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

by Emily Guendelsberger

After the local newspaper where she worked as a reporter closed, Emily Guendelsberger took a pre-Christmas job at an Amazon fulfilment centre 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 centre, 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.

• ISBN10: 0316509000
• ISBN13: 9780316509008
• Publish Date: 15 August 2019 (first published 16 July 2019)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Little, Brown & Company
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 352
• Language: English

Reviews

[Jeff Sexton]

Intriguing Premise Hurt By Lack of Evidence. This is one of those books that has an intriguing premise and brings some often overlooked aspects to the table and is thus worthy of and even needed in the national conversation, but that is ultimately tainted by the author's own biases and lack of empirical evidence and lack of extensive bibliography. The author does a phenomenal job of showing what it is like to work in the environments she chose to work in - an Amazon Fulfillment Center, a call center, and a franchise McDonald's - and the people who work there. But as she admits repeatedly, she could always leave at any time she wanted - while she rarely if ever mentions what her husband does for work, she does mention during one ordeal at the call center that her father in law is a doctor - and the entire point of getting these jobs was to "test the waters" to see what people who worked them were really like and what their concerns really were. Very well written, just with significant flaws in reasoning due to her own biases, particularly in her ultimate conclusions. Could have been far stronger, but still a recommended read.