On the Clock
What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane
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On the Clock
Narrated by:
Christine Lakin
Buy Now for £12.99
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Narrated by:
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Christine Lakin
About this listen
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.
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Critic reviews
"Guendelsberger paints a down-to-earth, accessible primer on how dehumanizing and exploitative American wage labor can be-and what can be done to change it."—Vanity Fair
"Nickled and Dimed for the Amazon age."—Salon
"Emily Guendelsberger gives a sense of just how far we are from that dream in On the Clock, a jaunty but dispiriting memoir of her work at three low-rung jobs: at a call center, a McDonald's, and an Amazon warehouse."—Caleb Crain, The New Yorker
"Seen from Guendelsberger's point of view, America's working class is quivering in stress and fear, hurting from torn-up feet, and all covered in honey mustard. The economic miseries inflicted on working-class people are bad enough, but here Guendelsberger has identified something deeper and arguably worse...We've been brutalized, bullied, and baited into being trained work-animals and not even afforded a corresponding. No wonder our society fell apart."—The New Republic
"The understanding that Guendelsberger brings after struggling, even in her somewhat cosplaying way, makes On the Clock the sort of exposé Upton Sinclair would have been proud of."—The Houston Chronicle
"In a timely and important look at the harsh realities of the modern American workplace, journalist Emily Guendelsberger recounts her experiences doing hourly labor all over the country: at a Louisville-based Amazon warehouse, a North Carolina call center and a San Francisco McDonald's."—Laura Pearson, Chicago Tribune, 25 Hot Books of the Summer
"Emily Guendelsberger's On the Clock is among the best of these new accounts of multibillion dollar corporations maximizing profit at the expense of their workforce. In Guendlesberger's case, there are some familiar villains-Amazon and McDonald's-along with a call center job, but what really separates this diaristic account is that it's funny. Which I suppose you have to be when you're doubleshifting in an Amazon warehouse a month before Christmas and the vending machines are stocked with painkillers and you don't even know if you'll have a job in the New Year. Haha!"—Jonny Diamond, Lit Hub Editor-in-Chief
"ON THE CLOCK reads like a dystopian travelogue, the deckhand's journal from a flaming garbage barge on the shoals of late-stage capitalism. Guendelsberger's journey 'in the weeds' of low-wage America is mordantly funny, devastating and rigorous, a broadside against the exploitation of the many by the few and a warning of how easily our sociopathic economy could all come crashing down, leaving even C-suite executives to subsist on ketchup packets and worthless stock options."—Jessica Bruder, author of Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century
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