[ How a relentless speedup is reshaping the working class.]
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LIFE UNDER THE ALGORITHM  
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Gabriel Winant
December 4, 2019
The New Republic
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_ How a relentless speedup is reshaping the working class. _

, Doug Chayka

 

Henry Noll was one of the most famous workers in American history,
though not by his own choice and not under his own name. Employed at
Bethlehem Steel for $1.15 a day, and known among workmates for his
physical vigor and thriftiness, Noll was—as the somewhat embellished
story goes—selected by an ambitious young management consultant
named Frederick Winslow Taylor for an experiment in 1899. One day on
the job, Taylor approached Noll—whom he later made famous under the
pseudonym “Schmidt”—and asked him, “Are you a high-priced
man?” As Taylor rendered the story in his book _The Principles of
Scientific Management_, “Schmidt” replied to the obvious trick
question cautiously: “Vell, I don’t know vat you mean.”

“Oh yes, you do,” insisted Taylor. “What I want to know is
whether you are a high-priced man or not.”


“Vell,” repeated Schmidt, “I don’t know vat you mean.”


“Oh, come now, you answer my questions,” smirked Taylor. “What I
want to find out is whether you are a high-priced man or one of these
cheap fellows here. What I want to find out is whether you want to
earn $1.85 a day or whether you are satisfied with $1.15, just the
same as all those cheap fellows are getting.” 


Schmidt then responded that yes, obviously, he would accept the
additional 70 cents (“I vas a high-priced man”). Then, the rub:
“You see that pile of pig iron?” Taylor explained that a
high-priced man did exactly as told, “from morning till night.”
Schmidt, whom Taylor compared unfavorably to an “intelligent
gorilla,” would be timed and—as we would put it today—optimized
in his every movement. “He worked when he was told to work, and
rested when he was told to rest.” In this way, Taylor boasted,
Schmidt’s output increased from twelve tons of pig iron moved every
day to 47. 


This was the primal scene of “scientific management,” versions of
which spread rapidly across the world’s workplaces. The bargain
between Schmidt and Taylor represented the explicit formulation of
what would become the defining compromise of twentieth-century
American capitalism: Increase your output, get paid more. Wages go up
with productivity.


Until, it turns out, they don’t anymore
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The unwinding of this agreement in recent decades, such that workers
must continue to produce more without expecting it to show up in their
pay stubs, has now been the subject
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discussion and debate
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The decline of unions, the rise of inequality, the crisis of liberal
democracy, and the changing face of American culture all, in one form
or another, relate to this transformation. We work and work and barely
get by, while wealth pools up in obscene quantities out of view. Pile
more pig iron, but don’t imagine you’re high-priced. What, ask new
books by Emily Guendelsberger and Steve Fraser, is this colossal
insult doing to our heads? No wonder, Guendelsberger observes, the
country is collectively “freaking the fuck out.”


In her new book, _On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How
It Drives America Insane
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Guendelsberger re-creates a version of Barbara Ehrenreich’s famous
experiment in _Nickel and Dimed
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reporter for the alt-weekly _Philadelphia City Paper _until it was
sold off and shut down
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in 2015, went undercover at three low-wage workplaces: an Amazon
warehouse in Indiana, a call center in North Carolina, and a
McDonald’s in San Francisco. Whereas Ehrenreich’s main discovery
was that there still existed an exploited working class—a
controversial point in the late 1990s and early 2000s—Guendelsberger
takes inequality and exploitation as given, asking instead what these
jobs are doing to the millions who work them.


What does the phrase “in the weeds” mean to you? In the
professional-managerial class, “in the weeds” signifies knotty
detail (as in the _Vox_ public policy podcast, _The Weeds
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Guendelsberger points out, “in the weeds” means the same thing
“swamped” does in professional-speak: overwhelmed and stressed
out. And America’s working class, Guendelsberger argues, is in the
weeds all the time, increasingly subjected to an automated
neo-Taylorism. Workers are scheduled by algorithm, their tasks timed
automatically, and their performance surveilled digitally. This was
what she learned on these jobs: “The weeds are a terribly toxic
place for human beings. The weeds make us crazy. The weeds make us
sick. The weeds destroy family life. The weeds push people into
addiction. The weeds will literally _kill you_.”


MONGREL FIREBUGS AND MEN OF PROPERTY: CAPITALISM AND CLASS CONFLICT IN
AMERICAN HISTORY 
by Steve Fraser Verso, 272 pp., $24.95

What Guendelsberger found in her experiment was that employers now
“demand a workforce that can think, talk, feel, and pick stuff up
like humans—but with as few needs outside of work as robots. They
insist
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their workers amputate the messy human bits of themselves—family,
hunger, thirst, emotions, the need to make rent, sickness, fatigue,
boredom, depression, traffic.” The results are “cyborg jobs,”
and they account, by Guendelsberger’s reckoning, for almost half of
the American workforce. The hidden moments of reclaimed freedom that
make any job bearable are being discovered and wiped out by bosses
everywhere: That trick you used to use to slow down the machine
won’t work anymore; or that window of 23 minutes when you knew your
boss couldn’t watch you is vanishing. Whatever little piece of
humanity survived in these fragments dies with them.


In her first job, at an Amazon “fulfillment center,”
Guendelsberger finds a regime that is Taylor’s “vision
incarnate.” (One co-worker, sensing Taylor’s ghost, theorizes that
Amazon is “a sociological experiment on how far a corporation can
push people.”) Guendelsberger, a “picker,” is made to carry on
her waist a scanner gun, which monitors her location, tells her the
precise item among the hundreds of thousands in the warehouse that she
is to go pluck from the shelves, its location, and how much time she
has to do it. A sliding bar counts down as seconds go by, haranguing
her. When she’s identified the shelf in the vast facility, dug
through the bin, and scanned the item, the next one appears right
away. 


While Amazon warehouses—generally in the ruins of economically
depressed cities—often offer better wages than whatever else is
around, it’s the time-discipline that kills you. The job is
extremely monotonous. (To cope, Guendelsberger sews earbuds into her
cap in violation of company policy.) When it’s time for breaks, it
takes her so long to reach the exit of the massive warehouse that she
must almost immediately turn around and go back to work. On top of the
stress, it’s physically painful
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The company’s time-off policy, she observes, is literally worse than
Scrooge’s in _A Christmas Carol_. Amazon dispenses free painkillers
to workers, and Guendelsberger quickly loses track of how many she is
taking. At one point, as she squats down to retrieve an item from a
low shelf, her body “mutinies,” she writes. “_Stand up_, I order
my legs for the hundredth time today, but it’s as if they’ve
gotten fed up with all the abuse and hung up on my brain. _Stand up,
you idiot_, my brain screams as I slowly topple backwards into a
sitting position.” Another worker complains, “My feet are,
like, _mincemeat_. I used to walk twenty miles a day with a backpack
on and not change my socks, and they _never_ looked as fucked up as
they are now.”


 


The other jobs more or less go this way, too. At the call center,
Convergys, Guendelsberger learns she is the human shield between the
frustrated customer and the disdainful, predatory company. (And it
turns out you can get MRSA at your workstation if you’re not
careful.) At this job, the staff are required to try to push sales on
callers throughout the interaction, although customers have generally
picked up the phone to try to solve a problem with a cable bill. The
aggravated callers take it out on the workers, who must multitask
among dysfunctional, incompatible computer systems while empathizing
and upselling. Guendelsberger begins imagining herself as multiple
personalities: Helper Emily, Sales Emily, Protocol Emily, Scribe
Emily, Conversation Emily, Short-Term Memory Emily, Awareness Emily,
Journalist Emily, and Boss Emily—who has to monitor all the other
ones. “Her job sucks.” Her worst call comes from another
call-center worker, using her own lunch break as her only opportunity
to try to sort out some service problem. 


Call center workers are monitored, disciplined, and reprimanded for
time theft if they try to switch the system off between calls.
Guendelsberger, admirably widely read and eclectic, introduced the
reader to Taylor in the Amazon section of the book; here she provides
a brief lesson on Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon
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tossed in with a bit of evolutionary psychology. How would you act if
you knew your supervisor might be watching at any time, or that any
customer might blow up at you for reasons you can’t control? You’d
be on hair-trigger—all of every day. And your body and brain
aren’t built for that. Stress response is supposed to be short-term,
fight-or-flight. To do it all of every day is to take a soak in an
acid bath
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(Guendelsberger conveys this by a parable about a backyard-dwelling,
rapidly evolving hominid named Wanda; unaccountably, it works.)


The final workplace, a McDonald’s, leaves the least impression—if
only because it’s the most familiar. It’s not hard to imagine why
serving fast food is terrible work
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even setting aside the poverty wages. “There’s _always_ a
line,” writes Guendelsberger. “We’re _always_ in the weeds.”
As at the call center, she must interact directly with customers, and
attempt to fit their demands into the more-or-less preprogrammed pace
of production, which she must also keep moving. She gets cut at one
point checking on the coffee—you can never let the coffee run
out—when the handle breaks and the pot falls on her. Had she not
been wearing pants easily removed from her legs, she’d have been
burned badly also, since McDonald’s holds its coffee at near-boiling
so it will keep longer. “It frequently feels like we’ve been
understaffed at the precise levels that will maximize human misery
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on both sides of the counter.” 


If McDonald’s is like Convergys in that it involves handling people,
it differs in that the unruly customers are right there, in person.
They can get in her face. An impatient, bossy one (“Hurry up hurry
up hurry up”) demands extra honey mustard from her, which
technically she’s not supposed to give. (“Honey mustard! Get me
honey mustard!”) Guendelsberger breaks the rule to avoid
confrontation. But she’s unsteady with anger, and a packet of
condiment slips from her hand and over the counter. “Quick as a
shortstop, [the customer] scoops it up and wings it at my chest, hard.
The packaging explodes; honey mustard splatters all over me and the
surrounding area.” The customer, backed up by a friend, accuses
Guendelsberger of having thrown the mustard first. Of course—more
victim-blaming. It’s the 2010s.


 

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: “Chronic stress
drains people’s empathy, patience, and tolerance for new things.”
We’ve been brutalized, bullied, and baited into being trained
work-animals and not even afforded a corresponding pay bump
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No wonder our society fell apart.


“Moloch” is the name Steve Fraser gives to this situation in his
new essay collection, _Mongrel Firebugs and Men of Property:
Capitalism and Class Conflict in American History
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Citing Milton and Ginsberg, he writes, “The Moloch of capitalism is
as deadly and merciless as its Canaanite ancestor. But its altars are
everywhere, virtually invisible yet part of the warp and woof of
everyday life: at one moment prayed to on Wall Street, at another
configuring the most hidden desires and anxieties of everyone’s
emotional life.” These prayers, desires, and anxieties—their
histories, their infernal dynamics—are the subject of the book’s
eleven essays, which touch on virtually the full sweep of American
history. Where Guendelsberger, the plucky reporter, came at the
problem up close, Fraser—an eminent labor historian—stands back to
try to size the whole thing up. Echoing an old-fashioned style of
American Studies scholarship, he’s interested in origin myths and in
something like a national psyche.


The essays in _Mongrel Firebugs_ summarize and build on two of
Fraser’s recent books, _The Limousine Liberal
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especially, _The Age of Acquiescence
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late-career magnum opus. While the new book’s contents were largely
written for magazine
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readerships
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the last ten years and Fraser approaches them in the loose way of a
storyteller, they display his encyclopedic knowledge of U.S. history,
especially working-class history. (Fraser’s early career was
characterized by pathbreaking original scholarship on the labor
movement of the early twentieth century, including a masterful
biography of garment workers’ leader Sidney Hillman, _Labor Will
Rule
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and the 1989 edited collection _The Rise and Fall of the New Deal
Order
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which continues to set historians’ agendas today.) 


In his recent work, and especially in the essays collected here,
Fraser traces a distinct arc across the history of American
capitalism. The nineteenth century was the age of capital’s ravenous
growth, consuming all in its path. “It proceeded relentlessly,” he
writes, “appropriating land and resources both human and natural
that had once been off limits because they were enmeshed in
alternative forms of slave, petty, and subsistence economies.” In
the face of this social apocalypse, people resisted vigorously,
turning the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries into a
period of protracted and often violent social conflict, which he calls
a “Second Civil War.” “The legions of the displaced became
charter members of an American proletariat. Their new existence was
both a promise and a reproach,” writes Fraser.


 

This is the age of the mass strike and the general strike, events that
escaped the confines of any particular employer-employee relationship
and became instead the _cri de coeur_ of a whole new world, as for
example in the national crusade for the eight-hour day.



It’s likely that Henry “Schmidt” Noll saw some of this action
himself: Bethlehem Steel had fierce strikes
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in 1910, 1918, and 1919.


Decades of such struggles culminated in the New Deal. Workers at
Bethlehem Steel, for example, struck again in 1937 and
1941—alongside millions of others
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around the country in these years. Finally, they won recognition, and
they were quickly co-opted into the American mainstream. The
conservative compromises that initially stabilized this new
order—reinstitutionalized racial and gender hierarchies, coercive
deradicalization of labor, private administration of the incomplete
welfare state—also left it riddled with contradictions, ultimately
producing its decay into neoliberalism
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in the 1970s.


Here Fraser arrives at his new great subject, the psychic economy of
our time. Where the first “Gilded Age” saw enormous resistance to
inequality, Fraser argues, ours has seen a distracted, demoralized
culture of compliance. Economic risk-taking, positively stigmatized
after the Great Depression, is now spoken of in heroic terms: To the
risk-taker go the spoils. (Google “risk-taker” and try not to
shudder at what you see.) De facto debt servitude
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and penal labor
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are back, too, although neither is met with the outrage one might have
expected based on earlier historical experience. (Coal miners in
Tennessee took up arms in the 1890s to free convict laborers, grasping
what the practice portended for themselves.) Unemployment, understood
through the late nineteenth century as a grotesque and unacceptable
social phenomenon and resisted in spectacular episodes of collective
action, is now accepted as natural—cyclical, like the seasons.


Painfully, the most potent strand of resistance instead has been the
right-wing populist outrage of the petit bourgeois against the
“limousine liberal.” In the book’s later entries, Fraser
explores this American demagogic tradition, finding Donald Trump’s
clearest predecessor
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William Randolph Hearst. Though here, too, he notes, irresponsible
populism a century ago required a pro-labor posture. “Today’s
right-wing populists are hardly about to invoke the anti-capitalism
that impassioned the people Hearst counted on. On the contrary, what
draws them to The Donald is that he is an übermensch risen atop the
capitalist order.” Trump in this way only exemplifies the phenomenon
of the ascent of the family capitalists—like the Kochs, Waltons, and
so on—in whose hands enormous wealth has accumulated in recent
years, and who, liberal and reactionary alike, manifest “godlike
desire to create the world in their image.” The worship they
receive, at its apex in Trump’s presence in the White House,
suggests that their apotheosis has been successful—“the genie
grown monstrous,” as Fraser puts it.


 

For Fraser, the cause of this deep ideological transformation lies in
the altered “metabolism” of capitalism. Where once it produced
upheaval by swallowing everything it could chew, today its systems are
basically expulsive: unemployment and exclusion, rather than coerced
assimilation and employment. “The gears of Progress, that demiurge
of the first Gilded Age, were set in reverse,” Fraser writes.
Capitalism “autocannibalized” itself, and the spirit of the new
age was accordingly the dejection of the social reject, not the
outrage of the unwilling conscript.

 

Indeed, Fraser can’t help but telegraph his own dejection. “There
is abroad in the world the spirit of Moloch,” he concludes,
“luridly lighting up the abyss out of which Trump has emerged.”
While his last lines call for renewed dreams of emancipation, he
hasn’t devoted much space to searching out where such dreams might
come from, and doesn’t seem to have much faith that they’ll
materialize. Here the gap between Fraser’s defeated New Left
generation
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and Guendelsberger’s defiant Millennials looms large.


The generational difference is political, but it’s also
sociological. Guendelsberger, unlike her direct predecessor
Ehrenreich, isn’t exactly slumming it—she doesn’t have as far to
fall. Through much of _Nickel and Dimed_, Ehrenreich is tormented by
the ethical implications of the social distance between herself and
her co-workers. Guendelsberger, on the other hand, is fairly
unbothered on this count; she was already unemployed when she embarked
on her project. She sleeps in her car for significant portions of the
narrative, and accepts the charity of her workmates gratefully. She
began the book, in fact, on spec—she only got her contract during
her second stint, at Convergys. “Even if nothing came of it, I
figured, I _would_ at least bank a couple thousand bucks.” 


The contrast with the conception of _Nickel and Dimed_—brainstormed
over salmon with Lewis Lapham—is a perfect index of what the last 20
years have done to the once-secure professional strata. Ehrenreich set
out to rediscover the lost land of the working class as a
self-conscious representative of the complacent middle class, in order
to send word back and stimulate the numbed yuppie conscience. After
another generation of neoliberalism, the line between these two groups
has blurred, so this interpreter act seems less urgent. Guendelsberger
herself straddles the line
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and she imagines her reader does, too. “Yeah, _you, mamá_,” she
writes in her afterword, hailing the reader the way workers addressed
each other at McDonald’s. “You’re a worker too—just like me
and Jess and Zeb and Candela and Kolbi and Miguel and the Mustard
Lady.”


To be sure, the places Guendelsberger went to work are saturated with
the poisonous ideologies Fraser explores. The Convergys staff are
continuously surveilled for “time theft” while the employer steals
time from workers left and right. The “Amazonians” are told
repeatedly that they’re making history, and many seem to believe it.
Complaining co-workers are often dismissed as ingrates. (“if You
think Amazon is bad, try McDonalds you McBitches,” an online
commenter scolds.) One warehouse workmate, “Blair,” both frets
constantly about following the rules and aspires to beat the world
record for fastest picker. She hopes in this way to prove that humans
will always beat robots. As Guendelsberger observes, Blair resembles
John Henry, the mighty, tall-tale figure who raced against the new
steam drill, blasting through mountainside with only his
hammer—winning, but dying with his hammer in his hand.


The Steel-Driving Man—likely
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a black convict laborer, and a slight physical figure in reality—was
memorialized in what became one of the most popular
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twentieth century through the Great Depression. Around the country,
laborers kept pace with their machines, intoning, “I’ll die with
this hammer in my hand.” John Henry, threatened and ultimately
killed by the machine, yet still triumphant, became one of the most
potent symbols of workers’ explosive resistance to primitive
accumulation. His legend, as the historian Scott Reynolds Nelson shows
in his extraordinary book _Steel Drivin’ Man_, resonated across
sectors of the new proletariat that shared nothing but a common
hostility to the new order.


On the other hand, you may bet safely that Uber drivers, adjunct
professors, and home health aides will not pass away their own
toilsome hours by singing songs about Blair’s race with the
algorithm. Blair is doing what John Henry did, but the act’s meaning
is inverted: It signifies the power of the boss’s ideology, not its
rejection. She’s the perfect example of Fraser’s argument. 


Because Guendelsberger is herself a precarious journalism worker, she
has little trouble discovering and slipping into the currents of
solidarity that flow under the surface in almost all workplaces. Labor
in capitalism is nearly always, in some way, social. Subdivided over
and over by Taylor and those who came before and after him, capitalist
production requires that people work together. No matter how hard
management tries to keep them from getting to know and trust each
other, they always will, at least a little. “We’re all in this
together against the stopwatches and the sharks,” writes
Guendelsberger. (She deploys an extended shark metaphor at one point.)
“And we may be only human, but there’s a _whole lot of us_.” It
is this social aspect of labor that is the key to unlock the
ideological prison that Fraser describes. Guendelsberger concludes the
book with a prediction: “You’ll meet other people who think the
status quo is cruel and ridiculous—they’re
literally _everywhere_.… You’ll come to feel a bond with them
that’s stronger than friendship. You’ll become part of something
bigger than yourself—and weirdly, you’ll feel more in control of
your life than you have in years.”


 

Guendelsberger worked at Amazon during early winter. She writes of the
stress of the holiday season as a horrible speedup, a kind of waking
nightmare: She can’t control her tormented body, she’s bored,
stressed, and depressed all at once. But, it turns out, this isn’t
the only way to experience the busy season. With a week to go until
Christmas, she finds her way to a tent village where a group of
temporary workers are staying. They have mini-pizzas, and she brings
beer and some cookies. They tell Guendelsberger she’s got it all
wrong—she’s been working much too hard. You only need to make rate
if you’re trying to get promoted and stick around for a long time.
Explains one named Matthias, “They need us there more than they’re
paying us.” Testing the limits, he managed to take 48 extra minutes
off before lunch recently before they came and talked to him. He
points out, “‘The facility as a whole was already operating at 110
percent—at that point, what the hell does it
actually _matter_?’” Matthias says, “affecting a cheery,
brainwashed tone, ‘We’re _Making History_! _Exceeding
Expectations_!’”


A group of transient temps taking long breaks and mocking Jeff Bezos
around a campfire isn’t a revolution, but it’s not nothing either.
As Guendelsberger says, some version of this is, necessarily,
everywhere. On your own, it’s hard to know whether you really do
need to make rate, or what to do when someone throws mustard at you
and they say you started it. It’s easy to crack under this pressure:
Moloch is powerful and frightening. But the thing about false gods is
that they truly cannot abide being mocked, and there’s always
someone else who sees through it, too—more, in fact, every day. The
boss may have an all-seeing panopticon, but the prehistory of every
strike begins when one worker catches another’s eye.

Gabriel Winant is a historian, currently completing a book on care
work and deindustrialization.

 

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