(I used my real name and job history when applying, and was hired nonetheless.)Įven having done a lot of research, I was shocked by how much more stressful low-wage work had become in the decade I’ve been working as a journalist. When my newspaper closed a few months later, I decided to try working three jobs that serve as good examples of how technology will be used at work in the future - in an Amazon warehouse, at a call center, and at a McDonald’s - with the vague idea of writing a book about what had changed.
UNKILLED HAMBURGER DRIVERS
But I was curious, especially after driving for Uber for a couple of months for an investigative piece fact-checking the claim that full-time drivers could expect to make $90,000 a year. I hadn’t had a service job in a while either. By definition, that’s most everybody with power in this country.Įven former House Speaker Paul Ryan, who has often played up the summer he spent “flipping burgers” at McDonald’s as a teenager, seems not to realize that it’s much more difficult to work fast food in 2019 than it was in 1986.
It can be hard to understand the stress of having someone constantly looking over your shoulder if you haven’t recently - or have never - had to work a job like this. These technologies are also getting more powerful, and that makes a lot of people’s lives inescapably, chronically stressful. Often overlooked is how those same technological advances have made it possible to control and monitor unskilled worker productivity down to the second. Perhaps it’s because as technology progresses, it tends to make life easier for the top of the labor market - those skilled, educated workers with decent salaries and benefits. We don’t put nearly as much time and energy into exploring the stress of unskilled, low-wage service work - even though the jobs most Americans actually work could be mistaken for Pits of Despair. The media mostly discusses job stress in the context of white-collar, educated professionals. Then take notes as they gradually lose interest in being alive. One neuroscientist actually nicknamed his apparatus the Pit of Despair.īut they’re all variations on the same theme: remove all predictability and control from the animal’s life. The most reliable protocol is “chronic mild stress.” There are many methods of making the lives of experimental animals mildly but chronically miserable - a cage floor that administers random electric shocks a deep swimming pool with no way to rest or climb out a stronger “intruder” introduced into the same cage. It turns out you don’t need to traumatize them. So to test your new antidepressant, you need an efficient method of making a lot of rats exhibit anhedonia - that is, making them lose interest in things they used to enjoy, like sugar. But the drugs used to treat depression in humans are developed and tested using rodents.) Actually being depressed is exclusive to humans.
UNKILLED HAMBURGER HOW TO
(Okay, you can’t technically make a rat “depressed” - a scientist would ask how to “create a model of depression” in rats. If you had to make a rat depressed, how do you think you’d go about it?