Trillbilly Worker's Party - Episode 106: Mother Jones' Will (w/ special guest Emily Guendelsberger)

Episode Date: July 18, 2019

This week we chat with author Emily Guendelsberger, who gives us an inside glimpse into the current state of service work. You can read Emily's article in Vox here: https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/7/6/20681186/fast-food-worker-burnout And check out her book here: https://www.amazon.com/Clock-Low-Wage-Drives-America-Insane/dp/0316509000 Please support our Patreon: www.patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty And come see us on tour through the southeast! https://www.streetfightradio.com/street-fight-radio-x-district-sentinel-x-trillbilly-workers-party/

Welcome, family. What's happening, people? What's happening out there? It's been a dark week here in America. And as your designated microphoners, we've just come to tell you that it's going to get a lot darker. Curge your loins. I mean, it's the same thing every week.

It's like groundhog day. Well, I had, I don't know. I don't want to get too much into it because we've got an interview at this episode, which I think does a really good job of sort of showing the state of the working class at the moment. And the thing that's been on my mind, though, in the last 24 hours, I've just been so disturbed by this Trump rally in North Carolina about an entire stadium of people basically chanting. For the deportation and or worse of Ileana Mar. Yeah, and I think it just goes to show you that this country is, as we've said before

on the show multiple times and as we've said in this episode, we are in a sort of political crisis in the sense that our system can no longer contain its many contradictions. And I think that what might result out of that could be a straight up sort of autocracy of some kind. If you want to call it fascism, you could call it that. Maybe if you want to have the deeper sort of historical view, you could call it autocracy of some kind. If you want to call it fascism, you could call it that. Maybe if you want to have the deeper sort of historical view, you could call it autocracy or emperor or whatever. Trial balloon for a coup. A head fake.

That's the thing. Like, throughout all this, it's so hard to not lapse into some sort of, like, liberal, some sort of, like, lib analysis of the whole thing. But I think that like if you're honest about yourself and if you're honest about American history, you will notice that the system is having a very hard time containing its many contradictions. And the thing that I could just kept coming back to with this Trump rally is you have all these liberals saying, I can't believe he said this. You can't say this.

Well, look, there are no rules in politics. He can say whatever the fuck he wants, it turns out. He lightweight called for the assassination of Hillary Clinton. He lightweight, yes, he did, for his political opponent, and this was exactly what he's doing now with Ilhan Omar. That's something if we would have done, somebody would have kicked our door in and questioned us. Exactly. Exactly. And the thing is, is that the way the system, the way the political economy is currently structured, an autocracy does not present a threat to that. What does present a threat to that is a mass movement of workers, the politically disenfranchised, pitchforks, basically, that a society that is kinder and is governed by workers, by people. And lest you say, why are you focused so much on the workers?

That's, uh, ableist or whatever. I, I'm using it in the grand sort of universal sense that like we are all the pro proletariat. We are daily squeezed of our capital by the people at the top. And, um, that's the only solution to this. It's not going to be some liberal refiguring of the political parties or it could, you know, maybe we could buy some more time by trying to institute some reforms. But I think that we are at a crossroads. that this interview on this episode gives you a good sense of what's at stake because we are in a place now, and I think we even pointed it out in the interview, if you were to put the state of the working class now side by side

with 100 years ago, people working 80 hours a week in coal mines, just back-breaking labor and just being physically crushed every day. You wouldn't see a whole lot of difference. But we do live in this weird reality where that reality now has been erased and sort of buried. And so hopefully this interview will kind of show you what's at stake. Because if we keep doing what we're doing, it's going to get more bleak. We're going to have more fascist rallies or whatever you want to call them.

And I don't know. The only reason I wanted to say something about it is because I was just so incredibly disturbed. Every now and then you get a glimpse of like kind of what the future is, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Every now and then you get a glimpse of, like, kind of what the future is, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

And, you know, I don't want to ring any alarms just yet, but, you know, sort of predicting the future has become our thing, you know? We've been pretty good at it. For every one we get wrong, we get about six right. Right. right right but i could envision you know we were kind of saying this in jest the other day but i could i could envision a situation where if trump gets close next time and there's some like credible dispute i could see that going to the supreme court in the supreme court giving it to him well i think that i have become this is the most liberal thing ever. This is, I've really struggled with this because it's a very lib and hack thing to compare the American Empire now with the Roman Empire. But I have become so obsessed lately with the transition from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire. and it kind of clicked for me last night, is because when that happened, historically speaking,

the masses and society at large did not all recognize that there had been a substantial shift in the political economy of that society. They had different, there was almost a sort of social, psychosocial negotiation where they all sort of had to come to terms with the fact that what they lived in in 40 AD was drastically different than what they had lived in in 40 BC. There was, they had to, they didn't even call the emperor the emperor the first few decades. There was, like I said, a negotiation.

Like, oh, we can't allow ourselves to think that this is an autocracy, even though that's what it was. And the reason why I'm obsessed with it is because it seems to me that that's what's happening now. And I'm not saying that we are that and that that is our destiny. All I'm saying is that if you look at what happened then, which is that the contradictions of Roman society had become so explosive that the only thing that could contain them was an autocracy. That was it. And I think that that's kind of what's happening now. If you look at what's going on in the house and in the legislative branches, these branches don't actually have much power anymore. They are mostly just sort of symbolic. Granted, they are able to use their sort of positions to raise awareness

of things. And this is why Ilhan Omar is being targeted, because the things that she's saying are truly radical and subversive. And I guess what concerns me so much is that in our sort of hesitancy to look at historical parallels or whatever, we might be missing the fact that like what we're entering now could be qualitatively different than what we've known all our lives. different than what we've known all our lives. I hope that, like, through this interview and through the things that have been in the media the past few days, you'll see that, like, the society we live in is changing rapidly.

And unless we can intervene in that, and we as in we, I mean, the socialist left, and I don't even mean the liberal left. They're going to have to make their own decisions and know how they're going to decide. Unless we can intervene in that and build out our numbers and activate as many people as possible, we might be thrown into the woodchipper as well. Or at least have the rug pulled out from under us so substantially that we don't have a

voice in society anymore. We can't affect change in any way. And those are the stakes. I'm only saying this because if it's this bad already, if we're already seeing these kinds of rallies in July 2019, I had to look at my phone to see what month it was. I blinked. I blinked in February 2017, and now it's here. It's weird.

Then it's going to get substantially worse over the course of the 2020 election. And so just keep that in mind. Things are changing rapidly, and the stakes are high. So anyways. And with that, we'd like to wish Otis Hayes of Louisville a happy birthday. Happy belated birthday. I would guess. We owe an apology.

So, it was asked, we were asked to wish Otis Hayes a birthday on his big three-year-old. We missed it by about two weeks,

I guess. Yeah, I think we got so wrapped up in the Amy McGrath dragon that we've, we left our boy Otis out in the cold but never again. Never again.

If you have birthdays that you want us to shout, if you have shout outs just let us know. Granted we are terrible at checking social media messages. We'll fucking check those notifications all day but the messages stresses me out and so but we'll try to get to them as

soon as we can. And this one was a special shout-out. So happy birthday, Otis. And without further ado, hopefully you'll enjoy our interview this week with Emily Gindelsberger, the author of... I want to get the whole thing right here. It's long. I have it written down.

I'll have to edit out all of this space on the clock what low wage work did to me and how it drives America insane so check out that book check out this interview and check us out on tour so a lot of these dates

keep changing well here's the last official final lineup here. On 7-28, we're going to be in Washington, D.C. at the Big Hunt for two shows, one at 6, one at 9. On 7-30, we'll be in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. August 1st, Jacksonville, Florida August 3rd and 4th, back-to-back nights in Atlanta and on August 5th, Nashville, Tennessee

and those tickets are available at the Streetfightradio.com store so go hit up the Streetfight website and get your tickets and we hope to see you out there and hang. We'll see you out there and we'll hang. So anyways, without further ado, here is our interview with Emily. Well, Emily, before we get started, can I ask you how you say your last name? Yeah, it's Gindelsberger. Gindelsberger.

Gindelsberger. All right. Well, thank you for being on the show this week, Emily Gindelsberger. Gindelsberger. Gindelsberger. All right. Mm-hmm. Well, thank you for being on the show this week, Emily Gindelsberger. I love your guys' show. I'm happy to be on it. Well, we're happy to have you. Emily, you've just written a book. We might as well just get right into it.

You just wrote a book that's about to come out. It's called On the Clock, What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane. And I haven't read the book yet, unfortunately, but I will. I've been hoarding the long copy you sent us. I'm sorry. Tom does

that. I'll go over to his house and he'll have stacks of books that people have sent us and I never see any of them. Oh, Tom. Tom. Rude see any of them. Well, Tom. Tom. Rude's what it is. That's right. Well, so, Emily, just to sort of tee things up here, what's the premise of the book?

What, you know, obviously it's kind of said in the title itself, but tell us a little bit about how you wrote it and what the sort of basic premise of it is. Sure. I mean, definitely it's inspired by Nickel and Dime by Barbara Ehrenreich, which I read as a kid and was a really seminal book in my life. I think that was, I think one of the first times, like when I was a teenager scooping ice cream that I sort of became conscious of, you know, other people have to do these jobs for real. I grew up middle-class, not wealthy, but you know, I wasn't working that job to help support the family. I was working the job scooping ice cream for spending money. And I had written an article a little while before I started on this book about Uber, where I sort of just signed up for Uber because I really wanted to back check the company's assertion that their average driver made $90,000 a year, which just seemed like bullshit to me, honestly.

But it was hard to get any data other than, because Uber's not going to share, like they don't keep track of things like the depreciation on cars or like how much people are spending on gas and all of these sort of like incremental hidden costs that build up real fast. So I did that. And my experience, well, A, I found that they were making, that I personally was making, and I was trying to work it like as hard as I possibly could. And I made about between nine and $10 an hour on average, which at $9 or $10 an hour, you couldn't do it even if you work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. So, yeah, there was that.

Right. It's not going to add up to $90,000. Yeah, it is never going to add up to $90,000. And they've stopped throwing that number around which i am pleased about but so after that my experience with uber was if have any of you guys ever done like uh done uber as a driver we haven't and i think it's mostly because of where we live yeah yeah yeah so what was interesting about it to me was all of the really subtle and kind of invisible ways the driver side app will stress you out and sort of make like a sort of control over the worker in ways that are kind of invisible if you're not actually doing it. And it allows them to sort of keep a very tight control of the workforce while still pretending that they don't have control of them and they're all, you know, freelancers just doing their

own thing. So I started getting really interested in the way technology can be used to really tightly control workers in the modern economy. Yeah. economy yeah um and i think that like that so it's been a few years since i've worked retail and service i worked at a ups store for over three years um and this was 2009 to or to about 2008 to 2012 or so and um even then it was still very tightly sort of regulated by technology, especially your time sheet. So we didn't use paper time cards. You know, you clocked in with a digital time clock.

And I thought that was one of the more. Where you talk a lot about how technology has really reshaped how businesses can squeeze as much labor out of workers as possible. to, yeah, immiserate people's lives, you know, castigate them, scold them for, or get them in trouble for being a minute late on the job. And maybe, in my opinion, the most insidious one would be the algorithmic scheduling. This is probably something that not a lot of people have much of an awareness of, or at least if you don't work in service work. Could you explain what it is and why companies like to use it so much? Yeah. So algorithm scheduling is when basically there are computer programs that analyze all the data from, you know, weeks ago, months ago, like a year ago, and from the past, you know, week and day.

And they sort of jam all those together and predict exactly how busy a store is going to be at any point during the day. So this makes for, like like really weird shift work. It's like really, it's really tough to predict what you're going to be week to week. Like people don't have really regular schedules that much anymore. They just get called in for, you know, five hours one day, like seven hours another day, working a night shift, working a morning shift. Like there's this thing called a clopin. Oh, I'm sorry. My editor's calling me one second. Out of the frying pan and into the fryer. Yep. No, I think it's because of Fox Business. I was just on a radio show in Jacksonville, Florida earlier this morning, and right afterwards, some Fox business show got at me and was interested in having me on, which I'm very conflicted about that.

I'm not sure. But anyway, sorry, I'm talking about algorithmic scheduling. I'm not sure. But, all right, anyway, sorry. I was talking about algorithmic scheduling. So that is in part why, like, shift work has become so, like, just weird looking all the time. Like, I'm sure you guys are familiar with, like, the cloping. You're right.

When I say cloping. Yeah, so that's when one worker is scheduled to both close late at night and then open early in the morning, like, with only, like, a lot more humanity involved in the in the just in the sense that like lower management you know was was going to have to look you in the eye and give you this ridiculous schedule and it's like human beings kind of you know they get embarrassed about that sort of thing it is embarrassing to tell someone like oh yeah like yeah close at 11 be there at six like or be there at five whatever whereas now it all comes out of a computer uh so managers have to just kind of shrug and be like i don't know that's what the computer told me to do right and also like the computers also you know especially at mcdonald's uh tell say when to cut people. If the store is not making enough money per hour to justify having that number of workers there, a lot of the time we'll just cut someone from the shift that was supposed to work a full shift

and just send them home after a couple hours or four hours or whatever. Right, because as you point out, the point is to squeeze as much labor out of the worker as possible and i think you even have a quote that was like technology has made understaffing a science so they they they sort of um you know get it down to the most um sort of minute degree of how much business is being done, when, and we'll sort of schedule around that accordingly. And the sort of accumulative effect of that is, I think, and again, I haven't read the book yet,

but your piece in Vox kind of spells it out. I think what you're getting at is that this all kind of amounts to this just chronic mild stress. And, you know, it's just this basically how you define that is you remove all sort of predictability and control and autonomy from the worker's life. from the worker's life. So if they can't, if they're learning about their schedule... Wow. You there, Emily?

Oh, yeah, I'm sorry. I couldn't hear you for a second. Oh, okay. That sounded like a cat scratching a litter box. So I know that sound. No, that was actually me desperately trying to rub out the coffee that I just spilled on my carpet. Don't mind me.

I am a mess. Hey, we all do it. You know, you're two days into being a new author. It's an exciting, stressful time. So, yeah, but basically your point is that when you have scheduling like this, if you don't know what your schedule is going to be a few days out from your shift, you know, and if you're doing things like the cloping, you know, you aren't getting a whole lot of sleep, basically the effect is you have no control over your own life. And so I kind of just wanted you to talk a little bit about that like um i think this was probably included in the how it drives america insane part of the title um but yeah essentially

the the effect is this just sort of like low rumbling chronic as you say mild stress yeah i'm kind of on a mission to uh, like, evolutionary psychology for the left a little bit. Because right now, whenever anyone is like, oh, yeah, I'm really into, like, evolutionary psychology, you can kind of bet that they're about to, like, say women are bitches because they're, you know, because they have evolved to be that way or something. Like, it always tends to, to right now the only people talking about evolutionary psychology tend to be either too academic to make it into the mainstream media or kind of uh the the jordan peterson yeah i was gonna say the intellectual dark web

yeah yeah and that's the thing because evolutionary evolutionary psychology is super, super fascinating. Like, it's something I've always been very, very interested in, like, why I feel the way I do, why I behave the way I do, because it all does sort of make sense. Like, for example, in the book, I talk a lot about PTSD and depression in that, like, I experienced both of those. And one of the really irritating things I thought about depression was, like, that it seemed like it was like this mystery where it came from. It seemed to come out of nowhere, and it didn't seem to make any evolutionary sense. to make any evolutionary sense. Like, I was constantly thinking, like, all right, if I were a cavewoman, like, I would have starved to death or something. You know, I would have, if I, you know, didn't want to leave my cave or whatever. But one of the things that really sort of helped me make sense of why the reasons for depression was getting into sort of the effects of chronic stress on

people. And once you get into that, it actually does make a lot more sense why America is kind of acting the way it is right now. And that was something that made the current political situation or just, you know, social situation in Americaica make a lot be a lot less confusing to me uh it helped me understand why things are the way they are in that basically if you think of that cave woman and i go i spend like 8 000 words doing this in the book about talking about uh like early man and the stress response and what it's for. But basically, if you are getting your stress response, your fight or flight response pinged like 20 times a day, like that wouldn't happen in, you know, any other time than this, basically, in our history because we weren't really good enough at technology to have an immediate response

every time you stop working or you stop being productive. Now you can do that. And so people are getting pinged with stress, like just constantly all day. And like back in the cave woman days or whatever, if that was happening all day, like every day for months, your body kind of assumes like, oh, I guess it's the apocalypse now. I guess things are really, really bad right now and sort of start adapting to survive better in an apocalypse. And when you look at all of these different effects of chronic stress, it's really interesting. Like you get more, people get more aggressive, people get more irritable, people are more xenophobic, they're more afraid of outsiders. And they're more interested in like a strongman leader rather

than a sort of more gentle style of leadership. And like, if you look at the jobs that a lot of people have and work you know for eight or ten hours every day they are the kind of jobs that would pin you with chronic stress all day and then pay little enough that life at home is also chronically stressful so there's been a lot of like there's actually not been as many people like getting back at me like, millennials, they don't work hard. They don't like we're, they're weak. They don't, you know, just telling people to that they should work harder if they want to succeed. There's been much more response along the lines of like, yeah, that's my job. That's exactly what I'm talking about from both, you know, from both the left and the right, which I think is really cool. But

the point is that like, if stress is inescapable, people are going to start like getting cooler and tougher and existing as if there is that, like, they don't want to take care of anybody but themselves and maybe their immediate families, but outsiders can, you know, just go fuck themselves. Yeah, it's like, so yeah, there's several things to sort of tease out from this. I guess the first is that you make a good point in your essay that this does have societal effects because when we think of the working class, what generally the media and the two political parties have told us is that it's coal miners or, you know, construction workers or whatever. Those people are definitely the working class but if we look at it sort of numerically um you know as you point out like there's more people

that work at arby's than the entire coal industry and not only that the average age of the fast food worker is 29 so it's not like paul ryan says it's not the summer job says. It's not this summer job. And this is the thing. This is what conservatives will tell you and even a lot of liberals will tell you that fast food work is this sort of stepping stone to another job. It's like, no, like a lot of the people that I know that work in the service industry have worked those jobs for years and years and years. Like those are their jobs. And that's what the working class is now. It is retail

work service work and it's incredibly stressful physically demanding you know as you point out um like something like 79 of mcdonald's workers have been or fast food workers have been burned um right now i uh i'm a part-time pizza cook um I burned the shit out of my fingers last week oh sorry and you gotta stay in front of that hot oven in 95 degree heat outside right right

but that's the thing you just kind of normalize it and you're like well this is the job and then 20 years down the line I don't have feelings in my limbs anymore and stuff like that. And it's just this sort of like slow building toll. And I think that's what you're getting at.

Like it's not something that is like every single day a boot to your neck. It is just little things that add up. And for me, the biggest one, and I think it's the same for you, at least in the Vox essay, is customers. Having to deal with customers and more specifically having to deal with really mean and just cruel would be the word. Like cruel. People are very cruel. They can be. And like will treat you like you are scum. Your job is to basically wait on them and we'll treat you no better than an animal. And for me personally, that was always the hardest part of those types of jobs.

Yeah, I think it's kind of under-accented exactly how demeaning and, like, how it just, like, crushes your self-worth and dignity to, like, just have to obey these customer- always right policies. So one of the chapters is in a call center, and in that call center you were not allowed to hang up before the customer for any reason, even if they were cussing you out, even if they were saying just horrible things. And it made you feel like less than human. It made you feel like you were worth nothing because it was very clear that your dignity was worth nothing in comparison to even the worst customer. worst customer. And that, again, is not, it's hard to really get across to people who do not have to deal with that sort of thing at work, who are allowed to like stand up for themselves without getting written up. Like, for example, like this woman at McDonald's, like she was in

a really bad mood and she threw a package of honey mustard at me and it hit me like right in the chest and it exploded and it got all over me and all over my hair and like i lost my temper and i just was like hey fuck you lady what the fuck and then i ran away into the back room because i was i knew i was not supposed to do that even though i didn't really make a choice to do that it sort of came right out of my brainstem because that's what you do when someone physically attacks you you know right uh it's a completely natural reaction but I totally got ridden up by my manager for that because you know you have to be able to control yourself uh and having to just sit there and take that is really bad for your soul like it's really bad it's really bad for your body and like it's really bad in all sorts of

like ways that you can track like like there's all these diseases of civilization linked to you know mental stress and stuff there's this book called called The Status Syndrome by Michael Marmot that gets really into this if any of the listeners are more interested in that. But it tracks how even when you account for the differences in health care, people on the lower end of the income scale are less healthy when it comes to heart disease, like ulcers, like all these stress related diseases. And it's like, yeah, like when you look at all of these, like there's a lot of like right wing people that are like obsessed with respect and stuff like that and that you respect them and stuff like that.

And that's the thing. I always wonder whether it's because they need to be respected because they're not respected at work or like there's a human need to be treated like another human being is what I'm saying. And if you're not treated like a human being, it gets to you. Yeah, you have to, what you're describing is, you're basically asking workers to sort of put aside the fight or flee response. Basically, because in an interaction with a person treating you like that, it's pretty much, you know, we are biological

creatures, you know, you pretty much have two responses in your mind. You're like, I, fuck you, buddy. Like, let's do this. Or I'm gonna go to the closet. Yeah. Or I'm gonna run away from this, which, you know, both equally understandable responses, but both equally unacceptable to management. Yeah, I've always been a fight person myself. Like, I've gotten mugged a couple times in Philly, and both times. Like, I know that you should give up your purse with my mind, but in the moment, I'm just like, hey, fuck you! Like, what the fuck? I'm going to fight you even though I'm, you know,

a very small person and I'm not like, hey, fuck you! Like, what the fuck? I'm gonna fight you even though I'm, you know, a very small person. And have no, and I'm not good at fighting at all. What about you guys? I feel I definitely fall on the side of fight. And have been in situations, when I worked at a UPS store we had this stupid policy,

this is just driving me insane, management would charge people $1 to get their packages taped up. And you will not understand, like you would not believe how pissed this would make people. People would get furious. And the funny thing is,

is like they would get so worked up, their faces would get red, their teeth would be bearing, like they would get so. It would be very primal. Yes, physically. Yeah, it gets really primal. physically exactly and so you are supposed to in this situation act like everything is fine and for the most part i generally got it down to a place where i could act like everything was fine if i'm

getting screamed at somebody i would be able to generally sort of disassociate and be like all right whatever but every now and then someone just gets under your skin, and I can't explain why. I mean, we're humans. We have biological, we have hormones, we have other things. We have histories and environments. And sometimes it's really hard to stay the sort of non-expressive worker. And this is the interesting thing about capitalism.

It intervenes in a lot of these sort of natural processes that, you know, we would just normally take for granted. And it tells you, like, well, you're actually not human. You're supposed to act like basically a robot or an automaton or whatever. And yes, the cumulative effect of that over time, over a long period of time, will be, yeah, you'll drink more. You'll probably abuse substances more. The effects will ripple out into your home life. This is good because I actually want to – I'm trying to look up something about – I talked to somebody – I talked to someone actually from Eastern Kentucky University that, about the opioid crisis, because when I was working at Amazon, it was just so present

everywhere I looked. And I kept making, I got this theory in my head, which did not turn out to be, I think, correct about why, which was, you know, Louisville, the Louisville area is a logistics hub, which means there's just a ton of like physical warehouse jobs for people. And like I went into a Rite Aid somewhere like right before orientation. And like just the amount of like the pain medicine and like foot insert stuff, it was like three times as big as any I'd ever seen. And I recount this in the book, but like it was incredibly painful to my first two weeks in the Amazon warehouse.

And at some point I was popping Advil just like all day long because, you know, you're working, you're walking on concrete floors and it's real tough on your knees and your hips and your feet. And I went to, one day I ran out of Advil and I wasn't, I didn't think I could keep going. And one of the details that I think all of the reviews so far have picked out of the book is that they have vending machines in the warehouses that give you free, like, generic Tylenol and Advil and, like, other things, like cold medicine and, like, crumbs or whatever. But that's the thing that everybody who hasn't had these jobs finds really appalling. Whereas other where Amazon was actually comparatively safe,

like warehousing wise, like everybody I talked to said that they were almost super annoying about safety rules. But the stuff like repetitive stress injuries that Amazon isn't going to really get held accountable for in the future, those are trying to keep up with the pace that they wanted you to go was required you, at least me, to take a lot of Advil. Yeah. And so I went to this pain medicine vending machine where I knew where it was, and you swipe your card, and it's supposed to just give it to you for free. Mine didn't work. This nice manager lady came over, and she was like,

oh, honey, is it your first week? And I was like, yeah. And she swiped her card for me and got me the Advil so I could keep working. And I was so, so grateful. And she said just like, as I was sort of walking away, she was like, be careful about how much of that you use, though. Like, now I have to take four to get the same effect as I used to get from two. So I sort of like extrapolated for that, like, oh,

I could see how it would go from two advil to four advil to like you know oxy defense like it seemed very like it seemed like an obvious progression to me so i called up this opiate uh opioid crisis specialist and he like pointed me at that marmot book he said that the repetitive stress injury idea that I had wasn't quite right, but that, you know, it's because people end up like getting addicted to opioids, not just because of injuries, but because they want to escape their lives and that people do it with a lot of things. Like mine is food. Like I tend to, like, I mentioned in the book how, like, when I was working at Amazon, I just stopped at McDonald's constantly because I was like, this is your reward for keeping walking today. Like, and I ate, like, a lot of ice cream, and I gained, like, some weight.

I don't know. I connect the opioid crisis in the book a lot more clearly to, I don't know, this lack of self-respect and dignity that people don't get in day-to-day life. And yeah, what you said was like, if you want people in the holler to, if you want to actually do something about this, you build a highway there so that, you know, people are able to, you know, do something that is not just, is not just trying to escape their miserable existence, I guess. Yeah, it's interesting that I was driving the other day, and so where we live is very, as they say, economically depressed or whatever. All the coal jobs have left. So a lot of their solutions are to bring back these sort of types of jobs that you're talking about. The biggest one, I think, around here is coal centers. The other day I was passing by this billboard.

It has a guy standing on front with a headset on. It's for Sykes, which is this big call center company around here it says you may look at it as a job we look at it as endless possibilities and it's i just i just thought that was the darkest thing like if your job you know your job is just to go as you were saying you go you get screamed at by people all day, you can't hang up before they do, et cetera. That's an endless possibility. It's like when McDonald's had that stakeholder meeting and said the Progressive Burger Company.

Right. It's like they're just framing this bigger project. That's funny you talk about. I have a friend of mine, Emily, that works at McDonald's and has for several years. I've been working with her a little bit on some some organizing stuff and trying to figure out you know some way we could you know create a hedge against some of the bullshit that her and some of her workers have to put up with without you know also getting them fired or whatever and she told me the story that um the guy that owns the location that she works at

had noted that their power bills had increased just like by a little bit by a little bit not not even really that much and that um as a result he was like turning the thermostat up like even in the back where all the fryers are and stuff, to, like, Oh, God, really? You know, in the high 70s and stuff. And, you know, all the workers were complaining that they were just, like, you know, sweating into, like, you know, when they were making biscuits in the morning and all this stuff. And they were like, this is just gross. Like, I wouldn't want to eat here, you know, and all this stuff.

Yeah. And it's just said that when they, you know, sort of lodged their formal complaint that he drove from Lexington, so he lives almost three hours away, drove down from Lexington and set the thermostat on 80 degrees and said, I dare any one of you to touch it. And he sat there all day and watched them to make sure they didn't turn up that thermostat. And for one, that story just, I mean, makes me see. But two, I was talking to her about that. I was like, well, what are you getting paid and all this stuff? And she's been there several years, and she showed me her check stub.

She made like $11,000 last year. And she's raising a kid. She has substance abuse issues, all this stuff. abuse issues all this stuff and um it's just that's what that's what this is like sociopathic behavior like renders real humans in this kind of work and i had never thought really that much about the evolutionary aspect of it till y'all were talking about it but like if if you're supposed to mute both fight and flight what you're left with is just sort of this you know demoralization in my opinion you're right yeah it's it's just sort of this, you know. Demoralization, in my opinion. You're right.

Yeah, it's just sort of like helplessness. You know, you would, I think that most people in human history would say, well, okay, what are the political solutions to this? What are the, we could organize, and a lot of people are doing that. And you even pointed out, especially with the Fight for 15 stuff and the multiple complaints that were brought against OSHA against McDonald's in 2015, which reading those is just absolutely shocking and appalling. But I think that if you're talking about the sort of political solutions, it kind of requires a reorientation of how we view the working class, whether they're coal miners or whatever, auto workers or whatever, and sort of use them very cynically for their own sort of ends. And there is a sort of lower strata to that working class that just doesn't even get talked about at all. In many cases, they just basically get erased. get erased and that is like especially like just like people throw around the like flipping burgers as if it is the easiest possible job and i think those people maybe were flipping burgers in the

80s like paul ryan was flipping burgers in the 80s and and i think i don't know i might just be like a like a a sunny optimist or whatever but i'm hoping that they just don't know. I might just be like a like a sunny optimist or whatever. But I'm hoping that they just don't know that they just don't realize it because they haven't had a job like this in in sort of the Internet age, how miserable they are compared to how miserable like compared to what they used to be and how people are trying to support families on these jobs where they were not in the past. And I'm hoping I can get those people to read this book. I have a question for you guys. I have an interest from the Wall Street Journal, I guess, to do some sort of op-ed.

If you can speak directly to the readers of the Wall Street Journal, and you were going to try to actually change their minds about something without just having them immediately turn off their brains at like $15 an hour or something, what would you talk to them about? Because I'm still making up my mind. Wow, that's a good one. Yeah. I guess it kind of falls in line with the Fox Business inquiry you also received.

Yeah. I'm still not sure whether they want me on just to yell at me or what, but we'll find out. My personal feelings, and this won't get printed, so we might as well just say it because it won't get printed. My personal feelings is that you won't be able to change their minds. The reason why this, the reason why capitalism works so efficiently, and I use that with scare quotes, by efficiently I mean, you know, it just turns people into blood grist, basically, I mean, you know, it just turns people into blood grist basically is because, yeah, because as we've been talking about, the whole thing is predicated on, you know, squeezing as much capital out of labor as possible.

And there has to be losers. And there has to be losers. That's the whole point of the system and so i think that like you could maybe say there would theoretically be a nicer capitalism but like it's fascinating how in that 2015 um complaint lawsuit uh mcdonald's response to that was these allegations i don't remember the direct quote but you quoted in your piece that these allegations, I don't remember the direct quote, but you quoted in your piece, that these allegations have been brought by activists who are trying to tarnish our brand, basically. And you're talking about accusations. Is that what prompted the Progressive Burger Company?

Probably. Probably. And the point, you know, and we're not talking about like just, you know, my shift got changed a few times. We're talking about people who suffered third degree burns, who fell in fast paced work environments, who have, you know, their bodies have been totally like if like this is the fascinating thing I find I find about modern society is that I think even a lot of leftists think that like the working class now is mostly sort of been automated out, been mechanized out and we don't have sort of working conditions like we did 100 years ago. And I think if I could tell anybody in this country,

one thing, it would be that if you were to put the working conditions of service workers side by side with working conditions of like 12-year-olds in coal mines in 1910... It wouldn't be a whole hell of a lot different. It wouldn't be a whole hell of a lot different. You're basically talking about the same thing. You work people to their death, or, and this is the difference,

I guess the opposite thing of that would be that you create sort of like quasi-working shifts where people will only be able to work like 15 hours a week, and then the next week they work 70 hours. But the effect is the same, that you don't have any control or autonomy over your own life. Yeah, and in the book, I actually get into the sort of, I guess, the science of what lacking control and autonomy in your life does. Oh, wait, I think I actually mentioned it in the box piece.

I think I opened with that, like how you know rodents are the the models for uh you know depression drugs how they're tested so there's been a lot of research on how to like uh like depress rodents isn't exactly the right thing because like that's not the correct scientific term but yeah like you if you want to test your depression drug, you have to make a jillion rodents kind of depressed. And the way to do that isn't to traumatize them. It's just to constantly ping them with, it's just to remove control from their life. Like, make them, and predictability, too.

life like make them and have and predictability to predictability and control are the number one things for trying for like depression and anxiety uh when they're not present and like control and predictability are exactly what american workers and like not just american workers even though that's what i've uh focused on obviously, but, you know, workers all over the place, because these technologies are kind of everywhere now. and profitability, then yeah, it's not particularly surprising that so many people are depressed and so many people have anxiety disorders and so many people are just like losing their shit at some McDonald's worker for no apparent reason, you know? Right. Because that's what you do when you're chronically stressed. You see everybody as out to get you.

Right. Yeah. The thing is about Wall Street Journal readers is that the Wall Street Journal's audience is mostly, it's the business class. And we do seem to be at a place, me and Tom were just talking about this yesterday, we do seem to be at a place, me and Tom were just talking about this yesterday, we do seem to be at a place in society where capitalism is in crisis, but it's important to define what exactly that means. You have, for the first time in probably 30 or 40 years, you have people, you have reformers coming out. And by reformers, I mean people like Liz Warren, who say that the system can, capitalism can be nicer, it can work more efficiently and that it's actually counterintuitive to have a just perpetually disenfranchised and physically degraded and beaten down working class and that capitalism will work better if you actually institute these reforms. There are people in the Wall Street Journal audience who think that,

because guess what? They know that if we continue on the current path, they're going to end up on the end of a pitchfork, and they don't want that. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I just made that point on some public radio talk show or whatever, and I made the point that like, like, I'm not an economist. And, and I don't like I'm not a business person. Like, I'm not that great at, you know, predicting what's going to happen in the future. Although I think I can sort of see where the general trend where

things are going. But if you want real proof, like if you want actual proof that this is not sustainable, just look at what they're doing right now in, like, Silicon Valley and Wall Street. Those people are generally, you know, valued for their ability to anticipate where the markets are going and, like, where they can arbitrage stuff. And, like, a bunch of them are, you know, there was that New York Times article, like, a couple years ago about how, like, all these, like like tech people are buying land in New Zealand and like making a luxury apocalypse dunkers. And like the other half of them seem to be investigating universal basic income, which seems like it should be just philosophically appalling to them.

You know, yeah, those people tend to know where things are going and i find that to be kind of worrying that that's where they think things are going it's either going to be pacifying people with enough money that their lives aren't miserable every month but that also removes you know the power of labor from the equation because you know if it's just robots then what are you going to do uh or you know they think it's just robots, then what are you going to do? Or, you know, they think it's going to be pitchforks, one or the other. Right. Yeah, this is the thing.

I guess if there's, okay, yeah, if there's two things I could tell the Wall Street Journal audience. The first thing is that the whole automation myth is people keep using it to sort of, like, do a gotcha thing about, like like sort of Marxism or communism. I don't know what your politics are, but personally, that's where I'm at. And people would say, you know, if you have an automated workforce, then the whole thesis of Marxism is invalid and not going to work. I don't think that... Oh, yeah, because Marx never thought anything about like the relationship between humans and machines, that sort of thing.

Exactly. As what was the headline yesterday, Marx didn't take into equation software. Yeah, yeah. It's just like, well, I mean, no, but, you know, that's the thing. These things are not, people treat software, like, this sort of monitoring, as if this is some sort of new thing. But it's just exactly the same dynamic as like, I don't know, y'all know about like Frederick Taylor at all? No. All right.

like factories were reaching this sort of breaking point where you could no longer get people to not slack off or soldier on the job. Like soldiering is basically everybody in the factory is like, we could go faster, but then, you know, we'd be exhausted at the end of the day. Why don't we all agree on a pace of work? And that's how long they're, and that's, you know, it's kind of like early quasi-unionization. Yeah. And so that sort of limited the size of factories at that time, just because, like, you used to be able to, you know, if you were, you know, Adam Smith's pin factory, that, like, famous example of how, like, breaking down tasks and having people, every person do like...

Yeah, division of labor, basically. Yeah, exactly. Like, the pin factor he was talking about was like 10 dudes. Like, they were all pretty small, and you were probably working alongside your boss, and you probably had a relationship with him. Right. you know you probably had a relationship with him right uh whereas like once the boss becomes this sort of far off guy in a you know monocle and top hat you're less likely to want to like bust your ass for him uh so what taylor what taylor's innovation was and it's huge and it's

kind of a shame that like people don't really remember him that much because this was such a big deal uh was uh there was new technology at the time and it was the stopwatch that was both accurate and like affordable for uh like non-royal people so he was one of the first people to start like timing out every step of a job and then you know trying to figure out how everybody should do it and how fast they should be doing things because before that it was kind of impossible to do that right and and like so that was one advance in technology and another was ford with assembly lines uh and that sort of thing and so like, when you look at the jump between, like, a stopwatch, like an analog stopwatch and records being all in paper, with today's, like, digital stopwatches and GPS monitoring

and, like, at the call center, there were rumors that some program was, you know, parsing all of the recordings for whether you raised your one of you raised your voice or used a certain language and that sort of thing like voice identification uh it's exactly the same thing it's just that technology has gotten so good at applying it that it's just completely you know trying to like bring what is it blood from a stone yeah is that the idiom or water from a turn you came to the idiom wreckers caucus so uh we like to fuck them up so i know what you're saying now i think the one miscalculation with all that, though, is software doesn't buy shit.

Yeah. Stopwatches don't buy shit. And so this is the point. This is the point I guess I'm trying to make is that we'll never have a fully automated workforce. Like that would implode the whole system. You need consumers. And so what we're going to wind up getting, I think, in the coming years, well, we've already got it. So what we're going to wind up getting, I think, in the coming years – well, we've already got it, but we're starting to see what it can really – how it can really scale up and how it can really amount to something just blood-soaked is that were sort of explored and kind of refined and perfected in the late 19th century and early 20th century that are now finding sort of manifested in new technological solutions.

Yeah, it's like a ghost in a machine sort of thing. Like, I felt like I was seeing Taylor everywhere in all of my jobs. Exactly. Yeah. And so, yeah, that's the thing. Like, there's this idea that there will be a sort of permanently disenfranchised, underclass, people automated out of work. And the reality is that I think that it'll be people working 70 hours a week, basically, and the whipcracker is no longer a foreman or a manager, even though that person still exists. But it's algorithms and it's robots and technology, which is incredibly bleak. Yeah, because that's the thing.

Taylorism has definitely been applied to lower management and, like, mid-level management as well. Like, a lot of this stuff is coming from the top. Like, a lot of managers, like, some guy, I was on Radio Times yesterday, and some former manager of a McDonald's called in, which was really cool. Oh, wow. And he was talking about the way algorithms, like, you know, like, he had to obey what the computer said. Like, he didn't really have a choice in whether to, like he didn't have discretion to be like, no, that's not going to work. We might have a rush later.

I don't want to cut this person. Or I don't want to cut this person because they have kids and they should be able, like, that's, you know, four hours of work that they thought they had that they now don't have. Yeah. that they now don't have. Yeah. Well, and so I guess this brings me to the second point that I wish I could tell Wall Street Journal readers, which would be get ready for the pitchforks, because if this continues on as it's going,

granted, a lot of us, we get demoralized or addicted or whatever, but at the same time, that's only sustainable for so long. If history has proven anything, there's never been a point in human history where people have endured conditions like this forever. There's always revolt. Because if we get back to, as you were saying, sort of evolutionary psychology, if we can sort of tease out any aspects of human nature, for me, the biggest one is nobody likes being oppressed.

Nobody likes having a boot to the neck, and they're going to respond to that. And so, yeah, I guess that's the thing. The pitchforks are probably coming, hopefully, sooner rather than later. But anyways, I don't know. Tom, do you have anything you want to ask before? I just wanted to wrap up on this note. Is there, you know, I've not finished the book. Terrence hasn't cracked it. But you got any good horror stories about, you know, all these jobs that you've done personally that that you might be able to tease well I will say that the Amazon chapter like I one of

the things I tried to do real bad was actually make people feel it I guess like I used to be like I went to school school at Oberlin to be a musician at first, and then about halfway through that, I was like, oh, sure, I'm not good enough to do this. But I still, you know, learned a lot of really interesting stuff about trying to communicate emotion and the way you're feeling to an audience. And I tried, and I'm trying, I've tried to do that in all my writing, but particularly this, where it is important for people to not just read numbers and stuff about like, you know, the number of people that have these sort of jobs and like how much they're making, but they need to

understand what it feels like all the time. Like there's that one dude who's like, you know, facts don't care about your feelings. Like it's really much more like feelings are important. Like they are what we live in like every day. We marinate in them constantly. And if you're constantly feeling like you're worthless and whatever, like that's going to have a bad effect on you no matter what, and the general public, no matter what kind of job you have,

and no matter how much it pays, even if you, like, I'm sure, like I have corporate lawyer friends that I went to college with, and their life seems fucking miserable because, you know, their time just as closely as, you know, McDonald's workers. There's a difference in that, like, their home lives are a lot easier because they're able to buy their way out of, you know, chores, and they take an Uber home instead of the subway, or, you know, they're able to buy their time back. But I guess if there's like one big point I want to, I was trying to make with this is like the way work feels, like people's experience of it day to day is really, really important.

And it's something we're not even tracking right now just because it's hard. important and it's something we're not even tracking right now just because it's hard we still have this very like facts don't care about your feelings idea of like what being rational is but it's just it's that's just such a simplistic way of thinking about things in that like the human brain is like the most complicated thing in the entire known universe, right? Like, we are not, and we're trying to, like, fit it into this, like, very simplistic equation of, like, free market capitalism, and it just is not working. Like, I think you, all you have to do is just look around at what the country is doing right now to see it's not working um so we really need to be able to assign value in a market if we don't want everything to you know if you are not interested in revolution like pitchforks then people are going to have to start putting value on things that right now

are just treated as like, whatever, that's not important. If you don't measure something, it's not important. And right now we don't measure whether everybody's miserable. And that's really important. So, yeah. I don't have the numbers on that, but anecdotally I would say that, yeah, everybody's miserable. Right? Yeah, that's

because, like, the, you know, the GDP doesn't care if anybody's miserable. Yeah. Totally. Well, so, Emily, the book is On the Clock, What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane.

Available now where fine books are sold. Yeah. And I'm going to try it again. America Insane. Available now where fine books are sold. Yeah. Uh-huh. And I'm going to try it again. Emily Grindlesberger? Is that right? Gindlesberger.

Gindlesberger. I'm so sorry. Oh, there it is. You don't even know how many amazing pronunciations I've had of my name throughout my life.

That was not particularly bad. I'm sorry. Mine is very straightforward. Three syllables. the whole name. Well, thank you so much. Pick up the book wherever you can.

Anything else you want to plug, Emily? Oh, I'm going to have, for any Philadelphia readers, I'm throwing an event called the Hegemonic Bar on July 26 at Moss Space. And I'm not going to say much more about it, but I am going to say it will be a good time, and there is an interesting twist to the party. Nice. Go do that shit, Philly. Yeah, go check that out, Philly.

Thank you so much, Emily, and we'd love to have you back on sometime. Sure, man. All right. Come talk to you. Same to you. Well, I'm going to that high creek mountain. Go on back to old Black Mountain Hill. I'm going to fight for the Union because I know it's Mother Jones' will.

Yes, I know it's Mother Jones' will, yes I know it's Mother Jones' will. The children were layin' in these tents, while layin' upon their quills. The thugs they was ramblin' through their tents,in' carcin' in their milk Pourin' carcin' in their milk I'm goin' back to old Orange Creek Mountain Goin' back to that old Black Mountain hill I'm gonna fight for my union Cause cause I know it's Mother Jones's will, and I know it's Mother Jones's will." And so it caught me way out to my cell, and I had a shotgun that stayed at home.

They took that shotgun, there's five of them, and broke it over, hit it over the railroad, broke it all to pieces, and they kicked me like I was a sore. I couldn't walk I was a sore. I couldn't walk hardly for a week. Like they kicked me to death, like they kicked me all apart. Broke that gun all to pieces. That happened on Rourke Creek. That blow up, there was a deep hole I recall, Lee North.

And they said that sure was a bad, dirty thing, dirty stuff.