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Summary
Summary
" 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.
Author Notes
Emily Guendelsberger has worked at Philadelphia City Paper , the Onion's A.V. Club , Philadelphia Weekly , and the Philadelphia Daily News , and has contributed to the Philadelphia Inquirer , the Washington Post, Politico magazine, and Vice .
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this spiritual sequel to Barbara Ehrenreich's 2011 Nickel and Dimed, journalist Guendelsberger takes jobs at an Amazon fulfillment warehouse, an AT&T call center, and a McDonald's franchise to investigate the sheer implausibility of living on minimum wage and the Kafkaesque features of service industry work. These include the Tylenol- and Advil-dispensing vending machines at the Amazon warehouse, a symbol of the excruciating pain that is an expected part of the job; bosses changing time sheets to deduct minutes employees spent in the bathroom; and screaming customers flinging condiment packets. Guendelsberger's coworkers are charismatic and charming, and completely unaware that they deserve a lot better from their employers: one of her fellow employees suffers a panic attack that requires emergency services and another attempts dental surgery on herself. Interspersed throughout are references to early 20th-century moguls like Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henry Ford (who pioneered the use of assembly lines to control workers' pace, a predecessor to Amazon's pace-tracking practices), giving historical background on how the plight of today's overburdened working class came to be. 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. Agent: Lydia Wills, Lydia Wills LLC. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A young journalist's account of her experiences working low-wage jobs in Kentucky, North Carolina, and California over a two-year period.When Guendelsberger lost her newspaper job in 2015, she decided to get "in the weeds" with millions of blue-collar Americans working in the service sector. Her odyssey began in Louisville, where she found seasonal work at Amazon. For two months, she walked 15 to 20 miles per day finding warehouse merchandise to fulfill online orders. The scanning gun she used to record each item also served as a countdown device to keep her perpetually on-task, and vending machines sold pain relievers for the raging body aches that came with the work. Turnover rates verged on astronomical, and while those who stayed claimed to love their job, they also called it "oppressive." The following summer, Guendelsberger headed to Hickory, North Carolina, where she took a job with Convergys, where she handled a high volume of telephone traffic while trying to avoid becoming the target of verbally abusive clients. As had been the case at Amazon, all breaks were timed down to the second, and any deviation was considered a form of theft. The author then went to work at a McDonald's in downtown San Francisco. Due to that city's efforts to increase minimum wage, her wages were "twice as much as the average McDonald's crew member," which ultimately meant little in one of the most expensive cities in America. At the mercy of a changeable work schedule, Guendelsberger dealt with never-ending lines of demanding customers every day, the worst of whom threw food at her. Detailed, intelligent, and well-researched, the book provides a sobering look at the inhuman world of blue-collar work while suggesting that creation of a better world starts by connecting to others who also believe "the status quo is cruel and ridiculous."An eye-opening, unrelenting expos that uncovers the brutal wages of modern global capitalism. A natural choice for fans of Nickel and Dimed. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
When the Philadelphia newspaper where Guendelsberger worked folded in 2015, she embarked on the series of jobs she profiles here: an order picker at an Amazon fulfillment center in Louisville; an AT&T call-center representative in Hickory, North Carolina; and a McDonald's cashier in San Francisco. She lays out her methodology and her thesis: that the white-collar world's idea of service-industry work is thirty years out of date quaint, even. In reality, advances in technology make it routine to monitor and pressure workers, forcing them to operate under undue levels of stress and with diminishing rewards. In her finely related chronicle of experiencing this work first-hand (each position for one to two months) she incorporates histories of labor, scientific management, and trade deals, as well as the psychology of work and stress. Guendelsberger can go from light-hearted to dead-serious on a dime, writing with a conversational, contemporary, and heavily footnoted bent. (There are also extensive notes and further reading.) This clear inheritor to Barbara Ehrenreich's seminal Nickel and Dimed (2001) is bound to open eyes and change minds.--Annie Bostrom Copyright 2019 Booklist
