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

In the tradition of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickle and Dimed, journalist Emily Guendelsberger describes her own experience working in the automated and time-starved world of hourly labor, showing what life is like for millions of other Americans today On the Clock is a bitingly funny firsthand account of what happens when a college educated young woman finds herself back at the bottom of the wage-earning ladder in a job which, like 40% of the jobs in America today, pays less than $15.50 an hour. After losing her job as a reporter, Emily Guendelsberger took a job in a call center. Living out of her car, she hoped to be able to get her financial footing before heading back into the reporting world. What she discovered in that first low-wage job, and at two others like it, is a world unto itself where hourly wage work is undergoing a critical transition that we haven't fully grappled with. Advances in monitoring and scheduling technology have sped up the pace of work for millions of workers, fundamentally altering their lives. Exposing the large scale stress of trying to meet robotic work standards, On the Clock shows how the way millions of Americans work today tells us something fundamental but little-understood about our country. To understand this world, Guendelsberger walks 15 miles a day in a vast Amazon warehouse with several conveniently located pain-medicine vending machines, is closely timed at each call center bathroom break, and gets pelted with mustard by a revenge-seeking customer at McDonald's. From her own often comic perspective Emily analyzes the physical and mental effects of chronic stress - from heart disease, obesity, and drug abuse to depression, belief in conspiracies, seeing immigrants as outsiders, and a preference for a strongman leader. On the Clock offers a better understanding of not just low-wage work and how we got to this moment in American history, but the surprising ways that things could get better.