at Roanoke Island in 1585. You may remember Roanoke as the “lost colony,” the one whose governor returned from a supply run to find that all hundred of its settlers had disappeared, leaving the word Croatoan scratched into a fence post as the only clue to what happened. Even today, the only historical consensus is that whatever it was probably wasn’t good. Since those auspicious beginnings, North Carolina’s been almost comically unlucky and poor, crippled by several factors—no large ports, a coastline nicknamed “graveyard of the Atlantic,” pirates, hurricanes, unproductive soil, incompetent leadership, and active economic kneecapping from other colonies. So as wealthier neighbors like Virginia and South Carolina developed Southern aristocracies based around huge slave plantations, North Carolina—especially this western area—remained mostly populated with subsistence-farming immigrants as likely to be from Germany or Scotland as from England. Supposedly, this is when North Carolina picked up the nickname “a vale of humility between two mountains of conceit.” After the American Revolution, North Carolina made so little economic and social progress that it acquired more nicknames poking fun at how backward it was, including “the Rip Van Winkle of the States” and “the Ireland of America.” It was already the poorest and most desperate state in the South by the time it joined the Civil War, in which it lost more soldiers tha...

“What goes into the price?” I ask. “The furniture is gorgeous, but… yeah, I could never afford any of this.” “Well, it’s how it’s constructed,” Douglas says. He indicates the sofa I’m sitting on. “This has a hardwood kiln-dried frame. The frame is corner-blocked, glued and screwed, eight-way hand-tied—that’s a coil that drops down into the frame of your furniture and is literally hand-tied off to the frame eight different ways with a heavy nylon. “The alternative is a sinuous coil, a continuous s that goes from front to back. It’s a lot less expensive to manufacture. But this”—he pats the sofa’s arm—“is how you get longevity. Eight-way hand-tied furniture is furniture you’ll always have. My parents have had their sofa for twenty years, and it looks brand-new. Or—may I show you a piece?” He shepherds me over to a wooden table whose surface is a complex inlaid mosaic. It’s breathtaking. So is the sticker price—$7,899. “Now, this is true furniture at its finest; you can feel it,” says Douglas, running his fingers over the seamless inlay with pride. “This is an honest-to-goodness piece of art.” He’s not wrong. But my last paycheck for two weeks of work at Convergys came to $525. If I saved every single penny—no food, no rent, no gas, no car payment—I’d have $7,899 in about four months.

You can whip Yourself into doing a lot of things. But Yourself gets veto power in certain situations—if you try to hold your hand over a flame, for example. As I continue trying to make myself hit the button that will take the screamer off hold, it strikes me that there’s a finite number of times You can force Yourself to do something before Yourself decides You don’t understand your best interests and mutinies.

What money can buy is free time and sleep, which are so closely correlated with self-reported happiness that they’re almost the same thing. So if you have the means, hire a house cleaner, a night nurse, a gardener, an au pair, a general contractor, a handyman. Life-hack. Drop your laundry off. Take an Uber instead of waiting for the bus. Live alone instead of with roommates. Pay higher rent for a shorter commute. Get a meal-delivery service instead of buying groceries and chopping vegetables. Take a job that pays less but allows more time with your family. Buy yourself out of the weeds.

Convergys doesn’t make its internal numbers public, though it does vaguely discuss high turnover as an industrywide problem,* so I try stitching together stray numbers from all the orientations. Jordan said she trains forty-eight classes a year, minimum; at twenty people per class, that’s at least 960 new hires a year just for AT&T. Steve said there’s six hundred people at the site total, and Marshall said AT&T takes up twice as much space as the insurance company downstairs—that’s a base staffing of four hundred AT&T reps. So the annual turnover on the second floor would be… 240 percent. That’s crazy. That’s like replacing every single AT&T rep in the building every five months. The only official Convergys numbers I manage to get my hands on are from an abandoned presentation on SlideShare titled “Turnover Reduction Model for Business Units,” created by regional HR director Kelly Wadsworth and dated December 11, 2014. In it, Wadsworth writes: Turnover continues to be a major business issue for all CMG [Convergys Customer Management Group] groups and divisions.… The costs associated with our current turnover trends are enormous. On average, across CMG, we turn our employee base over 1.8 times per year. That’s slightly lower than my estimate, but it’s still wild—like replacing all Convergys’s 125,000 employees worldwide every six or seven months.

My Life and Work can feel surprisingly modern for a book written almost a century ago. Ford reads like an old-timey Travis Kalanick, invoking a lot of the same mythology as Silicon Valley startups—disruption, government red tape holding back progress, the greedy fat cats of organized labor, a pathological devotion to work. Ford’s biggest contribution to the history of industry was not the car, but the assembly line. He didn’t exactly invent it, but he was the first person to really demonstrate how insanely profitable standardized large-scale mass production could be. The assembly line was a drastic change in the way work was done. Even scientifically managed tasks generally required several motions and the supervision of human managers. But Ford took Taylor’s principles and did him one better. A workman under Taylor would have drilled each of the forty-five holes in a Model T engine one by one, carrying a set of craftsman’s tools around the workshop as he walked from engine to engine. Even after being Taylorized, the process of drilling a bunch of variously sized holes still involved some autonomy and at least a little skill. Ford designed his own standardized tools that were perfect for making Model Ts and useless for any other purpose, stripping away the skill Taylor had missed. A workman at the Crystal Palace didn’t have to know how to use a drill: he made those same forty-five holes by pulling a single lever that, Ford wrote, “might be attended to by a child of three.”...

By suspending the auto parts to be worked on from a chain that moved the parts down a line of stationary workers, there was no need for the constant individual managerial oversight of Taylorism. It was visually obvious when someone wasn’t keeping up, because unfinished pieces started building up at his station. It was impossible to hide any deviation from the pace of work. And since management controlled the speed of the chain, workers lost any remaining control they had over that pace. Productivity skyrocketed. In seven months, the time it took to produce a Model T fell from twelve and a half hours to an astonishing ninety-three minutes. That year, Ford made more Model Ts than all its competitors put together. By its high point, in 1925, the Crystal Palace churned out nine thousand Model Ts a day. But workers hated it there. One former Highland Park worker described his time there as “a form of hell on earth that turned human beings into driven robots.” Another: “[Ford] attempts to standardize the machines, and so he does with labor.” The wife of another worker was so concerned she actually wrote Ford a letter: “The chain system you have is a slave driver! My God! Mr. Ford. My husband has come home & thrown himself down & won’t eat his supper—so done out! Can’t it be remedied?” Workers hated the assembly line for more than just the physical demands, though. It’s tough to take pride in a job that “a child of three” might do. And tasks were broken down so minutely that, as ...

But Ford didn’t take their complaints very seriously. Despite all evidence to the contrary, he appeared to believe that workers didn’t actually mind jobs that were monotonous, unrewarding, and physically exhausting. He wouldn’t want that sort of thing himself, of course, but he saw himself as practically a different species than the oxlike laborers on his lines: Repetitive labour—the doing of one thing over and over again and always in the same way—is a terrifying prospect to a certain kind of mind. It is terrifying to me. I could not possibly do the same thing day in and day out, but to other minds, perhaps I might say to the majority of minds, repetitive operations hold no terrors. Ford goes on to write that, anyway, the repetitive nature of work on his assembly lines wasn’t so different from the repetitive work done by bankers and businessmen. “Here he veers off into fantasy,” writes Richard Snow in his excellent biography of Ford, I Invented the Modern Age: Bankers and businessmen rarely walked off their jobs in disgust after five days. Just when the efficiencies of the moving assembly line had proved themselves at the end of 1913, the Ford managers discovered that they were having to hire 963 workers to be assured 100 of them would stay with their jobs long enough to learn them. You read that right: during the first year of Ford’s assembly line, turnover at the Crystal Palace was 378 percent. That’s unbelievable, even compared to Convergys and Amazon—that would be the...

There’s a perception that life before modern civilization was, as philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously put it, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”—an idea stemming from his personal observations of the brutal poverty of London’s underclasses in the mid-1600s. But since the 1960s, the perception of what life was like for early humans has been shifted by a lot of evidence that they spent most of their time straight chilling. Wanda’s life isn’t exactly Eden—she could be dragged off by tigers at any moment. But it isn’t exactly stressful, either—literally, her stress response goes off occasionally, not constantly. It probably only takes Wanda about five hours a day to find enough bugs, roots, and berries to survive. She spends the rest of her time socializing, napping, having sex, and wrangling her tribe’s children.

You’re a little embarrassed about this, but you get caught up in a marathon of So You Think You Can Dance and forget all about Wanda for a while. You finally come out of your binge at 10:00 p.m.—that’s around 30,000 BCE, if you’re counting—because you hear a weird, off-key tootling and intermittent thunks coming from the backyard. Outside, Wanda appears to have carved herself a crappy flute, covered your house with cave paintings, and turned your back door into target practice for a crude bow and arrow. Irritated, you bang on the glass, but this time you jump a mile as an arrow thunks into the window frame. But you can’t tear yourself away now, because Wanda’s getting crazy busy. The Neolithic era begins around 11:00 p.m., when Wanda manages to make crappy flour out of some grasses. You leave for, like, a second to go to the bathroom, and by the time you get back, she’s somehow acquired a herd of sheep and is planting your yard with crops. She also starts weaving cloth, making pots and baskets for storing dry food, and building rudimentary houses—trading her nomadic lifestyle for something more permanent. Around 11:30, Wanda invents the wheel. There’s clusters of houses around the crops and sheep now, marking the first time Wanda’s lived in a group of more than 150 or 200 other people—the biggest that nomadic tribes tend to get, historically. By 11:45, Wanda’s invented writing and equipped her raft with a sail. She’s also somehow built a forge and is using it to make glass...

But Wanda’s body—now only cosmetically different from yours or mine—hasn’t had anywhere near enough time to adapt to the insane, sparkling, deafening, terrifying, all-singing, all-dancing modern world. Wanda’s body and nervous system still think that tigers are everywhere, and she’s just as likely to jump out of her skin if you knock on the window now as she was a week ago. And the very thing that’s saved Wanda’s life millions and millions of times has suddenly become deadlier to her than all the tigers in history. Wanda’s stress response flails around in the mostly tigerless modern world. It’s occasionally useful, helping a panicked mother lift a car off her child or a soldier survive an ambush, but those situations are the exceptions, not the rule. And the flailings of humanity’s uprooted stress response are deeply involved with the “diseases of civilization”—heart disease, obesity, cancer, depression, anxiety, diabetes, etc.—that afflict first-world countries.

Until I began researching this book, I’d always assumed Wanda’s world was kind of apocalyptic. Like many people, I just took the Hobbesian “nasty, brutish, and short” view of prehistory as fact. Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins begins his famous 1966 essay “The Original Affluent Society” by outlining the common view at the time: “Mere subsistence economy,” “limited leisure save in exceptional circumstances,” “incessant quest for food,” “meagre and relatively unreliable” natural resources, “absence of an economic surplus,” “maximum energy from a maximum number of people”—so runs the fair average anthropological opinion of hunting and gathering. Sahlins had a new theory—that Wanda’s world was actually one where “all the people’s wants are easily satisfied.” A good case can be made that hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and, rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society.… The food quest is so successful that half the time the people do not seem to know what to do with themselves.

In the 1980s, archaeologist David Madsen was excavating a site in Utah when he noticed that all the ancient poop in the latrine area was full of grasshopper bits. Curious about the energy efficiency of catching and eating bugs, he set his team to catching the area’s omnipresent Mormon crickets, a traditional food of native people in the area. After an hour of picking crickets off bushes and from the grass, each person had collected an average of two and one-third pounds of bugs—nearly three thousand calories.* In areas where the crickets clustered, such as the cave Madsen was excavating, you could do much, much better. “One person collecting crickets from the water margin for one hour, yielding eighteen and one-half pounds, accomplishes as much as one collecting 87 chili dogs, 49 slices of pizza, or 43 Big Macs,” Madsen wrote.

When kids don’t get enough food for as little as a week, their bodies switch to short-term mode and stop putting so much energy into getting bigger. When kids start eating enough again, they resume growing. By looking at X-rays of a human’s long arm and leg bones, then, you can actually tell whether she went hungry for longer than a week or two as a child.

As a rule, you can predict the behavioral effects of chronic stress by imagining what would help Wanda stay alive in an unpredictable, brutal Mad Max world. She becomes less generous. She gets extra jumpy and paranoid, and is easily distracted. She’s more impulsive. Her temper has a lower threshold. She’s more afraid of and hostile toward people outside her “tribe,” that circle of empathy that encompasses “people like me,” and that circle shrinks as things get worse. She’s less likely to care about nuance. She’s more likely to see patterns in static and conspiracies in unrelated events. And she’s more likely to put her trust in a strongman leader.

When she’s off the phone, Jess fills me in—while I was gone, Anthone’s abscessed tooth got so bad that it actually gave her a black eye. They’d gotten up early this morning to try to fix it, but it was harder to get at than the last one Anthone had. I wince. Abscessed teeth happen when bacteria get inside a tooth via an untreated cavity or crack and infect the supersensitive pulp and root, which is incredibly painful. As the tooth rots from the inside, a pocket of pus forms, putting more and more pressure on the dental nerves as it swells. An emergency root canal is a common treatment, because the infection can spread down into the jawbone, then into the blood and organs. An untreated abscess can kill you. “Wait, go back a second—are you saying…” I think of the straightened safety pin with mounting horror. “You mean you—you tried to fix it yourselves?” Yeah, says Jess. They’d managed to DIY the last one Anthone had, and it wasn’t that hard. “There’s the white thing—you know, the white swollen thing?—and you just stick it with a needle, and then she just spat the stuff all out, and then you have antibiotics so it doesn’t get infected.” This time they’d had more trouble getting to the abscess, though—the pocket of pus is higher up and farther back. After many failed attempts to drain it this morning, they’d had to give up. Jess drove them both to Convergys early instead of getting a ride with me because Anthone had a fever. “Holy fuck, you went to work like this?” I ask, hor...

I sometimes imagine myself in the Crystal Palace, stationed at the lever of that specialized tool that drills forty-five holes in a Model T engine. The job would suck even if I were just pulling the same lever all day. But here, it’s as if half the time the engine needs thirty-eight holes—or fifty-five, or seven—and I have no clue where any other levers are, or if they exist at all. And when you ask around about where the thirty-eight-hole lever is, every single person has a different answer. One will patiently show you where it is. Another will less patiently show you a different thirty-eight-hole lever on the other side of the building. Another will continue to ignore you, making you wonder what about you makes her dislike you so much. Another will show you where the sixteen-hole and twenty-two-hole levers are and how to jerry-rig them together to make thirty-eight holes. Another will roll his eyes and just do it himself. Another, who always seems like he just got back from blowing lines in the bathroom, will treat you to an excited monologue on how that’s bullshit: engines don’t really need thirty-eight holes, and this engine is probably trying to scam the company. Sometimes there is no thirty-eight-hole lever. Sometimes the engine calls you a stupid bitch.

Not all AT&T customers are screamers, of course. Most are perfectly nice. One man even insists on waiting on hold to personally tell my manager what a good job I did with his complicated problem. It really does make my day, just like a terrible call can ruin my day. But the glowing commendation makes no difference jobwise—it doesn’t factor into my metrics at all. If anything, the extra six hundred seconds the guy spent on hold probably wrecked my average call-handle time for the week. I’m still appreciative, but underneath, there’s a strange mix of resentment, envy, and contempt for the guy. What kind of half-assed job does this guy have that he can just waste six hundred seconds in the middle of the workday? I think. He wouldn’t last a second at this job.