POST-MODERN TIMES
Guendelsberger’s On the Clock : The High Stakes of Low Wages BY JO STEIGERWALD
Emily Guendelsberger ’06 spent three years working in and living on low-wage jobs in America; jobs regimented to the nanosecond and permeated with invasive technological oversight. Immersion at an Amazon warehouse, a Covergys call center, and a McDonald’s franchise inspired her 2019 book, On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane. Before her “experiment,” Guendelsberger’s own job experiences ranged from working at Oberlin’s Dascomb dining hall to copy shop employee, receptionist, and newspaper journalist. On The Clock grew from her 2015 article about Uber drivers in Philadelphia, as Uber moved into unwelcoming cities with the claim of providing great jobs; to wit, that their drivers could make $90,000 a year. The “baldness of that embarrassing lie” led her to talk to drivers, and then convince her editor into letting her work as a full-time Uber driver. Her subsequent article revealed that the Uber app favored the company, the best drivers (ex-cabbies) made only $10 to $11 an hour, and Guendelsberger’s story went viral. A few months later, her paper closed. Rising interest from agents and publishers in her Uber 18
story led Guendelsberger to examine that intersection of work, wages, and technology in a longer format. “I had always been interested in experiential journalism because sometimes we lose sight of how things feel. You can track the goodness or badness through numbers, but you cannot understand what a job was like until you experience it yourself.” So she packed her car and took a job at a behemoth Amazon warehouse outside Louisville. A few months later found her at Convergys in North Carolina. It was here that she wrote a 90-page book proposal in a Barnes & Noble café, next to the Walmart parking lot where she lived. Yes, the parking lot. Guedelsberger lived out of her car while working for the largest call center in America. “I didn’t realize a book proposal could change as you discovered more! I sold the book after stints at Amazon and Convergys; hard to do after working the day job.” Publisher’s Weekly describes On the Clock as a “spiritual successor” to Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2011 book Nickel and Dimed. Throughout On the Clock, Guendelsberger acknowledges that what sets her experience apart from many of her temporary colleagues is that she knows she gets to leave. The jobs she takes for research and experiential journalism purposes are finite for her, and she accepts conditions that would have otherwise driven her to quit: dizzying fatigue and painkiller-filled vending machines at Amazon; caustic customers and bathroom breaks termed “stealing company time” at Convergys; food thrown in her face at McDonald’s. “What struck me was how much more people will tolerate in a non-white collar
job when all other options are lacking. My coworkers were persuaded that they did not deserve better than this. And this means having no dignity, no way to assert that you are a human being who has feelings. It grinds you down.” Guendelsberger was radicalized by the experience. “You cannot see someone you are living with doing dental surgery to herself with a safety pin and a bottle of isopropyl alcohol and not be changed. I haven’t had to destroy myself to survive.” Until she began her research, she looked at low wage jobs through the lens of summer jobs in high school or college—employment memories based on work before technology tracked every second. “I think that an honest day’s work would pay enough for you to live without being terrified of eviction or hunger, with mental energy for yourself when the work day is over.” Despite the grueling peril it describes, On the Clock is leavened with humor, contextualized through economics, and informed by philosophy. And for many it touches a nerve. One reader, a former call center worker, told Guendelsberger that the description of a bad call at Convergys gave her a panic attack and she had to put the book down. “That means what I was trying to do, worked.” Guendelsberger credits a class, Arnie Cox’s Music and Embodied Cognition, at Oberlin as key to her effectiveness as a writer, especially for this project. “Learning why music works, how you hear music and feel a certain way, and trying to pass along what you are feeling to another…that’s the basic function of empathy. And that understanding made me a better writer.”
ILLUSTRATION: DELPHINE LEE
Thought Process