“If HR wants to claim a seat at the table, it needs to
start by pulling up a chair in the break room.“
The Breakroom and the Boardroom
It’s a Monday morning in a distribution center a few miles south of downtown Dallas, and Carlos has already sweated through his faded navy Cowboys 1995 NFC Championship game commemorative T-shirt.
Dawn breaks across the sky, and Carlos looks at the streaks of orange and yellow beginning to edge the Texas sky, takes a deep breath, and finishes loading another heavy box onto the back of an idling truck.
The respite is short; time is ticking, and he’s already in danger of running behind – hours before his corporate HR team, sitting a thousand miles away or so in a so-called “center of excellence,” has even logged in for the day.
Carlos clocks in at 4:57 a.m. every day, three minutes early, “siempre, todos los dias,” Carlos claims – always, every day, and he means that literally, since he rarely allows himself a day off, picking up extra shifts or pulling doubles whenever he can.
Carlos, of course, doesn’t do this because he’s trying to “hustle harder,” nor is he gunning for a promotion (there aren’t any). It’s because if Carlos clocks in even one minute late, Carlos is issued a warning. He’s already gotten one, a few months ago, because, he says, the bus, which he relies on to make it the 15 or so miles from his house to his workplace, broke down.
It’s not a mistake he can afford to make again; two strikes means Carlos gets lower priority when the company is assigning schedules or offering extra shifts, and three strikes? Three strikes means he’s fired.
No appeals. No explanations. No arbitration or employee relations investigation. In fact, no humans are involved at all.
Just an automated time clock, and a company policy that, like his daily production quota, hangs like a perpetual spectre over his head.
Essential Work, Dispensable Workers
Here, in this massive warehouse owned by one of the world’s most profitable companies, located in one of the nation’s most affluent counties, there are no PIPs. There are no performance reviews, nor are there additional training opportunities.
There are just intractable policies, and even more intractable consequences for even the most aberrant or esoteric of violations.
This is a world that many of us talk about, but few of us actually see. At the same time, we often refer to the kinds of low-skilled, high-turnover sorts of jobs that are the reality for Carlos and millions of others like him as “high volume,” the actual workers themselves, ironically, largely suffer in silence.
That’s because Carlos is one of the more than 80 million Americans who constitute the hourly workforce; that’s over three out of every five US workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Contrary to unpopular belief, the BLS can, in fact, be trusted – unlike the policymakers whose decisions this outcome data represents.
While HR executives and multinational corporations spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year on increasing employee engagement, or codifying company culture, or improving the “employee experience,” (whatever the hell that truly means), the real experience for Carlos – and millions of other workers like him – is primarily managed by algorithms and metrics.
It’s a culture of fear, shaped more by compliance than care, and enforced with penalties instead of promotions. High performers don’t get promoted; they get to keep their jobs and their paychecks. Which, for workers like Carlos, is enough motivation to put up with working conditions that are closer to slavery than Silicon Valley.
His job, like most of the roles we referred to during the pandemic’s peak as “essential,” is physically demanding, micromanaged by machines, and just dangerous enough to be life-altering, just not lucrative enough to change his life.
“I’ve never met the HR person,” Carlos shrugs. “They’re in California somewhere, I think.”
They are, in fact, headquartered somewhere in the suburban sprawl of Salt Lake City; the building, as seen on Google Maps, looks nondescript, with its low-slung design, mirrored glass, and right angles. It features only a small sign near the pull-off of an industrial park wedged against the Wasatch foothills.
It’s a world away from the 700,000-square-foot warehouse where Carlos and the other thousand or so workers are overseen by HR back at headquarters. It might as well be a different planet.
The Real Cost of Work
Carlos tells me he can’t complain; in fact, he’s grateful for the steady work after months of temp and day gigs. The money’s good, too – $17.50 an hour. That comes out to about $1,050 a week after taxes—just enough to cover rent, groceries, a cell phone bill, a bus pass, and other essentials.
And for Carlos, just enough is more than enough reason to keep getting up while it’s still dark, navigate the three bus transfers, and nearly three quarters of a mile of walking it takes for him just to get to work every morning. It’s enough reason to keep lifting heavy boxes for eight hours, almost without stopping, in temperatures that often hit 100 degrees.
He shrugs and smiles. “No complaints,” he tells me.
He hopes to keep doing this for as long as he can keep the job; he’s less worried about another infraction for showing up late for a shift, and more by something entirely out of his control: getting injured on the job. He’s seen it happen dozens of times, from sprained knees to broken bones. And he’s terrified that it could happen to him, even with all the extra precautions he’s learned to take.
He is uninsured, he admits (while his employer does offer associates voluntary group coverage, almost all hourly workers, Carlos included, decline; since it’s not subsidized, it’s prohibitively expensive). The bigger cause for concern?
“If you get hurt,” Carlos says, “you’re replaceable.”
This is what life is really like for most of the 44% of US workers classified as “low wage,” with a median hourly wage of $10.22. A report on household wellbeing from the Federal Reserve found that a staggering 37% of American workers didn’t have enough cash left over between paychecks to cover a $400 emergency expense.
For workers living paycheck to paycheck, having a job isn’t about growing a career over the long term, but surviving the day-to-day and avoiding things like a busted tire, a missed shift, or a sick kid that could derail everything in an instant.
As Denise, a CNA who works nights at an urgent care clinic in an upscale suburb north of Dallas, bluntly stated, “A good job is one where you get paid on time, and you don’t go home crying every day.”
Two Workplaces, One Company
While corporate HR and TA pundits and practitioners debate the relative merits of things like return-to-office mandates, employer value propositions, or building inclusive company cultures, hourly workers have more mundane concerns – like if they’ll get next week’s schedule in time to arrange childcare.
The divide between the top and the bottom of the org chart has never been wider – and while there’s always been a gaping chasm between management and worker (it’s the basis of Marxism, after all), the increasingly centralized, automated HR function is becoming increasingly disconnected from the workforce it’s tasked with managing.
McKinsey research has revealed that more than three out of four frontline workers feel disconnected from their employer’s mission; Edelman’s 2024 Trust Barometer found 71% don’t feel seen or heard by their organizations at all.
At a time when corporate HR is preoccupied with the possibilities of AI, its hourly workers are more concerned with making sure they clock out before using the restroom.
“I don’t know what HR is supposed to do,” said Tyler, a fast food worker at a large national chain. “Other than to tell us what we’re not supposed to do.”
“If HR wants to matter, it has to stop hiding behind policies and surveys. You
can’t outsource empathy. You can’t automate dignity. You have to show up.”
HR Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
In theory, HR exists primarily to provide a bridge between management and workers; in practice, it’s often a little less of a bridge and more of a barrier. Instead of advocating for workers, many HR groups exist solely to enforce management’s policies and procedures, ensuring compliance while minimizing any human capital-related risks to business continuity or bottom-line results.
White collar employees are companies’ greatest assets; hourly workers, in both theory and in practice, represent their employers’ greatest liability (and line item) – and are primarily treated as such.
“I told my manager I had tested positive for COVID,” said Maddy, a cashier at a high-end retailer near Fort Worth. “They said I needed a doctor’s note or I’d lose my attendance bonus. I couldn’t afford to lose $80. So I came in.”
This isn’t an exception or an outlier. It’s the kind of standard operating procedure that never gets printed in the employee handbook, unwritten but intractable.
The Shift Project at the Kennedy School at Harvard surveyed tens of thousands of hourly retail and service workers across the US. These workers reported nearly endemic levels of on-the-job retaliation, last-minute scheduling, and time or attendance policies that penalize people for exigencies outside of their control – three factors that also rank among the top reasons hourly workers cite for wanting to leave their current jobs.
Which is to say, the biggest problems plaguing frontline workers are all inherently HR problems for which few in HR seem interested in finding a solution – or empowered to do so in a function where protecting the status quo is what passes for best practices.
In writing this article, I spoke to 22 hourly or temporary workers across the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex over the course of 10 days; admittedly, many of this imperfect sample were food service workers, but that’s what we call a working lunch.
I spoke to five warehouse workers, four retail associates, three construction workers, two temporary administrators, and the person who mows my lawn; all of them asked to have their identities kept private out of fear of retaliation (which, coincidentally, is the top workplace concern for hourly workers).
Ryan Lopez said I could shout him out, though, so if anyone needs a good landscaping crew in Dallas, I’ll happily connect y’all.
I imagine that one of the most widespread fears among this demographic regarding the workforce was not reflected in the first-person perspectives and anecdotal reports collected during the research for this article. As I am not fluent in Spanish, nor did I want to go down any political rabbit holes, the topic of current immigration enforcement efforts and their impact on high-volume workers was deliberately avoided.
Everything else was fair game.
My Boss is an Algorithm
We talk a lot about HR Tech in the context of its possibilities, from driving innovation and efficiencies to creating increased transparency and equity.
The subtext is clear: as an industry and a profession, we’ve placed our collective faith in the immutable fact that HR Technology will meaningfully improve and impact the future of work for the better (ostensibly, this includes all workers).
For high-volume employees, however, the realities of the rise of HR Technology are impacting their work and their lives in ways that seem almost contradictory to the product marketing and brand promises plastered on so many 30×30 trade show booths.
HR Tech isn’t an enabler; it’s an inhibitor. More specifically, it’s a trap.
Of the workers I spoke with, the first (and often, only) ‘HR Technology’ most workers referenced is one of the original workplace tools, the simplest and most straightforward of any category in the industry: time and attendance.
More specifically, the good old-fashioned time clock. That’s right. For the billions of dollars a year this business turns over, time clocks, cards, and their digital or biometric equivalents have, by far, the biggest day-to-day impact on workers’ lives.
More broadly, time and attendance – a pretty staid, kind of boring category, if we’re being honest, is the only one that seems to really change how workers think about or approach work – a mixture of hate and fear that any legacy HCM end user is probably pretty familiar with.
“Every minute I’m late, they dock me, and I get that whole ‘time is money’ thing,” said Marcus, a barista at a large chain coffeehouse in East Dallas. “But it’s my money, and it’s never my fault. Last week I was late because the scheduling app didn’t update my shift time until close to midnight, and I passed out already.”
Harvard Business Review calls the phenomenon Marcus describes as “the algorithmic boss.”
The not insignificant portion of the overall HR Tech market, whose primary products (there are many, and almost all of them are wildly profitable) are scheduling, attendance, and productivity tracking/employee surveillance, is one of the least discussed, yet fastest-growing categories in the market. Yet, while their functionality is simple and straightforward, this might not be a good thing – even the smartest of algorithms have zero context for the circumstances and challenges that these workers face in aggregate, much less as individuals, just to survive on an hourly wage in America in 2025.
According to MIT’s Work of the Future Report, frontline automation has not only increased job insecurity and compressed wages for high-volume workers, but it’s also amplified the already significant inequalities for workers, particularly those without a college education.
No One Designs Software For These End Users
Take Dani, who supervises a supermarket deli in Mesquite, Texas. “Every second I’m on the clock, I’m required by law to have gloves on. So, I’ve made it a habit of putting them on before I go into the store, been doing it that way for years,” Dani said.
The company recently “upgraded” their time and attendance system, moving from a traditional time card to a scanner that reads RFID chips emplanted in the identification badges each worker is required to wear around their neck like a lanyard (before the new tech required it, workers wore simple name tags – “way, way chiller,” Dani assures me.
None of the largely manual, paperwork-driven time card system that had been in use since the store opened in the early 1990s. The convenience is a win for employees; the identification verification, higher accuracy, and lower risks of time fraud are a win for employers.
Except, of course, for the fact that when it comes to HR Technology, front-line workers never actually seem to win.
“The first day I was in, nobody told me that if I had my gloves around my badge, it wouldn’t pick up on the system that I was there. So, about 40 minutes into my shift, I get an alert on my phone that I was being given twenty minutes to contact my manager or face potential termination, and I was in the back talking to him at the time.”
The manager, naturally, immediately contacted the corporate support center to try to resolve the seemingly minor issue. They informed him that it was a known issue, and all he had to do was submit documentation to the vendor so that everything could be reconciled. He filled out and sent an online form through a third-party portal within an hour of the incident occurring.
A couple of weeks later, both her manager and Dani, she tells me, had assumed it was taken care of. They were wrong.
“I got hit with a written warning by corporate for being late without calling in, and I had the 40 minutes I thought I was clocked in had been deducted from my total pay. Turns out, corporate outsourced the whole payroll and time system to them, so there was nothing they could do – I don’t even technically work for them,” she said of learning that she was employed through what can best be described as a BPO.
“I’ve worked for this company for almost five years, and I’ve never actually worked for them? It’s crazy.”
While corporate eventually removed the warning from her record, she never received pay for the time she had already worked that day, close to an hour, before being notified of the error.
“It’s like eighteen bucks, man,” she told me. “There’s the principle behind this shit, but there’s also my job. And I want to keep my job.”
This isn’t workforce optimization. It’s Taylorism set against the dystopia of late market capitalism – micromanagement by machine.
“When you say your company is in the “people business,”
remember: those people are watching, and they’re counting on you.“
Speaking Up Comes at a Cost
Like Dani, most of the workers I spoke to said they don’t bother reporting issues anymore. Not because they’ve given up, but because they’ve learned what happens when they try.
“You get fewer hours,” said Darryl, who works security at a big box retailer outside Fort Worth. “Or suddenly your shifts all move to weekends. Or they start writing you up until you quit. They call it ‘coaching.’ Like it’s for your development. It’s not.”
In place of trust, workers have created informal safety nets: group texts, shared rides, lunch money CashApps, and unspoken agreements to cover for each other when management won’t. There’s more HR happening on folding chairs in the breakroom than in all the “people platforms” combined.
When I asked workers what they needed most, nobody mentioned stock options or wellness apps.
They asked for clean bathrooms. Predictable schedules. Working time clocks. A place to sit down.
And maybe—just maybe—a little respect.
What Frontline Workers Want HR to Know
I ended every interview with the same question:
What do you wish your employer understood about your job?
Here’s what they said:
• “Stop scheduling me with 24-hour notice.”
• “I need a chair. I’ve had three surgeries on my knees.”
• “Treat me like a human, not a barcode.”
• “If you want feedback, show me you’ll do something with it.”
• “Come do my job for one day. Then we’ll talk.”
They don’t want culture. They want control. And a little dignity.
According to research from One Fair Wage and the UC Berkeley Labor Center, tipped and low-wage workers are disproportionately subject to wage theft, hazardous working conditions, and systemic inequities.
Most lack basic recourse. They have no visibility, no leverage, and no voice in the systems designed to manage them.
The Real Future of Work
Here’s the kicker: these jobs—the ones treated as the most disposable—are the least automatable.
You can’t outsource elder care to an app. You can’t offshore restaurant service. You can’t use AI to restock a shelf, mop a spill, or calm down a drunk guest at 3 a.m. on a Tuesday.
The “future of work” isn’t just happening at trade shows, white papers or analyst reports. It’s happening right now in the back kitchens, late shifts, stock rooms, and overnight runs to the ER. It’s not just essential. It’s existential.
Yet these workers have been excluded entirely from the people strategy conversation—ghosted by a function whose job is supposed to be, quite literally, human resources.
If HR wants to claim a seat at the table, it needs to start by pulling up a chair in the break room.
The Ask: Show Up
Some employers are trying. A handful are piloting co-designed shift planning, community-based PTO, and real-time feedback loops. But they’re the exception. The rule still rules.
If HR wants to matter, it has to stop hiding behind policies and surveys. You can’t outsource empathy. You can’t automate dignity. You have to show up.
Get on the floor. Walk the line. Talk to the people who are already working the jobs we say matter most. Ask them what’s broken. Then (pay attention: this is the important part) shut up and fix it!
Because when you say your company is in the “people business,” remember: those people are watching, and they’re counting on you.
About The Author
Matt Charney is a leading voice in recruiting and HR technology, specializing in go-to-market, growth, competitive intelligence, and thought leadership. He was most recently Editor-in-Chief at Recruiter.com and CMO of Employer.com, overseeing content, marketing, and brand strategy across a portfolio that includes Bench Accounting, Mainstreet, Capbase, and Before You Apply. A former recruiter for Disney, Warner Bros., and Amgen, Matt later held marketing leadership roles at Cornerstone OnDemand, Monster, and SmartRecruiters. He has advised over two dozen HR tech startups, and his writing has appeared in Forbes, Mashable, and the Los Angeles Times. But he’s still trying to figure things out, too. Matt will be speaking at Transform 2026. Join him at Transform 2026 to hear him speak from March 23-25!