“The Secret Hell of Online Shopping” is the promo for the cover story in the March-April issue of Mother Jones. What’s detailed there by reporter Mac McClelland, who went undercover as a worker at Amalgamated Product Giant Shipping Worldwide Inc., is enough to put you off buying anything on the Web for the rest of your life.
McClelland describes the killing monotony and physical pain of scrambling for more than 800 items a day, books, dildoes and heaven knows what stored on shelves spreading from floor level to seven feet up. Speedwalking across cold concrete floors, she and other “pickers” had to alternate between bending to reach the lowest shelves and stretching to reach other goods stored above their heads (though ladders were available, the nigh-impossible quotas left the workers with no time to take and replace them).
At these operations, where price is everything, McClelland explains, “…storing the merchandise at halfway ergonomic heights and angles… would cost space, and space costs money, and money is not a thing customers could possibly be expected to hand over for this service without huffily taking their business elsewhere.”
Though most of the warehouse was chilly, on upper floors where books were stored it was oppressively hot, and the static electricity was so strong that each time workers grasped a book they took a painful shock. Constant manipulation of the scanners that told them which items to pick soon led to carpal tunnel syndrome. Time off taken without a week’s prior notice got a worker fired; leaves of a few hours to vote or attend to an emergency at home were out of the question.
Supervisors, though they had to enforce the rules because they, too, were terrified of losing their jobs, were sympathetic, McClelland said, and there was general acknowledgment that everyone was there only because of the fear of the unforgiving economy outside; McClelland quotes a man from the temp agency that staffed the warehouse who told her, “Just look around in here if you wanna see how bad it is out there.”
And workers enduring conditions like those McClelland describes have been injured yet more by being forced to work off the clock. Last year, the Advocate published a story on wage theft [“Does Your Boss Steal Your Pay?“, July 14, 2011], but even before the recession, globalism was pulling Americans’ pay, working conditions and rights downward toward the bottom, as Steven Greenhouse explained in The Big Squeeze, published in 2008.
Among those whose stories are told in The Big Squeeze was Farris Cobb, a night supervisor for Sam’s Club, a subsidiary of Wal-Mart, in Florida. Cobb, who worked by the hour, not on salary, came to work around 7:30 each evening to check with managers about what his crew needed to do, but didn’t clock in until 9. He clocked out at 5 a.m., but actually worked until around 8. Though he was underpaid by thousands of dollars a year, he never complained for fear of losing his job. Farris told Greenhouse that on Friday nights his crew often clocked out around 2 a.m. because they were forbidden to work more than 37.5 hours a week, but they were not allowed to leave until a new management shift arrived at 4.
Through the night until 4, Farris and his crew were locked in—including one night when a hurricane blew into Panama City, where his store was located. As the wind rose, no one from upper management with a key would come to unlock the door; the workers were told to stack copy paper in front of the glass doors and “crawl up” under the steel storage racks, though hundreds of pounds of warehoused goods could have fallen on them if the racks had shaken. Anyone who left, the workers were told, would be fired.
Greenhouse furnished an inventory of other abuses as well: video game designers working 13 hours a day seven days a week with only an occasional Sunday evening off; ambulances summoned to a call center where workers taking 100 calls a day (the numbers of calls monitored by computer) experience stress attacks. These are stories of American citizens, not undocumented “guest workers,” working in America as if America were a third world country—struggling in a world of de facto deregulation caused by the fear that if they complain, they will be pushed into an abyss of unemployment, debt, hunger and homelessness.
