P&P Live!: Jamie K. McCallum – Worked Over: How Round-The-Clock Work Is Killing the American Dream – with Meagan Day

Jamie K. McCallum is professor of sociology at Middlebury College and previously wrote the book Unions, Local Power, which won the American Sociological Association’s prize for the best book on labor. In Worked Over, he draws on a wealth of data and interviews with Amazon warehouse employees, teachers, baristas, and other workers to reveal how the battle over time on the job has been central to conflicts over capitalism for over a century, and how inconvenient and unpredictable working hours are integral to the profound inequality in our society today. The pandemic has only underscored the demands that are made on workers’ time, as white-collar workers struggle to keep up with demanding jobs without childcare, while nurses and EMTS are dragooned into 24/7 shifts and prohibited from taking time off.

Meagan Day is a staff writer at Jacobin magazine. Her articles have also appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Vox, n+1, The Baffler, In These Times, Mother Jones, and elsewhere. She is the co-author with Micah Uetricht of Bigger Than Bernie: How We Go From the Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism (Verso, April 2020).

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