On the Clock Quotes

“Q: Your warehouse workers work 11/5-hour shifts. In order to make rate, a significant number of them need to take over-the-counter painkillers multiple times per shift, which means regular backups at the medical office. Do you:
A. Scale back the rate ---clearly, workers are at their physical limits
B. Make shifts shorter
C. Increase the number or duration of breaks
D. Increase staffing at the nurse's office
E. Install vending machines to dispense painkillers more efficiently

Seriously---what kind of fucking sociopath goes with E?”
― Emily Guendelsberger, On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane

“Q: Your customer-service representatives handle roughly sixty calls in an eighty-hour shift, with a half-hour lunch and two fifteen-minute breaks. By the end of the day, a problematic number of them are so exhausted by these interactions that their ability to focus, read basic conversational cues, and maintain a peppy demeanor is negatively affected. Do you:
A. Increase staffing so you can scale back the number of calls each rep takes per shift -- clearly, workers are at their cognitive limits
B. Allow workers to take a few minutes to decompress after difficult calls
C. Increase the number or duration of breaks
D. Decrease the number of objectives workers have for each call so they aren't as mentally and emotionally taxing
E. Install a program that badgers workers with corrective pop-ups telling them that they sound tired.

Seriously---what kind of fucking sociopath goes with E?”
― Emily Guendelsberger, On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane

“According to a 2015 survey of thousands of US fast-food workers by the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, 79 percent had been burned on the job in the previous year—most more than once.”
― Emily Guendelsberger, On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane

“The menu Kroc used to take McDonald’s national was similarly minimalist, with exactly three food items—Pure Beef Hamburger, fifteen cents; Tempting Cheeseburger, nineteen cents; Golden French Fries, ten cents. He aimed to make his burger construction line as standardized and closely measured as the Crystal Palace, decreeing, among other things, that McDonald’s burger patties must weigh 1.6 ounces and measure 3.875 inches in diameter. Don’t like a quarter ounce of onions on your burger? Too bad, just scrape ’em off—custom orders slow things down, and speed was the whole point. That’s why they call it fast food. Then Burger King countered with “Have it your way” in the ’80s, and to compete, McDonald’s started broadening its menu and allowing for special orders. Today, the average McDonald’s menu has more than a hundred items, and special orders are commonplace. But customers never changed their expectations of miraculously instantaneous service to match the vastly more complicated menu crew members are working with. So a lot of people who’ve experienced the magic of getting a Big Mac seconds after ordering it seem to believe there’s some Star Trek machine in the back that zaps food into existence from nothing. At least, that’s the only reason I can think of that customers like this lady get so mad when their special orders take an extra minute or two.”
― Emily Guendelsberger, On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane

“Imagine having to put a code into your phone when you go to the toilet, and then have a weekly meeting with your supervisor where you have to justify why you were 1.2 minutes above the average toilet break allocated to you last week,” wrote another. 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.”
― Emily Guendelsberger, On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane

“As more and more skill is stripped out of a job, the cost of turnover falls; eventually, training an ever-churning influx of new unskilled workers becomes less expensive than incentivizing people to stay by improving the experience of work or paying more.”
― Emily Guendelsberger, On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane

“Because [a human's] chances of surviving... are much better living in a tribe or group than alone, she's developed these beautiful, incredibly complex social tools like empathy, patience, generousity, guilt, friendship, shame, and loyalty that help hold together groups of up to a couple hundred people together even when there's internal disagreements.
...Ever so often, though, a member of [a human's] tribe is born without access to those social tools, and is thus only capable of caring about herself. The modern term is sociopath...
...All those social tools we developed only really work on the small scale, though ---it's as if we only have enough true empathy to extend to a couple hundred people at a time...
...Which is why in our modern world of free markets, [the sociopath's] lack of empathy actually makes her better at surviving...Empathy and morality are clearly vital to our species, but they're often illogical within the simple framework of free-market capitalism...Maybe [the sociopath] installs pain-medicine vending machines, or markets Oxycontin as nonaddictive, or pays her workers much, much less than what it costs to live. This is the kind of innovative thinking that makes [the sociopath] an apex predator of the free market.”
― Emily Guendelsberger, On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane

“I've heard some horror stories about fast food ---getting a burger thrown in your face? Nuh-uh!" says Kimberly, shaking her head emphatically. There's a lot of battle-weary nods. Jesus, I think, horrified.”
― Emily Guendelsberger, On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane

“Holy shit, dude!" I say, wiping my eyes. "Scrooge literally has a better time-off policy than Amazon!”
― Emily Guendelsberger, On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane

“There’s actually lots of ways to “infect” a rat with depression, though some are more efficient than others. A frequently cited 1992 paper2 reviewing the best methods concludes that you don’t actually want to traumatize or terrify your rats, like Selye accidentally did. The closest approximation of the depression that plagues modern humans can be achieved by bombarding lab rats with mild but chronic, random, and inescapable stress. You don’t have to terrify them—just remove predictability and control from their lives, and they’ll eventually lose interest in pleasurable things. When they do, you’re ready to test whether your experimental antidepressant will get them interested again. “Losing interest in pleasure” so perfectly described my own gray years that it was kind of surreal to read it in the sterile, clinical context of a scientific paper about rats. I found the characterization of the best stressors as “mild” to be oddly affecting, too—I put off going to a doctor much longer than I should have because I didn’t think I’d really “earned” the right to have PTSD or depression, a feeling that’s apparently very common. I wasn’t a soldier or a refugee—nothing that bad had happened to me. But trauma isn’t the best method of creating a model of depression. All you have to do is remove control and predictability—the exact things low-wage workers have been forced to sacrifice in the name of corporate efficiency and flexibility. Is it any surprise that it feels like the country’s losing its collective mind? It would be more surprising if we weren’t.”
― Emily Guendelsberger, On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane

“Like, look at Walmarts-- you know how they always look kind of postapocalyptic these days? Like, everything's a mess and it looks like nobody works there? That's what I'm talking about. It's apparently been a staffing policy from Arkansas to only give each store manager enough labor hours for a skeleton crew for, like, a decade. Stores may look like garbage and working there completely sucks, but if everybody's in this constant state of trying to catch up, nobody's wasting time on the clock."

"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.”
― Emily Guendelsberger, On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane