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 companies can’t schedule their San Francisco employees the way companies do most everywhere else. It’s an attempt to disincentivize common practices like (A) employing a large staff of part-timers or temps instead of a smaller staff of full-timers to avoid paying for benefits and (B) scheduling in a way that’s nice and flexible for the company but leaves workers unable to plan their lives more than a couple of days in advance.

You clock in by scanning your fingerprint, and, as at Amazon, the system won’t let you clock in before the exact time on your schedule. So for a few minutes, the small area between the fry bin and the smoothie machine is crowded with several people about to start their shifts. Behind them, someone drops the day’s first basket of fries into the deep fryer with a sizzle.

As usual, I spend my last couple minutes of lunch killing time by the smoothie machine. The system won’t clock me back in until I’ve had my full thirty minutes, but I always try to be back and ready to clock in a couple of minutes early, because I will get yelled at for being one minute late. I wish I could tell this to the people in line, who stare at my apparent idleness resentfully as I wait to press my finger to the square.

It’s silly to feel guilty over being a minute late, especially when between a third and half of my lunch break is spent navigating the kitchen, washing my hands, getting my purse, navigating the kitchen again, paying for my shift meal, navigating the kitchen again, putting my purse away, washing my hands, navigating the kitchen one last time, and waiting around to clock back in. Plus, I’m legitimately working my ass off at an in-the-weeds pace almost every single minute of my eight-hour shift.

The entrance to the nearby BART stop is crowded with a dozen homeless people, so many that it’s actually hard to get down the stairs. None of them bothers asking me for money, because, as I’ve been fascinated to discover, my McDonald’s uniform is like an invisibility cloak when it comes to panhandlers. The whole time I work here, exactly one guy hits me up while I’m in uniform—and I don’t really count him, because his “Hey, spare a cheeseburger?” was clearly meant to make me laugh.

In the free-market theory of economics, everything is naturally drawn to a mutually beneficial equilibrium as if by gravity. Workers unhappy with their pay or working conditions will find a new job. Customers unhappy with their cell phone provider’s pricing or customer service will switch to another provider. An employer who wants to stay in business will raise wages or improve conditions if she’s losing too many workers, and cut prices or invest in better service if she’s losing too many customers. It’s all very clean and elegant.

Supporters of this idea could point to Henry Ford’s Crystal Palace as evidence. When we left Ford, he was trying to solve the horrendous turnover problem caused by his debut of the assembly line in 1913—workers were so miserable that he couldn’t keep the Crystal Palace staffed, and it was crippling production. So in 1914, Ford announced the famous five-dollar day—a raise in wages to nearly twice what you could make elsewhere in Detroit.

There’s a lot of mythology about why he did this; anything attributing it to Ford being a nice guy or something is pure bullshit. Know this: Ford had to offer five dollars a day to make it worthwhile to put up with the miserable conditions of the Crystal Palace.

But the markets worked—Ford’s turnover problem vanished. Other factories around Detroit—and soon the rest of the country—had to raise wages to compete for the best workers. A comfortable middle class started to form. The free market worked.

Today, corporations have weighed the costs of high turnover against the costs of making the experience of work less miserable, and, because workers and customers are both kind of stuck with them, they choose bad service, terrible work conditions, and high turnover. It’s not because it’s some law of nature—it’s like this because the unskilled labor pool can’t vote with their feet when everywhere sucks.

[...] After Mustard Lady, some part of me finally accepts that you need walls between you and the customers to survive here, and I start building them. I still do everything I’m supposed to, of course. I just… stop caring. Caring makes you vulnerable.

It’s actually hard to break the habit at first. But going the extra mile just doesn’t make sense. The extra energy it takes for me to do a very good job benefits the customers, our franchise owner, and the McDonald’s brand—and I get nothing but exhaustion in return. Good-faith effort is just too complicated to measure, and therefore doesn’t exist to the fingerprint time clock and staffing algorithms. Even if I were gunning for a promotion, managers barely earn more than crew members. The only reward is in owning a franchise, not It’s actually hard to break the habit at first. But going the extra mile just doesn’t make sense. The extra energy it takes for me to do a very good job benefits the customers, our franchise owner, and the McDonald’s brand—and I get nothing but exhaustion in return. Good-faith effort is just too complicated to measure, and therefore doesn’t exist to the fingerprint time clock and staffing algorithms. Even if I were gunning for a promotion, managers barely earn more than crew members. The only reward is in owning a franchise, not working at one.

[...]

But empathy is a two-sided coin. The shield protects me from screamers, but it also appears to filter out any satisfaction I used to get from making people happy. Without that, and without much opportunity to form friendships with coworkers, my shifts become hour after hour of mechanical movement at top speed, saying the same words and performing the same motions over and over and over. I start really dreading my shifts.

[...] There’s actually lots of ways to “infect” a rat with depression, though some are more efficient than others. A frequently cited 1992 paper reviewing the best methods concludes that you don’t actually want to traumatize or terrify your rats, like Selye accidentally did. The closest approximation of the depression that plagues modern humans can be achieved by bombarding lab rats with mild but chronic, random, and inescapable stress. You don’t have to terrify them—just remove predictability and control from their lives, and they’ll eventually lose interest in pleasurable things. When they do, you’re ready to test whether your experimental antidepressant will get them interested again.

The whisper comes from whatever it is inside me that gets angry when things are unfair, and thinks it’s possible to change things for the better. It’s what briefly hijacked my body to scream “HEY, FUCK YOU, LADY!” It’s the part of me that likes to help people, and can be hurt by them. It’s what makes me able to experience pleasure and fury—the exact part that went missing during my gray years of depression. It’s the idea that the world can be better. It’s the expectation that the world should be better.

I’d be a better employee without this little voice. If I hadn’t graduated from a good college, or had been born below the middle class, or had children very young, I’d probably have spent the last decade and a half struggling to sandpaper this troublemaking part of myself down to nothing.

I don’t know if it’s crazy-guy germs or just bad luck, but a couple of days later I come down with a nasty cold/flu and have to call out of a few shifts. Candela is less than pleased, but because this is San Francisco, I can call out sick without fear of losing my job. If I’d been working there a little longer, I’d even have been able to call out sick without losing the day’s wages.* But the next schedule after I call out sick, I only get fifteen hours instead of my usual thirty to thirty-five.

Cutting someone’s hours is a common punishment in fast food and retail—and the subject of an important class-action suit currently in the works against McDonald’s. In 2014, the National Labor Relations Board brought seventy-eight charges against McDonald’s and some of its franchise operators for punishing workers who’d participated in Fight for $15 protests by, among other things, cutting their hours.

That puts me in good company. According to a 2015 survey of thousands of US fast-food workers by the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, 79 percent had been burned on the job in the previous year—most more than once. And not everyone got off as easily as I did.

“My managers kept pushing me to work faster, and while trying to meet their demands I slipped on a wet floor, catching my arm on a hot grill,” said Brittney Berry, whose forearm was severely burned, to the point of nerve damage, at the Chicago McDonald’s where she worked. “The managers told me to put mustard on it, but I ended up having to get rushed to the hospital in an ambulance.” A third of fast-food workers surveyed had been told to treat burns with condiments like mustard or mayonnaise.

“One of my coworkers and I have to empty the grease trap without protective gear, and since we were never given the proper equipment or training, we just dump the hot grease into a plastic bag in a box of ice,” said Martisse Campbell, who works at a McDonald’s in Philly and whose hand was severely burned by boiling grease from a fryer. He was also familiar with condiment-as-salve suggestions—“Once, my coworker got badly burned, and our manager told him, ‘Put mayonnaise on it; you’ll be good.’”