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165 reviews for:
On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane
Emily Guendelsberger
4.28 AVERAGE
165 reviews for:
On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane
Emily Guendelsberger
4.28 AVERAGE
4.5 stars
This sobering book immerses the reader in the day-to-day reality of working at some of America's most notoriously oppressive employers. Guendelsberger's tone is approachable (maybe too approachable...there's an awful lot of cursing, which doesn't necessarily bother me but it feels strange when juxtaposed with the long sections of academic research), which is appropriate for her undercover point of view. I think she does a decent job of acknowledging her privilege and contrasting her personal experiences with interviews of her fellow coworkers, none of whom are similarly privileged. So when she points out the very obvious fact that no worker deserves to be treated the way she was at Amazon, Convergys, and McDonald's, it doesn't feel like she's ignoring the similarly obvious fact that for many workers, there isn't a choice in the matter.
I was initially interested in reading this book because the synopsis brought to mind my years working in retail for a well-known women's clothing and home goods store, which shall remain nameless in this review :). After reading it, I now realize that what seemed like soul-crushing work to me could have been far worse. I at least had opportunities to talk to my coworkers and commiserate--or just remind ourselves of our non-work lives and what was really important. I had to deal with dreaded "clopening" shifts but I was at least nominally guaranteed the limit of an eight-hour workday (that wasn't always the case in practice). I suffered serious sleep deprivation off-and-on, but I had the relief of an hour-long lunch break. Small comforts I took for granted are out of reach for so many American workers. For hourly service workers, finding a job is largely an exercise in balancing trade-offs. And this isn't even to mention the added stress of customer-facing jobs, where any potential customer could be a "screamer"--as in, screaming at you for things that are often out of your control.
"So why is America so crazy? It's the inescapable chronic stress built into the way we work and live. It's the insane idea that an honest day's work means suppressing your humanity, dignity, family, and other non-work priorities in exchange for low wages that make home life constantly stressful too... our bodies believe that this is the apocalypse."
*clapping hands emoji*
This book really makes you think about not just what we think a day's hard work is worth, but what constitutes a reasonable day of work. Where do we draw the line? How did our standards change over the years and what were the driving factors behind those changes?
Some of the most interesting sections were about such drivers of change. Namely, Frederick Winslow Taylor, the "father of scientific management," and Henry Ford, the... well, you all know who Henry Ford is. It kept throwing me off that his Detroit factory was nicknamed Crystal Palace because that is also the name of a popular English football club. But I digress. The long story short is that these two men are responsible for a lot of the inhumane practices that have been modernized by companies like Amazon (with their Big Brother-esque scanner guns that time employee actions down to the second) and McDonalds (ditto the micromanaging of tasks by time, in their case with incessant beeping alarms that would drive any worker insane).
I also appreciated Guendelsberger's point at the very end of the book that the average American has a severe lack of political efficacy because a) they see that nothing ever improves for all but the most wealthy of Americans and b) politics is "covered like sports." She highlights the reality of daily work life vs. the economic indicators that paint a rosy picture in the media. And she's honest about some of the reasons that voters supported Trump (besides the obvious, which is racism, but we won't get into that now).
I do wish there had been some actual solutions presented in the conclusion of the book, but I appreciated the way she tied everything to our current political moment. And I guess awareness is half of the battle?
Though there were a few times where Guendelsberger belabored her point a little too long, overall I really liked this book and would recommend it to anyone interested in labor politics, economics, etc. I enjoyed listening to in on audiobook thanks to the fast pace and entertaining voice work (just wait for the examples of the western North Carolina accent!).
This sobering book immerses the reader in the day-to-day reality of working at some of America's most notoriously oppressive employers. Guendelsberger's tone is approachable (maybe too approachable...there's an awful lot of cursing, which doesn't necessarily bother me but it feels strange when juxtaposed with the long sections of academic research), which is appropriate for her undercover point of view. I think she does a decent job of acknowledging her privilege and contrasting her personal experiences with interviews of her fellow coworkers, none of whom are similarly privileged. So when she points out the very obvious fact that no worker deserves to be treated the way she was at Amazon, Convergys, and McDonald's, it doesn't feel like she's ignoring the similarly obvious fact that for many workers, there isn't a choice in the matter.
I was initially interested in reading this book because the synopsis brought to mind my years working in retail for a well-known women's clothing and home goods store, which shall remain nameless in this review :). After reading it, I now realize that what seemed like soul-crushing work to me could have been far worse. I at least had opportunities to talk to my coworkers and commiserate--or just remind ourselves of our non-work lives and what was really important. I had to deal with dreaded "clopening" shifts but I was at least nominally guaranteed the limit of an eight-hour workday (that wasn't always the case in practice). I suffered serious sleep deprivation off-and-on, but I had the relief of an hour-long lunch break. Small comforts I took for granted are out of reach for so many American workers. For hourly service workers, finding a job is largely an exercise in balancing trade-offs. And this isn't even to mention the added stress of customer-facing jobs, where any potential customer could be a "screamer"--as in, screaming at you for things that are often out of your control.
"So why is America so crazy? It's the inescapable chronic stress built into the way we work and live. It's the insane idea that an honest day's work means suppressing your humanity, dignity, family, and other non-work priorities in exchange for low wages that make home life constantly stressful too... our bodies believe that this is the apocalypse."
*clapping hands emoji*
This book really makes you think about not just what we think a day's hard work is worth, but what constitutes a reasonable day of work. Where do we draw the line? How did our standards change over the years and what were the driving factors behind those changes?
Some of the most interesting sections were about such drivers of change. Namely, Frederick Winslow Taylor, the "father of scientific management," and Henry Ford, the... well, you all know who Henry Ford is. It kept throwing me off that his Detroit factory was nicknamed Crystal Palace because that is also the name of a popular English football club. But I digress. The long story short is that these two men are responsible for a lot of the inhumane practices that have been modernized by companies like Amazon (with their Big Brother-esque scanner guns that time employee actions down to the second) and McDonalds (ditto the micromanaging of tasks by time, in their case with incessant beeping alarms that would drive any worker insane).
I also appreciated Guendelsberger's point at the very end of the book that the average American has a severe lack of political efficacy because a) they see that nothing ever improves for all but the most wealthy of Americans and b) politics is "covered like sports." She highlights the reality of daily work life vs. the economic indicators that paint a rosy picture in the media. And she's honest about some of the reasons that voters supported Trump (besides the obvious, which is racism, but we won't get into that now).
I do wish there had been some actual solutions presented in the conclusion of the book, but I appreciated the way she tied everything to our current political moment. And I guess awareness is half of the battle?
Though there were a few times where Guendelsberger belabored her point a little too long, overall I really liked this book and would recommend it to anyone interested in labor politics, economics, etc. I enjoyed listening to in on audiobook thanks to the fast pace and entertaining voice work (just wait for the examples of the western North Carolina accent!).
I liked reading her personal stories and she did give me some interesting things to think about. I got a little bored with some of the historical/scientific sidetracks.
Emily Guendelsberger opens her book with the question: What do you think of when you hear the phrase “in the weeds”? For most Americans who have never worked a low-wage job, “in the weeds” means getting lost in the little details, as in, “Don’t get stuck in the weeds on that essay, just focus on the high-level points.” But for those who have worked a low-wage job, “in the weeds” means something like “swamped,” as in, “I don’t have time to mop right now, I’m in the weeds with all these food orders.” I had never heard this latter definition, revealing my privilege, but Guendelsberger became familiar with it when she was in high school, working a variety of fast-food and service positions that many high schoolers do. After taking on the quest of re-entering modern-day low-wage work, Guendelsberger was reintroduced to this concept with a bang: she realized that many low-wage jobs nowadays force employees, among other less-than-ideal things, to be “in the weeds” for every second of their shift. No breaks, other than their legally-mandated ones, which even then, are minimized to as small as they can get. Productivity monitored down to the second. Constant competition and expectations of robotic efficiency. Accusations of wage theft for taking a moment’s rest. So it begins.
The author is a college-educated journalist who worked for a small paper in Philadelphia. The paper was forced to close in 2016, laying off all its workers. Guendelsberger needed a job and was interested in learning more about low-wage work for a potential book - so she decided to dive headfirst into three of the most common (and most commonly complained-about) low-wage jobs in the U.S. at the moment. She got a job working as a temporary contractor at SDF8, an Amazon warehouse in Kentucky, during the “peak” season of the 6 weeks before Christmas; she worked at an AT&T call center operated by Convergys in North Carolina; and she took a job at a McDonald’s in San Francisco. She stayed at each of these jobs for long enough to get a real feel of what it’s like to work there. She wasn’t doing it just for fun - she didn’t have a job and actually needed the money to pay for her mortgage and other living expenses. She does recognize, however, that she is much more privileged than many of the workers there - she knows that she can leave at any time and get a better-paying, less stressful job. This comes into play many, many times when she wonders how people do this, how workers live their lives in a constant state of being “in the weeds” or getting yelled at by customers or being so exhausted you pass out immediately after returning home. How do people raise families like this? How do people not explode with anger or frustration or high blood pressure? Among these questions, Guendelsberger learns a good few things about these three jobs, common across all of these different positions despite manifesting in various ways: \
1. Productivity and metrics. Each job implemented some form of technology to hyper-precisely track what the employee is doing during every second of the day (including your bathroom breaks), measure how long it’s taking compared to the (randomly chosen) desired target time, and punish employees who don’t meet these goals. At Amazon, each worker has a personal scanner with a bar counting down the number of seconds remaining to scan the next item. At Convergys, the target call time was 600 seconds, and workers would get angry warnings as that number approached. At McDonalds, machines beep angrily like the inside of a submarine when the customer’s wait time for an order exceeds the comically low target time. Your employment and possibility of incentives or promotion depend on these metrics, but they’re often not humanly possible. It’s essentially the employers working hard to make sure that you can be as close to a robot as possible, until they eventually replace you with a robot.
2. The Panopticon. As above, workers are diligent mainly because of the fear instilled during training. There’s always someone watching, whether it’s your GPS tracker in the scanner letting a “coach” know that you’ve been in the bathroom or sitting for too long, or your calls that are being recorded at the call center for “quality assurance purposes.” You can disobey the rules, but you live in constant fear of who’s watching.
3. Screamers. This wasn’t a problem at Amazon, but it certainly was a Convergys and McDonald’s. If you, like me, treat service workers with the most basic modicum of respect and dignity, you will be truly shocked and outraged at how truly awful some people are to call center or fast food employees. She recounts having things thrown at her and her fellow employees at McDonald’s, including burgers, mustard, and hot coffee. She recounts stories from ex-Convergys employees saying that the stress of being yelled at all day made them consider self-harm.
4. Being “in the weeds” constantly. See #1 to meet productivity goals. Companies also hire fewer staff than they need with the idea that if workers can cover for a fellow employee who is out sick with the flu, that means they’re not working as hard as they can the rest of the time. So, employers will staff only a skeleton crew, requiring them to be “in the weeds” all the time to meet customer demand. At McDonald’s, there was never not a line. Workers did not have a minute to rest, let alone breathe in between orders. Not only that, but a random assortment of tasks required a manager to take time out of being “in the weeds” to enter their PIN code for approval, and cashiers were responsible for fulfilling 60% of an order as well. I was extremely stressed listening to Guendelsberger’s description of the lunchtime rush, with the long line buzzing in anger and frustration, culminating in a very angry woman yelling and throwing food at her.
5. Physical and mental exhaustion. Guendelsberger said she would walk between 13 and 16 miles every day working at the massive mini-city of SDF8. Obviously, no breaks and no rest because of the scanner’s time clock and GPS, which can tell when you’re sitting in one place for too long. Instead of fixing these productivity expectations, Amazon just installed painkiller vending machines around the warehouse. On the other hand, working at Convergys tested the limited of Guendelsberger’s mental and emotional strength. Not only did she have to juggle about 12 different tasks while talking to a customer, including handling their problem, opening a smorgasbord of different applications and portals to do a variety of useless things, making a sales pitch, and praying that her caller didn’t become a “screamer,” but she had to do this all while on a clock, with a boss potentially listening in. Again, I was extremely stressed just listening to her metaphor of a “clown car” with 12 different clowns vying to be driver.
There are so many more terrible, soul-sucking lessons that Guendelsberger learned from her three low-wage positions, and she does a fantastic job at relaying these lessons in the book. The only reason I’m giving it 4 stars rather than 5 is that, paradoxically, I could have done without the pretty detailed anthropologic and labor history/sociology/theory she peppers in throughout. I was far, far more interested in her everyday experiences of living these jobs, reflecting on the other people in the same job who can’t escape, and her privilege of being able to leave. As low-wage, poor treatment jobs like these increase in the U.S., it’s so important to read about the experience of what it’s like on a daily basis to fully understand what the problem with these jobs are. Of course, there are areas to reform aplenty, but understanding the true pain points of employees in this situation is valuable to prioritize what hurts workers the most in the short and long term. Even with the better working conditions mandated in the Bay Area McDonald’s, Guendelsberger still had a rough go - because of the other “business improvements” McDonald’s implements that make it a tough job. I thoroughly enjoyed this read and highly recommend it to anyone interested in fair work and fair labor.
Update December 2020: I'm changing this review to five stars - because what makes a five-star book is one that I keep telling friends about, one that changes the way I think about something, or one that fills my tank with anecdotes and knowledge about a new topic. This book does exactly that.
The author is a college-educated journalist who worked for a small paper in Philadelphia. The paper was forced to close in 2016, laying off all its workers. Guendelsberger needed a job and was interested in learning more about low-wage work for a potential book - so she decided to dive headfirst into three of the most common (and most commonly complained-about) low-wage jobs in the U.S. at the moment. She got a job working as a temporary contractor at SDF8, an Amazon warehouse in Kentucky, during the “peak” season of the 6 weeks before Christmas; she worked at an AT&T call center operated by Convergys in North Carolina; and she took a job at a McDonald’s in San Francisco. She stayed at each of these jobs for long enough to get a real feel of what it’s like to work there. She wasn’t doing it just for fun - she didn’t have a job and actually needed the money to pay for her mortgage and other living expenses. She does recognize, however, that she is much more privileged than many of the workers there - she knows that she can leave at any time and get a better-paying, less stressful job. This comes into play many, many times when she wonders how people do this, how workers live their lives in a constant state of being “in the weeds” or getting yelled at by customers or being so exhausted you pass out immediately after returning home. How do people raise families like this? How do people not explode with anger or frustration or high blood pressure? Among these questions, Guendelsberger learns a good few things about these three jobs, common across all of these different positions despite manifesting in various ways: \
1. Productivity and metrics. Each job implemented some form of technology to hyper-precisely track what the employee is doing during every second of the day (including your bathroom breaks), measure how long it’s taking compared to the (randomly chosen) desired target time, and punish employees who don’t meet these goals. At Amazon, each worker has a personal scanner with a bar counting down the number of seconds remaining to scan the next item. At Convergys, the target call time was 600 seconds, and workers would get angry warnings as that number approached. At McDonalds, machines beep angrily like the inside of a submarine when the customer’s wait time for an order exceeds the comically low target time. Your employment and possibility of incentives or promotion depend on these metrics, but they’re often not humanly possible. It’s essentially the employers working hard to make sure that you can be as close to a robot as possible, until they eventually replace you with a robot.
2. The Panopticon. As above, workers are diligent mainly because of the fear instilled during training. There’s always someone watching, whether it’s your GPS tracker in the scanner letting a “coach” know that you’ve been in the bathroom or sitting for too long, or your calls that are being recorded at the call center for “quality assurance purposes.” You can disobey the rules, but you live in constant fear of who’s watching.
3. Screamers. This wasn’t a problem at Amazon, but it certainly was a Convergys and McDonald’s. If you, like me, treat service workers with the most basic modicum of respect and dignity, you will be truly shocked and outraged at how truly awful some people are to call center or fast food employees. She recounts having things thrown at her and her fellow employees at McDonald’s, including burgers, mustard, and hot coffee. She recounts stories from ex-Convergys employees saying that the stress of being yelled at all day made them consider self-harm.
4. Being “in the weeds” constantly. See #1 to meet productivity goals. Companies also hire fewer staff than they need with the idea that if workers can cover for a fellow employee who is out sick with the flu, that means they’re not working as hard as they can the rest of the time. So, employers will staff only a skeleton crew, requiring them to be “in the weeds” all the time to meet customer demand. At McDonald’s, there was never not a line. Workers did not have a minute to rest, let alone breathe in between orders. Not only that, but a random assortment of tasks required a manager to take time out of being “in the weeds” to enter their PIN code for approval, and cashiers were responsible for fulfilling 60% of an order as well. I was extremely stressed listening to Guendelsberger’s description of the lunchtime rush, with the long line buzzing in anger and frustration, culminating in a very angry woman yelling and throwing food at her.
5. Physical and mental exhaustion. Guendelsberger said she would walk between 13 and 16 miles every day working at the massive mini-city of SDF8. Obviously, no breaks and no rest because of the scanner’s time clock and GPS, which can tell when you’re sitting in one place for too long. Instead of fixing these productivity expectations, Amazon just installed painkiller vending machines around the warehouse. On the other hand, working at Convergys tested the limited of Guendelsberger’s mental and emotional strength. Not only did she have to juggle about 12 different tasks while talking to a customer, including handling their problem, opening a smorgasbord of different applications and portals to do a variety of useless things, making a sales pitch, and praying that her caller didn’t become a “screamer,” but she had to do this all while on a clock, with a boss potentially listening in. Again, I was extremely stressed just listening to her metaphor of a “clown car” with 12 different clowns vying to be driver.
There are so many more terrible, soul-sucking lessons that Guendelsberger learned from her three low-wage positions, and she does a fantastic job at relaying these lessons in the book. The only reason I’m giving it 4 stars rather than 5 is that, paradoxically, I could have done without the pretty detailed anthropologic and labor history/sociology/theory she peppers in throughout. I was far, far more interested in her everyday experiences of living these jobs, reflecting on the other people in the same job who can’t escape, and her privilege of being able to leave. As low-wage, poor treatment jobs like these increase in the U.S., it’s so important to read about the experience of what it’s like on a daily basis to fully understand what the problem with these jobs are. Of course, there are areas to reform aplenty, but understanding the true pain points of employees in this situation is valuable to prioritize what hurts workers the most in the short and long term. Even with the better working conditions mandated in the Bay Area McDonald’s, Guendelsberger still had a rough go - because of the other “business improvements” McDonald’s implements that make it a tough job. I thoroughly enjoyed this read and highly recommend it to anyone interested in fair work and fair labor.
Update December 2020: I'm changing this review to five stars - because what makes a five-star book is one that I keep telling friends about, one that changes the way I think about something, or one that fills my tank with anecdotes and knowledge about a new topic. This book does exactly that.
Loved this book. It should be required reading - wish a newspaper would serialize it. I look forward to more books by this author.
Listen up. Next time you need to talk to a customer rep to dispute a billing charge, inquire about a change in service, or just complain about a lack of good service, chances are you are chatting with someone in a call center who is not at all associated with the company you are doing business with. One of the important lessons I learned from this book is to never ever get mad at a customer rep again unless they are rude.
OK, so now that's off my chest, here is what I thought about this book: I was captivated. Ever since Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickel and Dimed," I have been fascinated with the inner workings of just about any industry or job. I've read in-depth reports about hotels, restaurants, the sugar beet industry, Walmart associates, Applebee's expediters, and those who deliver all of those packages via UPS.
So I was excited to read about this journalist's report on working for Amazon (it's horrible on the body), a call center (she worked with AT&T customers and it is as bad as it sounds), and a busy McDonald's in the heart of San Francisco (there's a reason the restaurants always seemed short-staffed). Guendelsberger reports on the tasks, working conditions, co-workers, and management, and there is no detail too small for her to ignore. She also incorporates a bit of labor history and even some evolutionary science on stress and the body.
There were a few times I thought passages could have used a little more editing but I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this anyone interested in today's working conditions for many of the hardworking people in the U.S.
For other similar books, try Jessica Bruder's [b:Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century|38212124|Nomadland Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century|Jessica Bruder|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1519083205l/38212124._SY75_.jpg|55079091], Alex Frankel's [b:Punching In: The Unauthorized Adventures of a Front-Line Employee|1340242|Punching In The Unauthorized Adventures of a Front-Line Employee|Alex Frankel|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1266777265l/1340242._SY75_.jpg|1329814], and [b:Heads in Beds: A Reckless Memoir of Hotels, Hustles, and So-Called Hospitality|13331184|Heads in Beds A Reckless Memoir of Hotels, Hustles, and So-Called Hospitality|Jacob Tomsky|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348186171l/13331184._SY75_.jpg|18538886].
[Personal note: In the first chapter, the author talks about the term "in the weeds," which means being so far behind nothing can be done to catch up. That really resonated as I still have the occasional nightmare about my experiences as a server.]
Thanks to the publisher for the advance digital reading copy.
OK, so now that's off my chest, here is what I thought about this book: I was captivated. Ever since Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickel and Dimed," I have been fascinated with the inner workings of just about any industry or job. I've read in-depth reports about hotels, restaurants, the sugar beet industry, Walmart associates, Applebee's expediters, and those who deliver all of those packages via UPS.
So I was excited to read about this journalist's report on working for Amazon (it's horrible on the body), a call center (she worked with AT&T customers and it is as bad as it sounds), and a busy McDonald's in the heart of San Francisco (there's a reason the restaurants always seemed short-staffed). Guendelsberger reports on the tasks, working conditions, co-workers, and management, and there is no detail too small for her to ignore. She also incorporates a bit of labor history and even some evolutionary science on stress and the body.
There were a few times I thought passages could have used a little more editing but I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this anyone interested in today's working conditions for many of the hardworking people in the U.S.
For other similar books, try Jessica Bruder's [b:Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century|38212124|Nomadland Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century|Jessica Bruder|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1519083205l/38212124._SY75_.jpg|55079091], Alex Frankel's [b:Punching In: The Unauthorized Adventures of a Front-Line Employee|1340242|Punching In The Unauthorized Adventures of a Front-Line Employee|Alex Frankel|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1266777265l/1340242._SY75_.jpg|1329814], and [b:Heads in Beds: A Reckless Memoir of Hotels, Hustles, and So-Called Hospitality|13331184|Heads in Beds A Reckless Memoir of Hotels, Hustles, and So-Called Hospitality|Jacob Tomsky|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348186171l/13331184._SY75_.jpg|18538886].
[Personal note: In the first chapter, the author talks about the term "in the weeds," which means being so far behind nothing can be done to catch up. That really resonated as I still have the occasional nightmare about my experiences as a server.]
Thanks to the publisher for the advance digital reading copy.
As a former (shamefully low-paid) food service worker, I found this book as much triggering as it was validating. Reading this has been part of a long process of overcoming some pretty profound (diagnosed) ptsd as a result. Well written and well supported, the author’s point is clear: low wage work is quite literally driving America insane.
See here for my full review of this book:
https://businessbookreviewer.com/2019/08/26/review-on-the-clock/
https://businessbookreviewer.com/2019/08/26/review-on-the-clock/
informative
lighthearted
reflective
fast-paced
This book was hard to read and the reality of these low wage jobs is even harder to accept. The physical toll of working at an Amazon warehouse seemed like a pretty horrible experience until the description of the work and expectations of Convergys came to light. The best of the three experiences seems to be McDonalds, but even the pace and scheduling there created the isolation inherent in all three of these jobs.
The three examples all have a few things in common: the expectation of robot like efficiency, mental and physical exhaustion, isolation, unpredictability, and little to no control of the situation. These all contribute to the constantly high stress of the workers, which then leads to depression and real medical conditions.
Guendelsberger concludes the book by making a pretty strong connection between these working conditions and the desire to make America great again. She provides an excellent explanation as to why folks would vote for anyone showing a bit of understanding of their plight and the need for change, particularly when the opposing candidate is saying America has always been great and seemingly promoting a continuation of the status quo.
The three examples all have a few things in common: the expectation of robot like efficiency, mental and physical exhaustion, isolation, unpredictability, and little to no control of the situation. These all contribute to the constantly high stress of the workers, which then leads to depression and real medical conditions.
Guendelsberger concludes the book by making a pretty strong connection between these working conditions and the desire to make America great again. She provides an excellent explanation as to why folks would vote for anyone showing a bit of understanding of their plight and the need for change, particularly when the opposing candidate is saying America has always been great and seemingly promoting a continuation of the status quo.