In the minimum-wage weeds

In the late 90s, the journalist Barbara Ehrenreich went undercover as a low-wage worker. She wanted to examine, first-hand, the rhetoric surrounding Bill Clinton’s Welfare Reform Act, which pushed welfare recipients into minimum-wage jobs on the theory that any job gave dignity and would encourage them to bootstrap their way out of poverty. Ehrenreich worked as a waitress, hotel maid, house cleaner, nursing home aide, and Wal-Mart salesperson. The non-fiction book that came out of this experience, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, has been frequently listed as a seminal work, is taught in schools, and has inspired quite a few nonfiction writers.

One of these writers is Emily Guendelsberger. In On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane, she chronicles her experience working three such low-wage jobs: in an Amazon warehouse, in a call center, and in a McDonald’s.

When was the last time you asked permission to go to the bathroom? Would you panic over running two minutes late? Is it normal to be constantly monitored at work, to have everything you do timed to the second? When did you last wear a uniform, or have food thrown at you? When is the last time you sold something to pay a bill? Do you have to wait to be searched for stolen goods after you leave work? Have you ever considered DIY dental surgery? Have you gone to work sick because you can’t afford to take unpaid time off? Have you had to supply a doctor’s note to prove you deserve that unpaid time off? Have you recently overdrawn your checking account, or had all your credit cards declined, or put exactly ten bucks of gas in your car?

The huge change in low-wage labour since Ehrenreich’s time has been the advent of technology. The mind-numbing routines, the lack of dignity, the hidden costs, the endless struggle to survive, the perennial suspicion of supervisors, the personality tests and drug tests… all these are the same in 2018 as they were in 1998. Technology, though, has given management an incredibly pervasive and intrusive view into the minute-by-minute activities of the workers. No longer is there a ( possibly reasonable) human manager checking your overall work, instead it’s a coldly dispassionate computer database noting down what you do every minute. In the Amazon warehouse, the scanner gun that each worker carries counts down the seconds available for each task. Sit on the floor for 5 minutes to rest? The scanner notes it, and your supervisor sees that information. Do this a few times and you’re fired.

The monitoring is even more extreme at the call center, where the workers are physically sitting in one chair all day, their calls are monitored constantly, they have quotas to fill, and are expected to maintain a relentlessly cheerful attitude and tone of voice for customer after customer.

The section about Amazon is the most fascinating (in a ghoulish way, it must be said) because of Amazon’s famous secrecy and unwillingness to allow visitors in its warehouses. The Amazon warehouse work, in the author’s experience, stands out because of the physical demands: 12 hour days where you might walk 16 miles around the warehouse, and repetitive stress injuries. (Are they worse than a farmworker picking fruit? Maybe no worse, but the farmworker doesn’t have to carry a scanner that checks every minute for productivity. I think.)

5 million Americans work in call centers. In Convergys, the center where the author works, the load is mental rather than physical. Amazon’s computerized setups are hard on the worker, but it turns out that a bad computer setup is even worse.

There’s so many passwords because Convergys’ computer system is actually about eight separate systems kludged together like Frankenstein’s monster. Each system has its own login, password, and set of uses and rules, and they don’t play particularly well together. Computers are ancient, pages we need are frequently 404’d and often half the passwords won’t work. Everything feels really bootleg compared to the sleek efficiency of Amazon.

Everywhere, there are fingerprint scanners to scan in and out, every minute (literally!) is counted, the staffing is incredibly tight, there is little time to socialize or befriend fellow workers, and there are allotted minutes for every task. Common to all these jobs is the concept of ‘time theft’: every minute for which you are paid belongs to your employer, and if you do not spend every one of those minutes on your assigned tasks, you are considered to be ‘stealing’ from the employer. Yet, the employers routinely steal employee time. Your lunch break starts when you check out, not when you walk out the door, and it may take 8 minutes at each end to check in and out for a lunch break, reducing your advertised 30 minute lunch break to 14 minutes.

Clearly, the author had a point of view when she took these jobs, and implicitly, she expected that the only people who would take up these jobs are those who have no other option.

I’d expected the pain. I’d expected the monotony. I hadn’t expected so many people to regard this as a decent job.

Because Amazon does pay better than comparable jobs in the area. [Workers] said they’d take the worst job here [in the warehouse] over the best job in fast food, a sector discussed with a universal shudder. And if you hustle enough to get [a permanent job], the health insurance is good and there’s even the possibility of earning paid time off.

The author talks to an Amazon warehouse worker who is both mentally and physically happy at the warehouse job because it lets her use her eidetic memory, she likes the exercise and the fact that it’s cured her insomnia. She meets a group of young men who work the crazy Christmas period at an Amazon warehouse, earning enough that they can afford to spend 5 months travelling for adventure and pleasure. Some of the workers she meets think that the only people who complain are those who are not willing to work hard (a conservative dream!).

Not surprisingly, there is enormous turnover at each of these workplaces. Turnover numbers are not published, but the author estimates a startling 100% turnover rate every few months..

When did lowpaid job work get so bad? The author spends some pages in the book on background, very readably presented. A truly psychopathic man called Frederic Taylor around 1900 figured out how to get the ‘stupid, phlegmatic, unintelligent’ workers to load more iron each day. (He went on to become a management consultant, leaving trails of discontent wherever he went.) How did Henry Ford come up with the assembly line, how did the workers react to the lack of skill required and the repetitiveness of the tasks? (Turns out that they refused to work at his factory until wages were raised significantly).

It seems obvious that companies will take advantage of workers any way they can, and the only solution is nationwide mandates. All workers, whether fulltime or part-time, must get a mandated minimum of bathroom breaks, physical breaks, some flexibility in their work time. Shift schedules must be humane and not at the employer’s whim, or those opting for the random shifts should get paid more Check-in and out time should not count against break time. The minimum wage must be raised. I think most reasonable people would agree about this.

In fact, the McDonald’s the author worked at is in San Francisco, where she gets paid a relatively plush $14/hr, has sick leave, and her shifts are scheduled humanely, because of ballot measures passed by the city. Yay SF!!! But what is wrong with the rest of the country that they cannot do likewise?

While Guendelsberger’s sympathies are clearly with the organized-labour movement to improve work conditions for lowpaid workers, she doesn’t really suggest a way to get there from here. There is a chapter at the end of the book along the lines of ‘We’re all in this together’, ‘meet other people who think the status quo is cruel’, ‘become part of something bigger than yourself’, but (and I hate to say this) it didn’t seem all that different than the management-speak platitudes that are churned out by Amazon, Convergys and McDonald’s.

Still, it is sufficient to detail the countless indignities, insane workloads, and physical and mental stress overloads facing minimum-wage workers in the modern industrial era, and in that, Guendelsberg has done very well. Her book is readable, accessible, engrossing, relevant, and extremely topical.

Highly recommended, as is Ehrenreich’s book.

In memoriam, Barbara Ehrenreich, who died on Sep 1, 2022. She grew up in a blue collar family in Montana, got a PhD in cellular immunology from Rockefeller University, but was most famous as a writer of nonfiction. Her clear, thougtful, opinionated writing was always worth reading. See, for example, Why I’m Giving Up on Preventative Care