In 2014, a woman named Maria Fernandes died of a carbon monoxide leak in the parking lot of a Wawa convenience store in northern New Jersey. She worked an average of eighty-seven hours a week at three different Dunkin’ Donuts locations in the area and was napping in her car like she often did between shifts, with the engine running for heat. A company spokesperson remarked that Fernandes had been a “model employee.”

This is the anecdote that opens Jamie McCallum’s book Worked Over: How Round-the-Clock Work Is Killing the American Dream. But it’s not what originally inspired McCallum, a professor of sociology at Middlebury College, to study the phenomenon of overwork in the United States.

Instead, his interest was piqued by his observation that students in elite academic settings were “almost competing with each other to see how hard they could work and to showcase their work ethic,” he told Jacobin. “I became interested in why it is that people of means treat work as such a badge of honor.” Eventually, the project expanded to include workers all across the income spectrum.