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On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane (2019)

por Emily Guendelsberger

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17515154,690 (4.24)18
"Nickel and Dimed for the Amazon age," (Salon) the bitingly funny, eye-opening story of finding work in the automated and time-starved world of hourly low-wage labor After the local newspaper where she worked as a reporter closed, Emily Guendelsberger took a pre-Christmas job at an Amazon fulfillment center outside Louisville, Kentucky. There, the vending machines were stocked with painkillers, and the staff turnover was dizzying. In the new year, she travelled to North Carolina to work at a call center, a place where even bathroom breaks were timed to the second. And finally, Guendelsberger was hired at a San Francisco McDonald's, narrowly escaping revenge-seeking customers who pelted her with condiments. Across three jobs, and in three different parts of the country, Guendelsberger directly took part in the revolution changing the U.S. workplace. Offering an up-close portrait of America's actual "essential workers," On the Clock examines the broken social safety net as well as an economy that has purposely had all the slack drained out and converted to profit. Until robots pack boxes, resolve billing issues, and make fast food, human beings supervised by AI will continue to get the job done. Guendelsberger shows us how workers went from being the most expensive element of production to the cheapest - and how low wage jobs have been remade to serve the ideals of efficiency, at the cost of humanity. On the Clock explores the lengths that half of Americans will go to in order to make a living, offering not only a better understanding of the modern workplace, but also surprising solutions to make work more humane for millions of Americans.… (mais)
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What bugs low wage workers more than anything is the lack of control over their workday and predictability in their jobs. Strangely, it doesn’t seem to be the low wage levels themselves, which would be aggravating enough if it weren’t for efforts to standardize the services of giants like amazon.com, MacDonalds, and the myriad call centres created presumably to mop up the lousy services provided by the giant companies who subcontract “customer service” to them in the first place.

As an employer myself, I can empathize to some degree where these larger companies want some predictability over how people are going to represent them to the public. I want my representatives to know clearly what we can do, what we can’t do, and to convey both to the customer in a reasonable way. Not to sound condescending, not to raise expectations, and certainly not to make the customer feel entirely powerless.

But there is a line employers and customers should not cross and the general wellbeing of the people you hire has to factor in.

Until I read this book it had never occurred to me that unsatisfied customers would throw food at the hapless MacDonalds servers. I’d never seen this at the myriad Canadian, US, and European MacDonalds outlets I’ve visited over the past forty years.

Apparently, it happens in San Francisco and a lot of other places.

My own staff and I myself have experienced some of the bad behaviour author Emily Guendelsburger documents in this book. It is what causes some people to leave the profession and contributes to the sentiment that retail is not a professional career or calling.

Lack of boundaries for customers is for sure a big problem. The need for growing quarterly earnings in public companies is another big problem. There are times when companies just shouldn’t be growing. Times when management lack a feel for what their policies are doing to their employees at the end of the line is one of those times.

The big employers complain that laziness on the job is time theft and I can’t count the number of times I’ve wished under my breath that I could simply get a full eight hours of labour out of my employees.

Do I really need all eight of those hours? Probably not, but what is enough? And can I design my business to survive based on a reasonable estimate of worker productivity.

It seems that the way amazon handles this problem is to provide vending machines offering pain killers for employees who suffer from the strain of walking all that distance everyday between amazon bins. Of lifting and pushing, sliding and reaching. Amazon’s hand scanners tell you where to go, when to start and when to stop, and when you’re just not going fast enough.

The next worst thing to having a computer replace you in the workplace is to have a computer telling you when enough is not good enough.

And then there is the thankless work of telephone support. Employers try to turn around profit eating services with profit making sales pitches, often further enraging customers who have essentially called to complain.

In this telling the employers abuse, the customers abuse, and who knows what else happens in the home.

Things are just moving way too fast. ( )
  MylesKesten | Jan 23, 2024 |
I have only one recommendation: READ. THIS. BOOK.

Right now. Buy it. Borrow it. I’m not sure I can even stop short of saying steal it if you can’t lay hands on it any other way.

If you’re a Boomer at or near retirement, and you can’t understand why certain job sectors complain that they can’t fill vacancies even as people are falling into homelessness – read this book.

If you’re a Gen Xer whose kids should be entering the labor market but are still living in your basement and you can’t figure out why – read this book.

If you’re in Gen Z and you’re struggling to comprehend why the older generations keep preaching the value (and rewards) of hard work but all you’re seeing are soul-crushing, spirit-destroying hell-holes that leave you sick, dispirited, and damaged – read this book.

Emily Guendelsberger has written an absolutely stunning, compelling, and deeply disturbing study of what low-wage work is doing to the blue-collar labor force “and how it drives America insane” – sometimes literally. It’s an update and an expansion on the same themes Barbara Ehrenreich tackled in Nickel and Dimed that goes beyond what it’s like to be caught in the low-wage maelstrom to look at why and how computerization, standardization, and megacorporations have combined to remove every last vestige of humanity from the 21st-century workplace.

After the small weekly newspaper for which she worked went out of business, Guendelsberger conceived a project that involved working for three of the 900-pound-gorillas of American industry – Amazon, AT&T, and McDonald’s, and reporting not just on the difficulty of managing to exist on what appears to be “market standard” (or higher) wages, but on the myriad ways in which corporate policy disrespects and abuses its workers. From Amazon’s restriction of bathroom breaks for its warehouse pickers (apparently ignoring the fact that Amnesty International considers denying or restricting excretory functions a form of torture) to AT&T call centers’ routine “adjustment” of employee timecards so that they are not paid for the minutes per day they may spend between the time they clock in and the time they actually take their first call (a practice which denies individual workers a few dollars per day but saves the corporation billions) to McDonald’s last-minute scheduling and general avoidance of giving employees a full 40-hour week (which gets the company off the hook for paid benefits), the author bucks up and does each job, but admits that the one thing that allowed her to survive was the knowledge that “I get to leave”.

She also looks at various scientific studies on the results of stress in lab animals, and extrapolates many of those same stress responses to contemporary issues and political movements, writing:
So why is America so crazy? It’s the inescapable chronic stress built into the way we work and live. It’s the insane idea that an honest day’s work means suppressing your humanity, dignity, family, and other nonwork priorities in exchange for low wages that make home life constantly stressful, too. Is it surprising that Americans have started exhibiting unhelpful physical, mental, and social adaptations to chronic stress en masse? Our bodies believe this is the apocalypse.

And on top of that, people with power seem totally blind to how dire life has gotten for much of the country. The state of the union is always strong. GDP is up. Unemployment is low. Everything’s fine. They’re so insulated from the real world that they don’t or can’t understand that, for most people, our current system is obviously broken. That’s why ‘Make America Great Again’ caught on while Clinton’s counter that ‘America Is Already Great’ didn’t – people aren’t stupid. They know something isn’t right.
( )
  LyndaInOregon | Aug 19, 2023 |
This is a pretty solid story on its own, and can be read as an updated take on what the recently passed Barbara Ehrenreich achieved in her Nickel and Dimed--getting a firsthand look at how it works (or doesn't work) to survive on low-wage entry level jobs by applying and working at them. Guendelsberger chose the decidedly 21st century jobs of an Amazon warehouse picker (in Kentucky) and an AT&T call center worker (in North Carolina), as well as at a McDonald's in San Francisco, to understand what it took to survive in each of them. This is an intriguing look at what's happening behind the scenes of these employers, but more than that a realization that generally these workers band together to keep one another going. The major example of this is when two of her call center coworkers even invited the author to move in with her, when they learned she was bouncing between a motel and sleeping in her car, clearly not circumstances that lead to one giving their best work. ( )
  jonerthon | Oct 16, 2022 |
Wonder what it's like working at a low-wage job in America? This book explains what it's like, how they sleep, what their life outside of work is like, and how it affects more than just themselves.

"At SDF8, I pop Advil like candy all day, not even bothering to track when my last dose was. I don’t talk to anyone at break or lunch; I’m too tired. My head pounds, and I feel generally dull. By the end of my shift, I’m almost staggering from the stabbing pain in my feet and trying to lean some of my weight on my cart as I push it, as if it’s a walker."

While this book is really centred in America (and American companies), the experiences are applicable for almost any low-wage job in the world. If you don't like American-centred books then skip this one.

"but my smugness fades as I see that everything, including my car, has been aggressively coated in ice. It’s been a mild winter so far, but of course it’s freezing two hours before sunrise. You idiot."

"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."

There were some times that a word didn't make sense in context with the other words, I'm not sure if that's an error on editing.

The writer loved to include stories from the past, which got repetitive after a while, so I tended to skip over them, and I didn't miss out on any context or part of the writer's experience.

The writer knows how to included humour and good jokes, I wish they included them more to break up the book.

"Today, my bracelet recorded more than thirty thousand steps. I start giggling helplessly as I work out the math. That’s more than fifteen miles. Fifteen! Fucking! Miles! It’s the funniest, most horrible thing I’ve ever heard."

"Scrooge literally has a better time-off policy than Amazon"

There is a huge amount of detail in this book, sometimes it's great to have, and sometimes I found it wasn't needed.

"But, more important, if Vicki’s saying what I think she’s saying—if it’s part of her job to change our official time-clock records to reflect only the time we’re logged in to the phones—that sounds an awful lot like wage theft."

The author touched on the different class system (like those who work low-wage jobs, and those who work in tech jobs). I almost wish the author spent more time covering that.

"Because if you don’t really know anybody outside your class, you can’t really understand the embarrassingly large disconnect between the actual working class and the kind of people who shape public opinion and policy."

"Do you want to win elections? Acknowledge that something’s wrong and offer people a different why.
So, why can’t employers find good workers to fill open positions? Because the drawbacks of the jobs they’re offering outweigh the benefits.
Why do people vote against their self-interest? Because when national politics hasn’t truly improved the lives of the non wealthy in decades and is covered like sports, why take it any more seriously than professional wrestling?
If the data says everything’s so great, why is America freaking the fuck out? Because the systems we use to compile and analyze data don’t consider America freaking the fuck out to be relevant information."

The conclusion chapter I found to be weird as it does wrap the book up, it does so in a way that requires you to remember almost random things that were mentioned in the book.

The author does include footnotes (in the eBook version) which I found helped to provide more context, and some provided humour.

Overall, an interesting book if you are interested in American low-wage jobs and what those people go through.

"After that, I knew not to be honest with customers in the same visceral way I know not to stick my hand in a fire."

"even the cheapest, most discounted motel is completely unsustainable for a single person making $9.50 an hour"

"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."

"I get to leave" ( )
  Authentico | Sep 18, 2022 |
Way back in the 1990s, while I was finishing college, I worked fast food for a couple of years. It was the worst, most stressful, most dehumanizing experience of my life, and when I left I swore that I'd live in a cardboard box on the street before I ever did it again. So I thought I had a pretty vivid idea of just how bad these kinds of jobs are. But I was wrong, because at least back then we didn't have computers monitoring our performance, timing us to the second, and using algorithms to schedule workers such that there are always just enough people to almost handle the workload if they work flat-out to the limits of their mental and physical ability all the time. All of which is apparently absolutely standard practice these days, and has completely predictable negative effects on people... especially when you factor in pay too low to live on, lack of health insurance, and difficulty getting time off to deal with the rest of their lives.

Emily Guendelsberger worked three different notoriously terrible jobs in the course of researching this book (although part of that was because she'd lost her cushier journalist gig and needed the money). She was an Amazon warehouse employee over the Christmas rush, worked in a call center doing customer support for AT&T, and did a stint at McDonald's. And, again, even though I thought I knew just how bad this stuff could be, the results were still pretty eye-opening to me. Especially the call center. Hoooo, boy, do her descriptions of how these places work explain a lot about some of my own experiences with customer support. And as terrible as their practices make things for the customer, they're so, so much worse for the people who have to spend eight hours a day on the other end and are forbidden to ever hang up.

It's all infuriating and depressing, and, as Guendelsberger points out, it may also explain a lot about why so many people in America seem to be, not to put to fine a point on it, losing their fucking minds. Half of us are overworked to the point of actual insanity, and most of the folks with the actual power have no understanding whatsoever of what the problem is.

Infuriating and depressing as the subject matter is, though, Guendelsberger's writing is a joy to read. She's candid, thoughtful, warm, down-to-earth, and often funny. She's also not actually interested in doing a hatchet job on any of the companies she talks about here, and, indeed, is willing to credit them when they actually do something decent and to quote both the positive and negative things her co-workers had to say about them. It's the systematic problems with how we view work and the complete wrongness of expecting humans to function like robots that she's more concerned with. And, to that end, she delivers a lot of interesting, engagingly written, easily understandable background on things like the history of companies' obsession with maximally efficient operations or the effects of stress on the human body.

I definitely recommend it, whether you've ever been among the ranks of the burger-flippers yourself or not. ( )
1 vote bragan | Aug 20, 2022 |
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"Nickel and Dimed for the Amazon age," (Salon) the bitingly funny, eye-opening story of finding work in the automated and time-starved world of hourly low-wage labor After the local newspaper where she worked as a reporter closed, Emily Guendelsberger took a pre-Christmas job at an Amazon fulfillment center outside Louisville, Kentucky. There, the vending machines were stocked with painkillers, and the staff turnover was dizzying. In the new year, she travelled to North Carolina to work at a call center, a place where even bathroom breaks were timed to the second. And finally, Guendelsberger was hired at a San Francisco McDonald's, narrowly escaping revenge-seeking customers who pelted her with condiments. Across three jobs, and in three different parts of the country, Guendelsberger directly took part in the revolution changing the U.S. workplace. Offering an up-close portrait of America's actual "essential workers," On the Clock examines the broken social safety net as well as an economy that has purposely had all the slack drained out and converted to profit. Until robots pack boxes, resolve billing issues, and make fast food, human beings supervised by AI will continue to get the job done. Guendelsberger shows us how workers went from being the most expensive element of production to the cheapest - and how low wage jobs have been remade to serve the ideals of efficiency, at the cost of humanity. On the Clock explores the lengths that half of Americans will go to in order to make a living, offering not only a better understanding of the modern workplace, but also surprising solutions to make work more humane for millions of Americans.

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