Activity

At $14 an hour, I’m paid almost twice as much as the average McDonald’s crew member—in November of 2014, voters overwhelmingly passed a ballot measure that would gradually raise San Francisco’s minimum wage to $15. San Francisco has universal paid sick leave, and the biggest retail and fast-food co…

I get to leave, I think as I drive past the Baymont Suites. I get to leave, I think, driving past the Walmart, YMCA, and Barnes & Noble. I get to leave, I think, driving past the Chick-fil-A, Hickory Furniture Mart, and all the abandoned factories along the interstate. They all shrink to nothing in…

“Toggling” means briefly logging out of your phone, then logging back in again. There’s no Pause button—we have as much power over our next call coming in as a Ford worker would have over the next auto part rolling down the assembly line. If you need to do something between calls that will take mor…

By suspending the auto parts to be worked on from a chain that moved the parts down a line of stationary workers, there was no need for the constant individual managerial oversight of Taylorism. It was visually obvious when someone wasn’t keeping up, because unfinished pieces started building up at…

“The new guy put cameras legit everywhere. We called him Big Brother for the longest, ’cause he’s always watching. He can even access it from his phone, so he can watch us, like, while he’s at home in bed—and if he sees something he doesn’t like, he’ll rush in from forty minutes away to say, ‘I see…