THROUGHOUT MARY COLEMAN’S six years as a cook at a Popeyes restaurant in Milwaukee, she remained stuck at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. One afternoon, when she arrived for her shift after an hour-long bus commute, her manager told her to go home without even clocking in. Business was slow, he said, and she wasn’t going to be paid for the day.

For ten years, Keith Barrett worked as a behind-the-scenes software engineer at Disney World in Orlando, helping monitor computers that handled ticket sales and hotel reservations. One day, Barrett and 250 fellow tech workers were stunned to receive layoff notices—Disney was replacing them with guest workers from India on temporary work visas. Many of the laid-off workers grew even more upset when Disney told them they wouldn’t receive any severance unless they agreed to train their replacements.

Jamie Workman became pregnant while working as a CVS cashier in Rocklin, California, northeast of Sacramento. Her eight-hour shifts soon became tiring and painful because she had to stand the whole time; her feet and legs became swollen. At one point, her shift supervisor gave her a stool to sit on for a few hours, but then the store manager ordered her to stop using it, telling her that cashiers weren’t allowed to sit.

Most mornings Jorge Porras reported to his car-wash job in Santa Fe at 8:15 A.M., as instructed, but his boss often didn’t let him clock in until 11:00, sometimes not until noon, whenever customers began lining up. Many days his boss paid him for six hours of work, even though he had worked nine and a half. One day, when the heavy chain that pulled the cars forward got stuck, Porras tried fixing it, but the chain suddenly lurched forward and cut off the top of his right ring finger. That injury forced Porras to miss two weeks of work, during which he didn’t receive any wages or workers’ compensation. When he and several co-workers complained about the unpaid hours and unsafe conditions, the car-wash owner fired them.

Patricia Hughes, a licensed practical nurse, came down with severe pneumonia while caring for a paraplegic in Thornton, Colorado. Coughing, vomiting, and with a 103 fever, Hughes called her manager to say she needed to miss work for two days. “I told him I was so weak that there was no way I could care for and move the patient,” she said. “He responded, ‘If you don’t come in tomorrow, don’t bother ever coming back.’ ” Too sick to work the next day, Hughes was fired, and as a result of losing that job, she was evicted from her apartment.

John Billington, proud of his 4.9 rating as an Uber driver in Los Angeles, was shocked when Uber suddenly chopped its L.A. fares from $2.50 a mile to $1 a mile. As a result, his average weekly gross income fell from over $1,500 to around $750, and that’s before subtracting the cost of gas, auto insurance, maintenance, and depreciation on his car. “Uber dictates everything,” Billington said. “We don’t get any input. It’s unfair.”

After seventeen years of teaching, Laura Fox, an elementary school music teacher in a suburb of Phoenix, was having such a hard time making ends meet that she took a twenty-hour-a-week job at McDonald’s. Fox, whose school district hadn’t raised pay in a decade, often worked at McDonald’s until 11:30 p.m., arrived home around midnight, and woke up at 6:30 to get ready for school. “Some days I was exhausted,” she said. “I work to teach the people who are going to be the future of society. It makes me feel disrespected that they pay teachers so little.”

A week after graduating from college in North Carolina, Desmond Anthony moved to New York to pursue a career as an actor. To support himself, he took a job as a sales clerk and cashier at the Express clothing store in Herald Square. At first his boss assigned him thirty hours of work each week, but after several months his hours were cut to just twelve or fifteen, and some weeks he was assigned no hours at all. Working fifteen hours a week, Anthony earned around $500 a month, not enough to cover his $800 monthly rent, let alone the several hundred dollars more needed for phone, subway, and food. Some days he went hungry, and some weeks he had to ask his parents for money. Anthony repeatedly urged his boss to assign him more hours, but instead of giving him more hours, the store hired more part-time workers, giving it more flexibility to plug workers into its ever-changing schedule. Anthony quit in frustration.