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

by Emily Guendelsberger

how dehumanizing the job felt. We’re at a strange point in the history of work. Automation of most jobs is only a decade or two away, and human workers increasingly have to compete with computers, algorithms, and robots that never get tired, or sick, or depressed, or need a day off. Still, in industries that rely on skills that robots still aren’t great at—fine motor control, speech and pattern recognition, empathy—the cheapest option is still low-wage human workers. And so many employers demand a workforce that can think, talk, feel, and pick stuff up like humans—but with as few needs outside of work as robots. They insist their workers amputate the messy human bits of themselves—family, hunger, thirst, emotions, the need to make rent, sickness, fatigue, boredom, depression, traffic—or at least keep them completely at bay.

This resonates

For whatever reason, most sexually explicit products at SDF8 get “modesty-wrapped,” or shrink-wrapped in opaque black plastic so workers can’t see what’s inside. But—come on. I’m not an idiot. I can tell when I’m holding a dildo.

a moment I won’t realize is significant until later: I’m being presented with a choice about which rule to break. I can break the safety rule, keep running, and maybe make it on time. Or I can walk the rest of the way and be late, but safe. Running will maybe get me fired. The consequences of being late, I’ve been told, are automatic. So I make the only logical decision, which is to keep running.

I’m overwhelmed by a surge of desperate gratitude—for my car, for the credit card I’ll use at McDonald’s, for my low-interest mortgage, for decades of regular dental care, for my college degree in two impractical subjects, for my husband’s ability to pay our bills while I try to shoot the moon, for my naive ideas about “normal,” for my ability to shrug and think, Fuck Darryl. I came to SDF8 to try to understand what it feels like to work in a fulfillment center. But the thing I really and truly understand now is that, regardless of how broke I may be, I’m the upper class. I always will be. I won’t ever really understand what it feels like to work here, because I know that I get to leave. You idiot. I take one more look at Darryl in my rearview mirror. I could still go back. But in the place I’d usually feel empathy, there’s just a shameful, overwhelming relief, and the words I get to leave.

Doesn’t Jeff Bezos have a right to be mad if you’re clocked in for forty hours but only actually working for thirty? Aren’t you stealing from him? What is an honest day’s work? How long does it last? How hard do you work? What are you owed in exchange? I like to picture the history of work as two titans, Labor and Capital,* locked in a centuries-long wrestling match. Whoever’s on top at the moment gets to define “an honest day’s work.”

“When you’re working in a life role with high demand and very minimal resources, you get very high levels of toxic kinds of stress. The job that you’re in is classic—you have no control over the demand that’s placed on you for productivity for any given hour that you work there. That is a contributing factor to the innate biological desire for relief. And that desire is part of what motivates the substance abuse,” he says.

“The human mind is designed to not feel bad. It does not like to feel bad. And it will tend to do things that it can to correct for feeling bad. And, unfortunately, things like drugs, alcohol, tobacco, and food—particularly carbs—make us feel better. It’s a native tendency to self-medicate into a better mental state, to get rid of this overwhelming negativity.

feel like they think they’re better than you,” says Kolbi, affecting a snooty voice. “‘Oh, it’s just a fast-food job, they’re lower than me, they’re lower income, they don’t make as much as me. If I’m on the phone, they can wait a minute because they’re on my time. They’re here to serve me.”

with decent jobs may be familiar with the other side of the life market, where you can trade money for extra minutes of sleep or free time. You could also call this the happiness market. The gist of the vast scientific literature on money, free time, and happiness is that you can’t exactly buy happiness—millionaires report feeling just as much stress about money as hundred-thousandaires. 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,

your life and time are valued so little that forty hours a week doesn’t keep your kids fed and diapered, you end up on the other side of the market, exchanging your remaining pieces of life* for whatever it takes to fill the gap. And the exchange rate there isn’t any less lopsided.

projects, or eat healthy food, or quit smoking. • But most of all, you take care of yourself during the apocalypse. Maybe your family, too. But everyone else? They can take care of their own damn selves. Fuck Darryl—I want McDonald’s.

“But… why would they work faster?” Suresh had asked, looking genuinely baffled. Radhika and I stared back at him, equally baffled. “If they keep working faster and faster to keep up with the understaffing, then Walmart doesn’t have any incentive to stop understaffing,” explained Suresh, who has literally worked on very admirable projects involving labor and Walmart. “It’s the line!” Radhika said. “Yeah, it’s the line, dude—everybody’s standing right there, glaring at you.” “When you’ve got a huge line, you don’t have time to think about the big picture. You just go as fast as you can so people don’t yell at you,” said Radhika.

Today, corporations have weighed the costs of high turnover against the costs of making the experience of work less miserable, and, because workers and customers are both kind of stuck with them, they choose bad service, terrible work conditions, and high turnover. It’s not because it’s some law of nature—it’s like this because the unskilled labor pool can’t vote with their feet when everywhere sucks.

you’re so spoiled, I think to myself, feeling worse than ever. You don’t have any real responsibilities—not like Marisol, not like Candela, not like everyone else here. You never learned to control your temper because you’ve never really had to. But that tiny, furious voice hisses, No! That’s bullshit! Nobody should have to trade her last scrap of dignity for her family. This isn’t how things should be. This isn’t right.

After Mustard Lady, some part of me finally accepts that you need walls between you and the customers to survive here, and I start building them. I still do everything I’m supposed to, of course. I just… stop caring. Caring makes you vulnerable.

It’s actually hard to break the habit at first. But going the extra mile just doesn’t make sense. The extra energy it takes for me to do a very good job benefits the customers, our franchise owner, and the McDonald’s brand—and I get nothing but exhaustion in return. Good-faith effort is just too complicated to measure, and therefore doesn’t exist to the fingerprint time clock and staffing algorithms. Even if I were gunning for a promotion, managers barely earn more than crew members. The only reward is in owning a franchise, not working at one. So I wise up. I become less sympathetic and more skeptical about customer problems—and it works. I get better at shaking off unpleasant customers like Mustard Lady. I get harder and more pragmatic, like my coworkers.

Since I was a teenager scooping ice cream, I’ve had a little voice whispering contrarian ideas in my ear. This is some bullshit. If buying a few drinks at a dive karaoke joint is a splurge, your job does not actually pay well! If you describe your workplace as oppressive, you don’t actually love your job! People shouldn’t have to live like this. How can you not see that you deserve more? The whisper comes from whatever it is inside me that gets angry when things are unfair, and thinks it’s possible to change things for the better. It’s what briefly hijacked my body to scream “HEY, FUCK YOU, LADY!” It’s the part of me that likes to help people, and can be hurt by them. It’s what makes me able to experience pleasure and fury—the exact part that went missing during my gray years of depression. It’s the idea that the world can be better. It’s the expectation that the world should be better.

I’m sure I passed that tarnish along to other customers. I’d guess other service workers and underlings he encountered that day also suffered the knock-on effects of my passive aggression. It’s the price other people pay so I can keep that little piece of my soul.

If my newspaper hadn’t closed, I think, I might have written a quick Szechuangate blog post, probably treating all the people going to insane lengths for an advertising gimmick as dumb but harmless. Those people in line looked pretty similar to people I knew—I’d have automatically extended empathy to them. But, honestly? I probably wouldn’t have tried to go out and get a McDonald’s worker’s perspective on record. It would have been a lot more work, but the truth is that angle probably wouldn’t have even occurred to me. My understanding of fast-food workers was the same as that of the throng of rowdy people in San Jose and most other reporters—fast-food workers just weren’t quite real. I think that’s why people stared when I screamed back at Mustard Lady—it was the novelty of seeing a chair lose its temper, or a touchscreen, or a robot.

Rat A’s entire life has been nothing but unpredictable, inescapable suffering, and it’s crippled her capacity to imagine anything better. So Rat A will just sit there getting electrocuted forever, even when relief is a short climb away. It’s a phenomenon called “learned helplessness.” Rat A is so tragic because her despair makes sense. All evidence in her life so far supports her idea that everything just sucks, forever, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

Try it. Be corny. Imagine a better world, one you’d like to live in. Imagine a world that’s kinder and less stressful than this one, a world built on human rather than shark values. Don’t think about politics, or policy, or feasibility—there’s experts for that. Don’t handcuff yourself with pragmatism right now. Just imagine, in as much detail as you can, a world that’s better.