Excerpt from On the Clock by Emily Guendelsberger, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

And 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. And people fortunate enough to have good jobs making policy or writing op-eds seem to have no idea how crippled a life with no escape from the weeds is. When was the last time you asked permission to go to the bathroom?

Would you panic over running two minutes late? Is it normal to be constantly monitored at work, to have everything you do timed by the second? When did you last wear a uniform, or have food thrown at you? When's the last time you sold something to pay a bill? Do you have to wait to be searched for stolen goods after you leave work? Have you ever considered DIY dental surgery? Have you gone to work sick because you can't afford to take unpaid time off ? Have you had to supply a doctor's note to prove you deserve that unpaid time off ? Have you recently overdrawn your checking account, or had all your credit cards declined, or put exactly ten bucks of gas in your car?

Nearly everyone with influence in this country, regardless of political affiliation, is incredibly insulated from how miserable and dehumanizing the daily experience of work has gotten over the past decade or two. Many have never had a service job. If I were to give my "in the weeds" poll to everyone with political clout — the donor class, lobbyists, politicians, aca- demics, think tankers, media people — I'd bet everything I own that only a few would know the waitress definition.**

Paul Ryan might be an exception. The former Speaker of the House often plays up the time he spent in food service as a young man, particularly the summer he worked at McDonald's, in 1986, as a high school sophomore.

"When I was flipping burgers at McDonald's, when I was standing in front of that big Hobart machine washing dishes, or waiting tables, I never thought of myself as stuck in some station in life," Ryan once told a crowd. "I thought to myself, I'm the American Dream."

But work has changed a lot since 1986. The insane technological advances of the past decades have turned time to lean and time to clean from subjective things determined by a human manager to objective quantities determined by computers that calculate, monitor, and min-max every second of workers' time on the clock.

A modern McDonald's job, for example, isn't the leisurely activity implied by "flipping burgers." Fast food today is intense. In McDonald's phonebook-size operations and training manual, every task has a target time in seconds, as in the assembly of a burger:

Target order display screen reaction time: 5 seconds.
Target toast time: 23 seconds.
Target sandwich assembly time: 22 seconds.
Target sandwich wrapping time: 14 seconds.
Target order assembly time: 16 seconds.

"Guests should wait no longer than 60 seconds from the time the order is being totaled until the order is presented," the manual advises, and the total time between a guest approaching the counter and receiving her food should never be more than three and a half minutes.

Until pretty recently, it was much too difficult to track and enforce guidelines this specific. Today, though, monitoring equipment integrated into the tools workers use to do their jobs can clock and track nearly any task a worker does in real time. And the street runs both ways— those same systems can be set to harass, nag, startle, or otherwise trigger a worker's stress response every time she lags behind the desired pace. (The next time you're in a busy McDonald's, for example, note the maddening, near-constant beeping of alarms.)

Or look at the copy in a sales brochure for HM Electronics, a major supplier of these sorts of micromonitoring computer business systems for McDonald's and other massive fast-food chains:

Excerpted from On the Clock by Emily Guendelsberger . Copyright © 2019 by Emily Guendelsberger . Excerpted by permission of Little Brown & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.