It wasn’t sup­posed to be like this, accord­ing to John May­nard Keynes. In 1930, the econ­o­mist predict­ed that his grand­chil­dren would be work­ing fifteen-hour workweeks. Tech­nol­o­gy would have advanced to the point two gen­er­a­tions after his own that work­ers’ aver­age time on the job would be a frac­tion of what it once was. We would all be strug­gling to fig­ure out what to do with so much free time.

The oppo­site has turned out to be true. Instead of being freed from the tyran­ny of the clock, American work­ers are more shack­led to it than ever, work­ing longer hours, being sub­ject­ed to errat­ic sched­ules, fig­ur­ing out how to work more just to make ends meet, and watch­ing an increasing amount of con­trol over their lives slip into the boss­es’ hands.

In his new book Worked Over: How Round-the-Clock Work Is Killing the Amer­i­can Dream (Basic Books, Sep­tem­ber 2020), Jamie McCal­lum, a pro­fes­sor of soci­ol­o­gy at Mid­dle­bury Col­lege, examines why and how US work­ers are more tied to the clock than ever, the dam­age this has meant for work­ers’ well-being, and what an agen­da to reclaim that time could look like. We spoke by phone in Sep­tem­ber. This inter­view has been edit­ed for length and clarity.