By Rebecca Stoner, Pacific Standard, July 15, 2019.
According to labor historian E.P. Thompson, pre-industrial societies measured time by task and season. "In Madagascar time might be measured by 'a rice-cooking' (about half an hour) or 'the frying of a locust' (a moment)," Thompson writes. In 15th-century England, people spoke of a pater noster wyle, the minute or so required to recite the Lord's Prayer.
With the advent of wage labor, time became money, and was therefore regimented, standardized, and monitored by employers. Two recent books—Emily Guendelsberger's On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives American Insane and Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy—explore how we experience time today, as our labor and leisure hours are increasingly minced into monetized pieces.
Guendelsberger's account is drawn from her year-long stint at three archetypal low-wage workplaces: an Amazon "fulfillment center," a call center, and a McDonald's. Like the rest of her co-workers, Guendelsberger spends her days "in the weeds"—a phrase she uses to describe the experience of workers who labor as hard as they can for every minute of a shift.
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