EVERY TIME YOU CLICK "PLACE ORDER,"
A WAREHOUSE WORKER WEEPS.
The other day a friend made an observation that has me thinking
about the high cost of shipping goods around the world, shipping manufacturing
jobs off to third world countries… workers paid poorly and highly
expendable. And then they turn around
and pay a fortune to ship the goods around the world to various ports of
destination. It seems like a good idea to
me, keeping the jobs better paid at home and just save the costs of shipping.
Too simple I suppose… and hardly a proper globalization concept. So the little
piece before, the writer is more savvy than I, but we have the same ethic.
If I have the choice between automatic or human ANYTHING I opt
for the human connection simply because it keeps a job to a real wage earner
going. No automatic banking, I go in to the teller. No shopping on line, I go
to a store. And so on. All part of my resistance to globalization, small but
meaningful to me.
What holds no sense to me is creating the need for all this
dehumanization and transportation in the guise of “efficiency”. Which is
ridiculous when you consider the financial and environmental costs of shipping!
However in the short article below you will see below the wages made by the
modern day elves are beyond inadequate, the workshop circumstances plain nasty.
Some folks will do anything to qualify pass as an elf...
December 23, 2011
Since June, I've been ruining my friends' online-shopping lives.
Back then, I reported on a vast warehouse in
Ohio where goods bought from online retailers are sorted, boxed, and
shipped to consumers.
Unsurprisingly, this job does not pay well. A little more
surprisingly, this job seems designed to crush employees' spirits. During my visit, two people
got fired within 10 minutes, one for talking to someone while he was working ~ "Where
are you from?" was the offending comment ~ and one for going to the
bathroom too much.
So occasionally, and now more that it's the holidays, my friends
and family will call to complain that "Bleh, I want to order something
from Amazon/Walmart/Staples/whatever, but I feel guilty about helping oppress
workers."
Want to read more
about Mac's visit to the warehouse of unbearable sorrow?
Why would online retailers be so mean? Well, in the case of
many, they have helpfully outsourced interaction with workers.
.
When Walmart started selling its merchandise on the internet, it
turned to third-party logistics contractors, or 3PLs, experts who could handle
the, uh, logistics, like warehousing and transportation, of online sales. Take
Exel, for example, the largest 3PL in the country, and a subsidiary of Deutsche
Post DHL, one of the largest companies in the world. Exel alone has 86 million
square feet of warehouse all over North America and processes literally
millions of goods every single day.
Other retailers directly perpetrate the oppression. Amazon.com
made headlines earlier this year when 20 current and former employees of its
Breinigville, Pennsylvania, warehouse told the local Morning Call that workers
were fainting in stifling heat and getting yelled at for not meeting
ridiculously high productivity goals and generally being "treated like a
piece of crap."
Employees who were sent home with heat exhaustion were
disciplined; a local ER doc eventually called OSHA and reported "an
unsafe environment."
Either way, many of the people actually loading and unloading
trucks, packing boxes, and pasting labels work not for retailers, or for 3PLs,
but for yet another company: temporary staffing agencies.
When an online retailer (especially one that doesn't actually
make anything) wants to wring out the most profit possible, it helps to have a
labor pool that is on demand, so it can order the exact number of humans it
needs to fill that day's number of orders if the humans are working at top
capacity.
That way, workers can't unionize or be legally entitled to
decent benefits.
That way, the online retailer can give them outlandish
productivity goals, like hundreds of orders and thousands of items per day
apiece ~ and when workers burn out, just replace them with the next temp, who
can join the rest of the ranks living in fear that they won't make their
numbers and might be incessantly berated for it, or simply fired.
Even if you meet the outlandish goals, don't necessarily expect
to be rewarded by say, a real job. As with so many in the industry, the
warehouse in Ohio are mostly "temps" ~ even though some of them have
been working in the same place for more than a year.
Lots of people are "temporary" pickers and sorters and
shippers year-round. Annual internet retail sales in the United States are
estimated to hit $197 billion at year's end; they're projected to grow 10
percent every year to $279 billion in 2015.
And during the holidays a lot more
people sign up ~ to handle the Christmas rush, the biggest retail-shipping
warehouses hire thousands of extra employees each.
That's each
warehouse mind you; Amazon for example had 52 in 2010, with plans
to complete another 17 by 2012.
And because Christmas is a deadline that consumers take very
seriously, peak-season temps have it a little bit worse. Often, they can't
request any time off during the holidays. If they miss Thanksgiving, or
Christmas Eve, they can be fired.
Overtime is generally mandatory, even if that means five 12-hour
days in a row. Doing anything for five days of 12-hour shifts is tough, but
particularly when that thing is standing in one spot at a conveyor belt
repeatedly stuffing inflatable air pockets into boxes, or running up to 15
miles a day around a vast warehouse in order to retrieve the items for those
boxes, bending over to grab them off floor-level shelves literally hundreds of
times a day, while supervisors meticulously keep track of how many items every
employee picks and let them know when they're not moving fast enough, not good
enough.
Hurry up, customers are waiting. Santa's special helpers can't
be permitted to take personal time off, or time to go to the bathroom except
during a couple of 15-minute breaks, or to have enough off-work hours in their
day to get laundry done or eat dinner with their kids.
It's Christmas, goddammit.
So while I don't want to have to change out of my pajamas to go
shopping, either, and I fully expect the goods I order off the internet to
materialize at my front door in about the amount of time it would take them to
be transported from the Starship
Enterprise, I'm just sayin'.
Like I tell people who are unfortunate enough to be friends with
me: It's worth considering how the hell those goods get to you, so fast, and
for free, when the company you bought them from is posting profits in the
millions, or even, in the case of Amazon, billions.
Chances are, it's via the people who worked for the small
businesses we ruined when we were saving $4 by buying stuff off the internet,
people performing dangerously repetitive or otherwise ergonomically unsound
jobs in a cold, shitty, emotionally abusive warehouse for very little money and
very few benefits, the kind of conditions people endure only because it's their
last resort.
It's worth considering, because one of the reasons those
conditions can so widely prevail is that no one ever does.
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