MONGREL FIREBUGS AND MEN OF PROPERTY: CAPITALISM AND CLASS CONFLICT IN AMERICAN HISTORY by Steve Fraser Verso, 272 pp., $24.95

What Guendelsberger found in her experiment was that employers now “demand a workforce that can think, talk, feel, and pick stuff up like humans—but with as few needs outside of work as robots. They insist their workers amputate the messy human bits of themselves—family, hunger, thirst, emotions, the need to make rent, sickness, fatigue, boredom, depression, traffic.” The results are “cyborg jobs,” and they account, by Guendelsberger’s reckoning, for almost half of the American workforce. The hidden moments of reclaimed freedom that make any job bearable are being discovered and wiped out by bosses everywhere: That trick you used to use to slow down the machine won’t work anymore; or that window of 23 minutes when you knew your boss couldn’t watch you is vanishing. Whatever little piece of humanity survived in these fragments dies with them.

In her first job, at an Amazon “fulfillment center,” Guendelsberger finds a regime that is Taylor’s “vision incarnate.” (One co-worker, sensing Taylor’s ghost, theorizes that Amazon is “a sociological experiment on how far a corporation can push people.”) Guendelsberger, a “picker,” is made to carry on her waist a scanner gun, which monitors her location, tells her the precise item among the hundreds of thousands in the warehouse that she is to go pluck from the shelves, its location, and how much time she has to do it. A sliding bar counts down as seconds go by, haranguing her. When she’s identified the shelf in the vast facility, dug through the bin, and scanned the item, the next one appears right away.

While Amazon warehouses—generally in the ruins of economically depressed cities—often offer better wages than whatever else is around, it’s the time-discipline that kills you. The job is extremely monotonous. (To cope, Guendelsberger sews earbuds into her cap in violation of company policy.) When it’s time for breaks, it takes her so long to reach the exit of the massive warehouse that she must almost immediately turn around and go back to work. On top of the stress, it’s physically painful. The company’s time-off policy, she observes, is literally worse than Scrooge’s in A Christmas Carol. Amazon dispenses free painkillers to workers, and Guendelsberger quickly loses track of how many she is taking. At one point, as she squats down to retrieve an item from a low shelf, her body “mutinies,” she writes. “Stand up, I order my legs for the hundredth time today, but it’s as if they’ve gotten fed up with all the abuse and hung up on my brain. Stand up, you idiot, my brain screams as I slowly topple backwards into a sitting position.” Another worker complains, “My feet are, like, mincemeat. I used to walk twenty miles a day with a backpack on and not change my socks, and they never looked as fucked up as they are now.”

The other jobs more or less go this way, too. At the call center, Convergys, Guendelsberger learns she is the human shield between the frustrated customer and the disdainful, predatory company. (And it turns out you can get MRSA at your workstation if you’re not careful.) At this job, the staff are required to try to push sales on callers throughout the interaction, although customers have generally picked up the phone to try to solve a problem with a cable bill. The aggravated callers take it out on the workers, who must multitask among dysfunctional, incompatible computer systems while empathizing and upselling. Guendelsberger begins imagining herself as multiple personalities: Helper Emily, Sales Emily, Protocol Emily, Scribe Emily, Conversation Emily, Short-Term Memory Emily, Awareness Emily, Journalist Emily, and Boss Emily—who has to monitor all the other ones. “Her job sucks.” Her worst call comes from another call-center worker, using her own lunch break as her only opportunity to try to sort out some service problem.