For Barbara Ehrenreich's 2001 book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, the author took a series of low-paying positions so she could research the difficulty of 'making it' on a minimum wage salary. The verdict: it's almost impossible if you have a family.
Barbara Ehrenreich
This follow-up book by journalist Emily Guendelsberger explores a similar theme.
Emily Guendelsberger
When Guendelsberger's Philadelphia newspaper closed in 2015, the writer took a succession of service jobs so she could examine the day-to-day experience of low-wage work in America. Emily's ultimate goal was to raise the awareness of influential people, most of whom are "incredibly insulated from how miserable and dehumanizing the daily experience of work has gotten."
Emily's three service jobs were: a picker at an Amazon fulfillment center (warehouse) near Louisville, Kentucky during peak season; a customer service representative at a Convergys call-center in Hickory, North Carolina; and an employee at a busy McDonald's in San Francisco, California.
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Amazon fulfillment center
The Amazon fulfillment center near Louisville, Kentucky is huge. It covers twenty-five acres, contains more than 2.5 million square feet of storage space, and can hold thirty million items. A picker like Emily collects items from shelves in the warehouse, loads them into a cart, and brings them to a conveyor belt. The goods are then carried to packers who ready them for shipping.
The job requirements for a picker include:
- walking 5 to 15 miles or more per 8-12 hour day
- frequently lifting and moving items weighing 25-30 pounds
- climbing and descending stairs
- regular bending, crouching, kneeling, and reaching above the head
Employees must work schedules that include nights, weekends and holidays; work overtime if required; and work shifts that change without notice. There's no time off during peak periods (so don't plan to attend your niece's wedding), and there are no benefits of any kind (so you'd better not get seriously injured).
Inside Amazon fulfillment center
Fulfillment center conveyor belts
A moment of rest is considered 'time theft', and employees accumulate 'points' for being late, leaving early, taking an extra minute at break time, spending too much time in the bathroom; and so on. If you violate the rules a manager will come talk to you. If you accumulate six points you're terminated.
Amazon knows exactly how your day is spent because the scanner gun that tells you what to pick also uploads your location and how long it's been since your last bar-code scan in real time. So Big Brother IS watching you.
Employee with scanner gun
This scheme of scientific worker micro-management began with Frederick Winslow Taylor in 1856.
Frederick Winslow Taylor
Emily describes Taylor's ideas in some detail, but essentially Taylor determined "how much a first-rate [factory worker] should be able to do in a day, then used that to calculate a rate for all workers." Anyone who didn't meet this top goal was considered lazy, stupid and untrustworthy (that is, purposely shirking). Employees working under this regimen constantly complained of "overwork, exhaustion, and the mind-numbing monotony of the work", and Taylorism fell out of fashion in the 1930s.
Nevertheless, the premise that "workers are lazy, stupid, and never to be trusted became the undercurrent of American management, from Ford's assembly lines to Taco Bell's decree that every car at the drive-through must be greeted within four seconds of pulling up."
Ford assembly line
Taco Bell drive-thru
Pickers in an Amazon fulfillment center have routes that keep them apart
Emily thoroughly immerses the reader in the painful, soul-sucking days she spent at Amazon, but to sum it up in her own words: "At [the warehouse], I pop Advil like candy all day, not even bothering to track when my last dose was. I don't talk to anyone at break or lunch. I'm too tired. My head pounds, and I feel generally dull. By the end of my shift, I'm almost staggering from the stabbing pain in my feet. The next morning, I wake up feeling even worse. The day again goes by in a blur of pain and exhaustion.....then I fall asleep in my clothes again." And so on.
The Amazon picker job is exhausting
According to the Harvard Business Review, people with these kinds of jobs inevitably feel "depleted, diminished, disenfranchised, demoralized, and disengaged at work." Thus depression sets in, and workers - desperate to feel better - engage in self-help like eating comfort food, smoking, abusing drugs, etc. (For Emily, self-help was McDonald's, Chick-Fil-A, and cigarettes.)
Workers engage in self-help
To be fair, Emily did meet a person or two who thrived at Amazon. Her co-worker Blair, for instance, noted: "I love that I go to work, I clock in, I do my job, I clock out. Every other job I've had I always ended up being the unpaid janitor. I tend to take work home with me, especially in the restaurant industry (her previous job). But I know Amazon would exist fine without me, and I kind of like that. I LIKE being a number."
Some pickers enjoy the job
Blair laments, however, that she spends very little time with her son, who generally stays with her mother. And Blair worries that robots will replace her one day soon, since the industry is clearly heading in that direction.
After Emily's last shift at the Amazon warehouse, on Christmas Eve, she goes to karaoke night with some of her co-workers. "The next morning," she writes, "I wake up with a tremendous hangover, pack up, and start the twelve hour drive back home. "I GET TO LEAVE", I think as I pull onto the highway.
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Convergys call center
Call centers like Convergys are often outsourced to India or the Philippines, but the industry also employs about five million workers in the United States. According to Emily, "the sector is profitable and growing, and its labor practices are likely to spread."
Call center representatives follow rigid protocols. A worker observes: Reps are bounded by scripts and rules. We cannot say anything outside or we get the boot. We're so heavily scripted we might as well be robots. And the system reports what reps are doing every second of every shift they work. (Sound familiar?)
Convergys handles calls for many different businesses, such as Comcast, Dish Network, Verizon, and Walmart. Emily is assigned to AT&T mobility sales and service, and starts her employment with 20 other reps in a weeks-long training session.
Call center training session
The trainer, called Kimberly, tells the new hires that the job is going to be stressful because it's fast-paced and they'll be pushed to make sales.....even to customers who call in to complain/report problems. Kimberly goes on to say, "You will deal with the worst of the worst. You will have people who call in who are just downright rude, and they are nasty, and they do not care.
Employees are allowed 12 'points' - for being late; leaving early; taking a day off; etc. - and bad attendance gets you fired.
By the end of the training period, almost half of Emily's class has quit. The remaining reps have more or less mastered the various computer programs needed to assist customers, which are "so poorly integrated that not only do you have to copy and paste addresses by hand, you can also only do it one line at a time."
Call center phone banks
Program juggling takes time, especially for newbies, and a caller may bark a curt "Hey, are you paying attention?" before they escalate to cursing and shouting. Reps are NEVER permitted to talk back or hang up on a customer, and during one aggressive call Emily describes herself as "a stammering, shaking, frog-voiced, teary mess."
Some callers are rude
When an even more hostile customer unleashes a torrent of furious shouting and cursing because Emily can't open his account without a password (which he forgot), her body goes rigid, blood roars in her ears as rage and adrenaline shoot through her body, and she (mentally) directs a LOT of foul language toward the man. (The language is in the book, but I'm being considerate of sensitive eyes.)
Some callers are furious
These kinds of experiences lead to anxiety about EVERY call, because it just might be a screamer. And logging off your phone between calls to calm yourself - even for a few moments - is considered time theft.
The turnover rate at Convergys is very high, "like replacing every single AT&T rep in the building every five months." The costs associated with this are enormous, so you'd think the company would change it's employment practices.....but no. It's apparently more profitable to constantly train new people than to have satisfied employees.
Emily notes, "The customer is always right policies are common in customer service, and they breed a particularly nasty type of despair. At Convergys, even when a customer was worth almost nothing to the company- the habitual liars trying to get fees waived; the clearly insane; the people months behind on their bills - the worst customer still had more value to the company than the best rep. So you'd better apologize, grovel, and swallow your pride, because your dignity is valued at zero."
Customer service representatives are instructed to be pleasant in all circumstances
The problem with this particular kind of work isn't physical exertion but mental stress. Emily observes that the stress response, also called fight-or-flight, helped our ancestors survive. If a predator was stalking a cave man, for instance, "his heart rate would increase; his blood pressure would rise; his pupils would dilate; his ears would become more sensitive to sound; and his perception of the world would be dialed up to eleven. He would need to do something right f***ing now".....like run for his life!
Fight-or-flight response
In modern times, our body's stress response - when people repeatedly screech at us, for example - is the same, but we have nowhere to run. Thus we may eventually become anxious and depressed. Emily recalls being depressed at a previous time in her life, and says she "had trouble sleeping; was angry, irritable, and negative; lost the desire to see friends; felt strange and empty; and thought everything was stupid and pointless." Working at a call center for any length of time may cause similar feelings.
Continual stress can lead to depression
After Emily's last shift at Convergys she has a cigarette at the outside picnic table, gets in her car, and as she's driving away thinks, "I GET TO LEAVE, I GET TO LEAVE, I GET TO LEAVE....."
***
McDonald's
The McDonald's Emily works at in San Francisco is especially busy. It's blocks from the headquarters of many gigantic tech companies - Uber, Twitter, Reddit, Craigslist, Airbnb, Pinterest, Yelp, and more. It also attracts a large number of homeless people. One Yelp review comments:
"This location ALWAYS has homeless people hanging around inside the restaurant or lurking/passed out directly outside. It is impossible to enter or leave without stepping over someone or encountering a panhandler begging for change."
At first, Emily doesn't mind the fast food job. She's constantly on the go but says, "I do get genuine satisfaction from making customers happy, and that's a lot easier here than it was at Convergys."
Working the service counter (after rudimentary training), a McDonald's worker is instructed to smile and say: "Hello. How may I help you?" When the customer places an order the employee works the cash register, then has to assemble the meal in a bag or on a tray, with the accompanying napkins, straws, condiments, etc. The worker also makes many items herself - sodas, oatmeal, coffee, ice cream cones, shakes, McFlurries, smoothies....and fits all that in between taking and assembling other orders.
Employees at McDonald's have to hustle
Other duties include helping people who can't figure out the credit card machine, or who use coupons, or who pay with apps. The employee also deals with the new hassle of delivery services, like Uber Eats, for example. Moreover, she restocks condiments and napkins and cups and straws a couple of times each shift, between taking and assembling orders. And she makes sure she never ever runs out of coffee.
Emily writes, "[The employee] is on various steps of a dance across two or three orders simultaneously whenever she has a line. And I've had a line for all but about five minutes of the thirty-odd hours I've been flying solo at McDonald's." In fact, the line NEVER ends.
A never-ending McDonald's line
The eternal line is purposely built into the system. Computers predict the exact number of customers who will show up at every hour of every day.....and this allows supervisors to schedule the smallest number of employees who can just barely handle the load by going full tilt for their entire shift.
A side effect of the unending line is angry entitled customers who act out - sometimes by yelling, sometimes by cursing, sometimes by throwing things at the server (or all three). Emily describes an interaction with a difficult woman who - when her 'special order' (which takes longer) isn't delivered quickly enough - slaps the counter and yells, "Come on come on come on come on come on, I've got to go!" The customer then threatens to leave before jabbing a finger at Emily and saying, "I'm not waiting any longer! YOU get me my food, RIGHT NOW!" Once the customer gets her bag of food, she barks, "Honey mustard! Get me honey mustard!"
By now, Emily's hands are shaking with fury, and as she leans over to drop the packets of honey mustard into the bag, one pops out and bounces across the counter. The screamer scoops it up and hurls it at Emily's chest, where it explodes.
This is the last straw and Emily curses and rushes off to hide in the freezer before returning to the counter. The author writes, "The rest of the shift sucks. I feel hollow and exhausted, and it's hard to smile. The line stays angry the whole time....and I feel desperate to leave by the end of my shift."
This type of incident isn't a one off, and is repeated again and again.
At the end of Emily's last shift at McDonald's, the ice cream machine goes crazy and spews out a river of soft serve. While trying to contain the mess, the author and her co-worker ignore the line and take a minute "to giggle and shriek and be human."
Ice cream spill
Then Emily "GETS TO LEAVE" for the last time.
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Emily concludes that "America is so crazy because of the inescapable chronic stress built into the way we work and live. It's the insane idea that an honest day's work means suppressing your humanity, dignity, family, and other nonwork priorities in exchange for low wages that make home life constantly stressful." And on top of that, "mainstream politicians seem totally blind to how dire life has gotten for a whole lot of people."
The author believes big changes are inevitable.....and it will be interesting to see what form they take.
Emily sprinkles a good deal of humor into the book, and includes some compelling anecdotes about her co-workers; living arrangements; husband; background, etc.
This book is a must read for every lawmaker in the country.....and most other people would find it interesting as well.
Thanks to the publisher (Little, Brown and Company) for a copy of the book.
Rating: 4.5 stars
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