Review: On the Clock, by Emily Guendelsberger

[Russ Allbery]

On the Clock
by Emily Guendelsberger

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Copyright: July 2019
ISBN:      0-316-50899-3
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     317

Emily Guendelsberger was senior staff writer at Philadelphia City Paper
when the paper was sold to a competitor for scrap and everyone who
worked for it was laid off. She took that opportunity to investigate
first-hand the working conditions of the modern American blue-collar
job: a picker in an Amazon distribution center in Indiana, a
customer-support call center in North Carolina, and a McDonald's in
downtown San Francisco. The result is this book, one of the most
engrossing pieces of long-form journalism that I've ever read.

On the Clock opens with a pop quiz. What does the term "in the weeds"
mean to you?

If, like me, you come from the white-collar world, you're probably
familiar with what Guendelsberger calls the academic definition: lost
in the details, bogged down in unimportant minutia. But in the food
service world, it means something different: overwhelmed with more
customers and demands than you can handle at a reasonable pace. Which
definition comes first to mind may be an indication of whether you've
worked in food service, and thus a class marker in the United States.
It's the second definition, as Guendelsberger shows throughout this
book, that characterizes the modern blue-collar job.

  You can make a lot of money explaining away the gap between data and
  reality in ways that flatter puzzled wealthy people. But if you've
  had a service job in the past decade, I'll bet that some of the
  answers are probably as obvious to you as why millennials aren't
  buying yachts. I'll spend the next few hundred pages trying to make
  it just as obvious to all you readers, but the short answer? The
  bottom half of America's labor market lives in the weeds. All the
  time.

  And the weeds are a terribly toxic place for human beings. The weeds
  make us crazy. The weeds make us sick. The weeds destroy family
  life. The weeds push people into addiction. The weeds will literally
  kill you. And people fortunate enough to have good jobs making
  policy or writing op-eds seem to have no idea how crippled a life
  with no escape from the weeds is.

This is the thesis that Guendelsberger develops over the course of
three very different jobs. Two involve intense human interaction; one
(the Amazon picker job) involves almost no human interaction at all.
One is physically strenuous; another is a desk job. Only one of them is
in food service. But the common point of all three is that they are
timed with machine-driven ruthlessness, are obsessed with "time theft"
by the employee (an entire sociological research project, and a
political party, could be based on that phrase), and are scheduled so
that the workers stay in the weeds essentially continuously during
their shifts.

  I did plenty of research beforehand, and I'd heard crazy things
  about how stressful each job would be — each in its own special way,
  like Tolstoy's unhappy families. But at each of them, technology
  made it impossible to escape the weeds. And every time, my thorough
  research totally failed to prepare me for how dehumanizing the job
  felt.

The focus of this book is detailed reporting of the experience of each
job, starting with the initial training, and Guendelsberger's own
reactions to that experience. But she also provides the reader with
context and background, allowing the reader to generalize from the
specific to the systemic and trace the origins of the system back in
time. There is a lot in this book about the origins of scientific
management and Taylorism. Even if you were already familiar with
Frederick Winslow Taylor, as I was, you're likely to learn more about
the history of work performance monitoring and quotas.

Even better, Guendelsberger interviews other workers in these jobs,
tests her assumptions against their opinions, describes their lives,
and reports the observations of those who love these jobs. This ability
to both put forward her own opinion and also report the opinions of
those who are able to thrive in this environment, without losing the
overall context, is a sign of great investigative journalism. It also
adds more memorable characters to the book: the woman with PTSD and
anxiety who found work as an Amazon warehouse picker ideal for
distracting her brain, the people who travel the country taking
seasonal work and living in tents, the McDonald's worker who tells
Guendelsberger to think of her family and walk away from any
confrontation with a customer, and so many more.

The turnover in these jobs is almost unimaginable, so it's worth being
aware, when reading these sections, that anyone who survives the first
couple of weeks is in a tiny minority. These interviews are therefore
biased towards people who cope with these jobs unusually well, which
underscores the implications of how difficult most of Guendelsberger's
coworkers still find them.

It's worth mentioning here that On the Clock includes a detailed ethics
statement about how Guendelsberger did reporting for this book, what
she surreptitiously recorded and what she didn't, why she made those
choices, who she told she was a reporter (which includes all of her
coworkers who appear in the book), and how she reconstructed
conversations with her coworkers. This is the first time I've seen this
type of ethics statement in long-form journalism of this type, and now
I'm wondering why there isn't one in every book like this.

The highlight of this book is Guendelsberger's ability to give the
reader a feeling for each job as a life: the funny moments, the
difficulties, the horrors, the good and bad coworkers, the attempt to
find somewhere to live, and the experience of fitting life around the
job. One example I'll remember is that she was doing this research
during the run-up to the 2019 election. She is a politically engaged
person, a reporter who paid close attention to the news, but found that
months went by during which she completely lost track of politics,
current events, and the campaign. There just wasn't time or energy left
to care about politics. There's a lesson in that for those of us who
moralize about political engagement and people who don't vote.

Equally memorable were the complex arrangements and juggling and family
support that her coworkers needed, relied on, and provided to others
(including her) to help each other survive. Guendelsberger was barely
keeping her head above water and only needed to support herself; many
of her coworkers were raising and supporting children while doing these
jobs. If you ever believed that people work low-paid jobs because they
are lazy, On the Clock should permanently put that belief to rest. It
also destroys the belief that these jobs are low-skill. The amount of
skill demonstrated by the workers who survive the horrific turnover is
amazing: short-term memory for fast-food workers, for example, or
navigating amazingly awful computer UIs for customer support while
simultaneously holding a conversation. It's just that most of those
skills aren't easily transferable or aren't good resume fodder.

Speaking of awful computer UIs, the section on customer support work
was almost painful to read as someone who works in the computer
industry. For every call, the agents have to launch multiple
independent programs, each with their own logins, and cut and paste
information from various programs into others to bring up the necessary
screens, all while greeting the caller and hearing the initial
description of their problem. The system is not so much badly designed
as not designed at all, just cobbled together from multiple systems
with complete indifference to the user experience of the agents. The
requirement that support agents repeatedly try to sell every caller on
new products and services in order to get paid a livable wage is
objectively worse (and worth remembering whenever you have to call
customer support), but the refusal to invest a small amount of
development work to make the tools work smoothly is professionally
infuriating.

There is so much truly horrible software in the world that only people
who work poorly-paid jobs for large corporations (or medical offices)
ever see.

I've barely touched the surface on the great parts of this book. I
could go on for hours about how good this is (and have, twice, to
friends). It's a truly exceptional piece of investigative journalism
that provides reporting, political analysis, personal stories, and
fascinating profiles all at the same time. If you want to understand
working-class America and aren't part of it, stop reading the endless
New York Times interviews of people in diners and read this instead.

This is the best non-fiction book I've read this year, and is more
valuable than innumerable opinion columns about the economic state of
the country or the changing nature of work. More of this kind of
reporting, please.

One parting thought: While writing this review, I looked through
Guendelsberger's Twitter feed and noticed that, of the three jobs, the
one people overwhelmingly want her to come on programs and talk about
appears to be the Amazon job. To me, this highlights a point that
Guendelsberger herself makes in the book. Amazon gets a lot of press
because Amazon is new, rich, and ubiquitous among the people who read
the news media writing these articles. But Amazon is in no way uniquely
bad, just large and well-organized. They may be slightly ahead of the
curve in bringing close monitoring to warehouse work, but this is an
industry-wide practice. The other two jobs were in many ways worse —
it's hard to describe how emotionally toxic call center work is,
although Guendelsberger does an excellent job — but a few companies
like Amazon get all the press and focus.

We need to stop thinking about this as a story of a few rich bad
actors, and instead start thinking about it as a sweeping change in the
nature of work that affects half the population and demands similarly
systemic answers.

Rating: 10 out of 10

Reviewed: 2019-12-27

URL: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-316-50899-3.html

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>