WOLFF: Your descriptions of the kinds of work environment: the monitoring of every moment,
a kind of Taylorism that we used to read about gone mad with modern technology
really makes the case that people are driven out of any kind of normal or natural
rhythm of life into becoming a robot. I remember the thought going through my mind
as I read your chapters that the really remarkable thing about modern America
isn't how we are making robots more like people. Your book explains we're doing the opposite.
We're making people more and more like a machine, like a robot as if they had no humanity, no
complexity. Is this image of things like fast food joints or Amazon type businesses or call
centers and so forth, are we looking at the future of American work? Is this the model
that now every other business will follow, this rigid routinizing of work?
GUENDELSBERGER: I think so. I tend to see capitalism as kind of a vector,
and the vector is certainly pointing in that direction. It's just like Walmart was in the 90's,
and everybody had to adopt the way that Walmart treated its workforce in order to be able to
compete. That's sort of how they were able to keep prices down, and it involved a lot of technology
that was new at the time like these computer systems that were able to track productivity
minute by minute and second by second. I think even listeners with white collar jobs probably
have started seeing this intruding on their own workplaces as these technologies become able to
metricize more and more complicated tasks. Right now it's being applied. Ask your doctor the next
time you're in for a checkup how metrics affect their job. Ask any lawyers. So, they are dealing
with kind of the same stuff that fast food employees are in that everything is timed,
and people are always looking at you but the pay for fast food workers is obviously much worse,
and also fast food workers never get to speak in the media generally. So, yeah I do think that
this is the way everything's gonna go. It seems like in the history of revolution or whatnot,
people generally need to be hungry or in some sort of terrible circumstance to really want to risk
something. And America is not really hungry, but I do think that the way that these things
have developed, the constant stress metrics that put people into a state of mind that is
somewhat similar to hunger and the desperation that drive people to rise up and actually do
something, feel like trying to do something that's difficult will be superior to just sticking with
whatever stable thing that they have regardless of how much it sucks. So, I'm hoping right?
WOLFF: Me too, but I do begin to see more and more signs. I opened today's program
celebrating the students at Grinnell College in Iowa who just voted 327 to six
to unionize all hourly student workers.
They now have their own union. It's the first college in the United States to achieve this.
GUENDELSBERGER: Wow, good for them.
WOLFF: Yeah, and if we had them here, I think many of them would testify
that they either have worked in the kinds of places you described already,
or they know friends or boyfriends girlfriends relatives who have. And they are in fact reacting
the way you say with that parallel. it isn't the hunger. It isn't the next sandwich they have for
lunch that's missing, but it's a sense of what they're going to do with their lives
that has been constricted to a point where they are almost suffocating in a mental sense.