When Clara calls to tell Lucy that she’s been hired for some jobs, for which she’ll be paid exorbitantly, she cautions Lucy not to treat the income as stable. “Think of it as a windfall,” Clara says. “Pay off some student loans.”

There’s a remarkably open acknowledgment here that Lucy is in debt to a third party. The modern labor relation is not supposed to include employees’ consumer debt; whether they have credit cards is not the boss’s concern. A worker’s indebtedness is supposed to come up as a source of employer leverage only in shady criminal dealings when it’s owed to the boss: drugs and immigrant smuggling, or in the sharecropping fields and company towns we learn about in history class. But with student debt so prevalent, young workers are assumed (known) to have loans they’re compelled to pay, making them even more vulnerable on the market.