“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 seen you do this, and you better not do it again!’”

“Holy shit!” I say, curious. “Like, what sort of stuff?”

“Like…” Kolbi thinks, then laughs. “Oh, I got a good one—we weren’t allowed to use cups. We can give customers free waters of any size cup, but us, ourselves, we weren’t allowed to use cups—not even for water, not for anything. We had to bring our own cups. So if he’d see someone with a cup, he’ll come, and he’ll get you for it. He fired a person over that.”

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 his station. It was impossible to hide any deviation from the pace of work. And since management controlled the speed of the chain, workers lost any remaining control they had over that pace.

Productivity skyrocketed. In seven months, the time it took to produce a Model T fell from twelve and a half hours to an astonishing ninety-three minutes. That year, Ford made more Model Ts than all its competitors put together. By its high point, in 1925, the Crystal Palace churned out nine thousand Model Ts a day.

But workers hated it there.

One former Highland Park worker described his time there as “a form of hell on earth that turned human beings into driven robots.” Another: “[Ford] attempts to standardize the machines, and so he does with labor.” The wife of another worker was so concerned she actually wrote Ford a letter: “The chain system you have is a slave driver! My God! Mr. Ford. My husband has come home & thrown himself down & won’t eat his supper—so done out! Can’t it be remedied?”

Workers hated the assembly line for more than just the physical demands, though. It’s tough to take pride in a job that “a child of three” might do. And tasks were broken down so minutely that, as Ford wrote, “the man who puts in a bolt does not put on the nut; the man who puts on the nut does not tighten it.” Workmen found tightening the same kind of nut a thousand times a day brutally boring.

But Ford didn’t take their complaints very seriously. Despite all evidence to the contrary, he appeared to believe that workers didn’t actually mind jobs that were monotonous, unrewarding, and physically exhausting. He wouldn’t want that sort of thing himself, of course, but he saw himself as practically a different species than the oxlike laborers on his lines:

Repetitive labour—the doing of one thing over and over again and always in the same way—is a terrifying prospect to a certain kind of mind. It is terrifying to me. I could not possibly do the same thing day in and day out, but to other minds, perhaps I might say to the majority of minds, repetitive operations hold no terrors.

“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 more than thirty seconds—finish up something complicated from the previous call, use the bathroom, yoga-breathe yourself back from the brink of tears—you have to completely log out. This is extremely forbidden, but I still do it a lot. I don’t really have any other option—I just can’t keep up with the pace yet, no matter how hard I try.

Toggling, Vicki says, is time theft. She glares around the room fiercely. I’m relieved I’m not the only one who looks guilty.

“It is considered stealing from the company,” Vicki says. She has that weird Convergys accent, too, layered over a thicker Carolina one. “That is why you see a clipboard beside me—at the end of the day, I go through the Melody reports, and I correct ’em.”

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 my rearview mirror, and the only thing I can think is I get to leave.

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.