Erik Eckel

Had the US federal minimum wage kept pace with inflation and cost of living since 1968, the hourly rate today would be $24 an hour. But many service industry workers earn only eight or nine dollars per hour in 2025. And these jobs, essential to our lifestyle and economy, are often physically demanding and require developing specific expertise within stressful environments where customers are increasingly difficult.

A creatively written new book confirms how challenging service industry work is. New Directions’ English translation of Claire Baglin’s On The Clock just hit bookstore shelves. The novel is really a memoir that collects the French woman’s experience working one summer at a fast-food restaurant.

What makes Baglin’s book particularly interesting is the fact the novel doesn’t just describe her trials taking drive-thru orders, cleaning work stations, frying potatoes and managing unruly customers. While that material provides enough intrigue to carry the book, she expertly integrates her father’s experiences working in French factories over a lifetime and even her mother’s time serving as a social worker.

The exploration of these important arduous roles, contrasted at one point with the affluence of a school classmate’s family, emphasizes just how challenging many find it making ends meet. By contrasting daily worries and anxieties, Baglin’s message makes an obvious point: too many people are trading their time, expertise and lives for too little, yet even those who live more luxurious lives find new anxieties to occupy their minds once the basics of living—food, shelter, some toys and the occasional holiday—are met. The sprinkling of French cultural highlights adds some additional zest and flavor to the book. It’s definitely worth a read.

This was especially true for me, as I’ve always been intrigued by stories—whether memoirs, essays or novels—that explore what life is like working various professions. Ben Cheever’s Selling Ben Cheever: Back To Square One In A Service Economy and Po Bronson’s What Should I Do With My Life are two excellent examples.

Cheever’s book explores a variety of occupations, from car sales to food service. The insights and discoveries learned working various roles is intriguing.

Bronson’s book, meanwhile, opens readers’ eyes to the fact they can work jobs they find fulfilling, as opposed to remaining within the roles they’ve always believed they were supposed to work. The example that’s stayed with me some 20 years after first reading the book is how an attorney—someone for whom it was always understood would follow the same route traveled by other legal professionals within the family—didn’t enjoy the work and found it most fulfilling baking cakes to celebrate office holidays, birthdays and similar events left the profession to open her own bakery. The book proved pivotal for me. The profiles Bronson collected inspired me to quit my own corporate job and start my own company.

We spend so much of our lives working. Education, career training and time on the job dominate most of our productive years. Capitalism promises rewards equal to the work, dedication and effort we each invest, yet we all know, now, that the playing field isn’t level, CEOs earn hundreds of times what a company’s actual producers make and CEOs are even paid more money than many households earn in a lifetime just to go away when they fall out of favor, which is often.

Baglin’s book is important because she surfaces these truths: so much of our professional livelihoods, working years and successes are based on bullshit decisions made by others unfamiliar with the actual factors operating with production environments. Often success is capricious and the most an employee can hope for is a two- or three-percent wage increase that loses pace each year to inflation.

I worked my share of hourly jobs, as odds are you did, too. Like me, you may remember the resulting challenges that arise balancing competing needs with limited finances and little free time. Baglin simply emphasizes these issues by observing how inane such work can be and how achieving the Holy Grail of performance review scores—a 20 out of 20–doesn’t really do all that much to change your life circumstances. Regardless, Baglin makes the right move. But you’ll have to read the book for the details.