On the Clock
What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane
by Emily Guendelsberger
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Pub Date Jul 16 2019 | Archive Date Oct 16 2019
Description
The bitingly funny, eye-opening story of a college-educated young professional who finds work in the automated and time-starved world of hourly 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. ON THE CLOCK takes us behind the scenes of the fastest-growing segment of the American workforce to understand the future of work in America—and its present. 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.
Advance Praise
"Guendelsberger's narration is vivid, humorous, and honest; she admits to the feelings of despair, panic, and shame that these jobs frequently inspire, allowing for a more complex and complete picture of the experience. This is a riveting window into minimum-wage work and the subsistence living it engenders." —Publishers Weekly
"When former Onion editor Emily Guendelsberger explores how the non-college majority scrapes by, she uncovers a Darwinian hellscape where the richest man on earth munificently bestows painkillers upon his warehouse serfs, telemarketers pitch products to the newly bereaved, and the customer is always right-even when she's lobbing McNugget sauce at your head. Filled with compassion, fury, and an invigorating dose of hope, On The Clock is the laugh-till-you-cry exposé our laugh-till-you-cry nation deserves." —Daniel Brook, author of The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America, A History of Future Cities, and The Accident of Color: A Story of Race in Reconstruction
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9780316509008 |
| PRICE | $28.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 352 |
Featured Reviews
Michelle K, Educator
On the Clock is a compelling, eye-opening, and necessary read for all Americans. Emily Guendelsberger gives us an up-close look at what it means to work the daily grind of low-wage work. Businesses boast that productivity is at an all-time high, ...but at what cost? Apparently, the heart and soul of the country.
Guendelsberger does such a great job taking us through the three jobs that she took (as a journalist undercover), each for about a month or two: an Amazon warehouse, a customer call center, and McDonald's. At each job, she was micromanaged to the second, with each job warning her about "time theft" which is when workers might--gasp!--take a few seconds to catch their breath. The jobs were all high-paced and stress-inducing on purpose to make sure that the workers didn't have time to think, talk, or otherwise act like humans. After all, if robots are so efficient, it pays for workers to try to emulate them, right? This is the new work in America, where everything is timed and where managers assume the worst of their workers.
I couldn't put the book down; it was so fascinating and horrifying.. I could practically feel the exhaustion at the Amazon warehouse and the stress of the call center right along with Emily. That would have been enough, but she also intersperses her personal narrative with lots of evolutionary biology and history to help readers understand how, exactly, we got to this point. All in all, it's a wonderful book that caused me to think a lot about issues that I had taken for granted.
Furthermore, the hopeful and optimistic tone at the end of the book is just readers need after such a dark look at what's become of the world of work. Guendelsberger assures us that even though we're at the cliff's edge, staring into the abyss, there's still time to turn around. We still have the power to stop this. She even offers some tangible solutions that I hope leaders take to heart. I would recommend this book to anyone wondering why we seem so stressed out these days when we are supposedly living in the best of times.
Joanne N, Librarian
Wow! The author does a fabulous job telling you what it's really like working minimum wage jobs when you've got no other options. She did her research and knows how to present it in a fascinating way. Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the advance copy in exchange for an honest review.
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