78 THENEWYORKER, AUGUST 26, 2019
the Twenty Thousand. At the time, there
was little to stop bosses from dialling
clocks back to steal time, or from charging
employees for the water they drank, but
the women won holidays, raises, a shorter
workweek, and, at many factories, the
recognition of their union, the Interna-
tional Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union.
Among the holdouts was the Triangle
Waist Company, which had a factory near
Washington Square. In 1911, a bin of cot-
ton scraps there caught fire, and a hun-
dred and forty-six workers died, most of
them women and almost half of them
teen-agers, trapped because an exit door
had been locked to prevent pilfering and
unauthorized breaks.
One witness to the disaster was Fran-
ces Perkins, the head of the New York
Consumers League, whose job involved
lobbying against fire hazards, child labor,
and overlong hours. “People who had
their clothes afire would jump,” she later
recalled. Outrage about the fire inspired
a reform movement, and Perkins pushed
New York legislators to institute a new
fire code. By the time Roosevelt was
elected governor of New York, in 1928,
Perkins was chairing a board that over-
saw industrial safety in the state. After
the stock market crashed, in 1929, she
urged Roosevelt to set up a public-works
program, unemployment insurance, and
a workers’-compensation program—
and he did. When he rose to the White
House, a few years later, Roosevelt in-
vited her to be Secretary of Labor; Per-
kins was the first woman ever named to
a Cabinet position. Before accepting, she
warned him that she expected the same
programs for the whole nation, plus a
federal minimum wage, a shorter work-
day, and pensions.
Does Perkins belong in a history of
unions? Greenhouse devotes most of a
chapter to her, but she wasn’t a union per-
son. Indeed, union leaders objected to her
getting the country’s top labor post, and
she herself admitted, “I’d much rather get
a law than organize a union.” But per-
haps the story of America’s unions can’t
be told in isolation from larger stories of
politics and governance. The General
Motors strike in the thirties probably
wouldn’t have prevailed if Roosevelt
hadn’t been President, and it might not
have even happened without the Wagner
Act, which secured the right to unionize
and barred employers from firing, black-
listing, or spying on workers who orga-
nized. When G.M.’s chairman reneged
on a promise to negotiate with the strik-
ers, Perkins was there to call him “a scoun-
drel and a skunk.” G.M.’s leaders couldn’t
figure out how to quash the strike—vio-
lence, they worried, might imperil sales—
and, to save face, they asked Perkins if
Roosevelt could make a personal request
that they meet with the workers.
Victory more than quadrupled the
auto union’s membership and led to sim-
ilar wins at Chrysler and Ford, setting a
precedent for union contracts that es-
tablished pay and benefit levels not only
in the auto industry but across the man-
ufacturing sector. By the postwar years,
it seemed possible that America might
realize a dream that Louis Brandeis had
described in 1915, a year before he joined
the Supreme Court: an industrial econ-
omy in which life meant “living not ex-
isting.” In the best of all possible worlds,
Brandeis believed, every workday would
be short enough, calm enough, and safe
enough to preserve workers’ “freshness
of mind,” allowing them to continue ed-
ucating themselves throughout adult-
hood, as citizenship required.
Emily Guendelsberger gives a sense
of just how far we are from that dream
in “On the Clock” (Little, Brown), a
jaunty but dispiriting memoir of her
work at three low-rung jobs: at a call
center, a McDonald’s, and an Amazon
warehouse. At the call center, she finds
that her fellow-workers, caught betweenunpredictable customers and eavesdrop-
ping managers, suffer panic attacks so
often that the local paramedic asks “Okay,
who is it this time?” when he gets out
of the ambulance. Chronic stress also
predominates during Guendelsberger’s
stint at McDonald’s. There are always
too many customers waiting in line, and
she constantly fears that their impatience
may at any moment tip over into rage.
Eventually, she realizes that the staffing
shortfall has been carefully calibrated:“Understaffing is the new staffing.” The
resulting stress, Guendelsberger warns,
thwarts “logic, patience, paying atten-
tion, resisting temptation, long-term
thinking, remembering things, empa-
thy”—in short, all the faculties neces-
sary for responsible citizenship.
At Amazon, a handheld scanner tells
Guendelsberger what to do at every mo-
ment and tracks her even into the rest
room. A training video warns of the
work’s physical demands—“This is going
to hurt”—and she’s disconcerted that
painkillers are dispensed for free. But
soon, she writes, “I pop Advil like candy
all day.” Her shifts last eleven and a half
hours, and she gets home too drained to
even think of writing or reading. One
day, slumped in front of “The Muppet
Christmas Carol,” she finds herself
“laughing almost involuntarily” at the
realization that “Scrooge literally has a
better time-off policy than Amazon.”W
hat went wrong? The labor his-
torian Nelson Lichtenstein, in his
influential study “State of the Union,”
published in 2002 and updated in 2013,
argues that, even in the two golden de-
cades that followed the Second World
War, American unions were bargaining
from a position of weakness. Manufac-
turers were fleeing the better-unionized
North for the South, in a domestic ver-
sion of the cost-cutting move now known
as “offshoring.” Because unions in Amer-
ica were organized firm by firm, rather
than industry by industry, as in Europe,
their administrative costs were higher
and their energies dispersed. Lichten-
stein credits labor’s gains in those years
to a willingness to strike rather than to
collective bargaining, which he thinks
suppressed internal dissent and encour-
aged people to see unions as serving their
members’ self-interest rather than a larger
political cause.
Unions fought hard for their mem-
bers in part because of holes in the New
Deal. Roosevelt and Perkins weren’t able
to implement a universal health-care sys-
tem, as they’d hoped, so auto unions
wheedled medical benefits out of auto-
makers. The first versions of Social Se-
curity and the Wagner Act excluded
farmworkers and domestic workers, many
of whom were black, because New Deal-
ers needed support from white South-
erners. (To this day, the occupations