If you don't live up in any respect, they're happy to let the next batch of trainees have your job. In fact, they prefer it; those with 5+ years of experience have the most to fear, as they acquire raises and cushier benefits over time, and so are often fired for the same infraction that gets a newbie a write-up.
I suppose that call centers are preferable to warehouses, in that there is little risk of injury, and there are more opportunities to move up or transfer careers. Still, this is one of the human costs of corporate capitalism in general: if you don't have rare or specialized skills, you have no negotiating power, and have to take whatever you can get. And don't even think about uttering the word "union".
But under non-capitalist systems such as in the USSR you were machine gunned or bayoneted for refusing to work (starting with the Kronstadt Rebellion and ending with Solidarity), and had no option to quit or leave the country.
Capitalism hasn't yet completely eradicated all drudgery from the world, but Mother Jones isn't about to acknowledge that it's better that 4000 marginal workers have jobs than not. It is horribly oppressive for a software engineer to imagine a job where you have to come in on time, but now remember your frustration at closed stores or unavailable phone support/customer service. For stores to be open at normal hours, for people to pick up the phone, for emergency rooms to be open when you need them, somebody has to care about punctuality.
I don't think that's the issue. Whould the cost lowering productivity or making for better social conditions be so high for companies that already make so much profit? And if yes does it have to come from public pressure or enacted laws? Can't a company establish acceptable social practices by itself.
I don't care if my stuff comes in a day later if it can ease up the horror of people working there. There is something to be done in connecting people using the service with the ones making it possible and at what cost. This is just nuts
Actually no. In anything, the socialist states were infamous for people not-working-that-much. The Kronstadt Rebellion and Solidarity had nothing to do with "refusing to work", and all to do with fighting the state power for more freedom.
That said, it's not either corporate capitalism (as described in the article) or USSR. There are plenty of options in between, starting with respect for workers as human beings, and regulations that ensure that treating people as mere cogs is not an option to gain a competitive advantage with. Kind of like we abolished slavery -- we can also abolish unpaid overtime and treating employees like shit. Take a look at Europe. And, no, the reason US has a slightly more advanced economy than, say, Sweden, is not due to harsh working conditions. It's has more to do with human capital, a large unified market PLUS tons of military might abused to ensure cheap oil and resources.
Capitalism hasn't yet completely eradicated all drudgery from the world, but Mother Jones isn't about to acknowledge that it's better that 4000 marginal workers have jobs than not.
Having a job at those conditions or not is not the only two options --we only make them to be. It's like you're saying "it's better than 4000 slaves have an owner to feed them than not".
It is horribly oppressive for a software engineer to imagine a job where you have to come in on time, but now remember your frustration at closed stores or unavailable phone support/customer service.
Yes, people have been taught to behave like spoiled children, and expect others to work for them 24/7. To the detriment of their own working conditions, because you are a consumer for a few hours at most, but you are an employee most of your day.
They offered us shifts in the warehouse when we didn't need 100% utilization on the phones. I never took them up on that, despite that juicy extra quarter an hour.
The absolute worst ones are the out-sourced centers that handle in-bound calls for multiple other companies. Because they have no stake in the long-term outcome and are paid solely by their numbers (cost per call), they have little incentive to train their staff well, pay well, follow through with customers, etc. Working for Comcast and AT&T directly was degrading and Dilbertesque, but they weren't as bad as the outsourced centers or the warehouse environs described in the article.
If, at some point in the future, so many tasks get automated so quickly that there aren't enough jobs for the majority of this planet's featherless bipeds, we might finally get a chance to rethink the age-old rule that a person must work in order to survive. Work might become something that you only do because you like it, or because you want a higher income than whatever the default is. I only hope that outdated ideologies won't get in the way of such a paradigm shift.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
Still, this article disturbs me and I will be making more effort to shop locally (I am lucky to live in a massive city however, where I have access to most things a short metro ride away).
WAG, but I'd wager that each of those machines would cost $500k.
That means 100 million in immediate outlays. WAG 2: fuel/electricity/maintenance is $200/month, and you need a team of 20 engineers to watch over them at $10k/engineer/month. So recurring costs come to $400k.
Which brings us to: 100M/1.3M = 77 months, or between 6 and 7 years.
That, however, doesn't take into account the opportunity cost of the initial $100,000,000 outlay. That brings it up to around a decade.
So, a decade to break even.
What you do do is arrange inventory based on sales, size, and packaging. Looking to minimize the travel of each picker and reduce the chance of injury. You also install conveyors and similar to make moving inventory around simpler.
It took me a while to realize that my work is making other people obsolete and replaceable, but I guess so does a big portion of software and technology in general. But it was surprisingly refreshing to switch off your brain for a few hours and do whatever the scanner tells you to do. Though of course I didn't have any pressure to do more than 1,000 picks a day, that is insane!
This was in Germany though, so the unions and worker's council made sure that the working conditions were more humane than described in the article.
In this case, the people in the warehouse were unable to carry metal in because the delay at the metal detectors would mean they got no break time. The nub of pencil would be ideal.
Oh and I don't just mean the right wing, fun fact, Hillary Clinton was a bigtime lawyer for walmart to help them prevent unions. Walmart even has a swat-like team to respond to possible union formations.
The "competitiveness of a company on the global market" isn't the be-all, end-all. The phrase itself belies your point: if we as a society wanted to, we could place tariffs equivalent to the cost of providing a humane workplace for packaging workers, while also requiring our own companies to do so. This would eliminate the competitive edge issue, while also allowing other countries to engage in free trade with us if they pass laws protecting their own laborers from workspace exploitation.
We simply choose not to, for certain values of we (read: members of the finance capital rentier class that dominates American political discourse).
Which is not to say that all unions are well-behaved. My time as a Teamster was both instructive and discouraging. They had secured a lot of provisions that I don't think should have been allowed to stand. For one, joining the union was a condition of employment. If that requirement didn't violate the principle of free labor markets, it at least cut close to the line. And they eradicated all traces of meritocracy; the only thing that could ever be rewarded was seniority. That was deeply discouraging for a new employee, and from the company's perspective it ensured that the highest-paid employees were also the least productive, by virtue of having spent the most time observing that hard work would never be met with any reward aside from itself.
However, we should not throw the baby out with the bath-water. Unions should be allowed to exist; history is rife with practical examples what happens if you don't do so.
And frankly, the potential problems posed by unions can naturally be addressed by the free market itself, if only we'd let it. If a company's compensation structure becomes unsustainable due to more efficient competition from another company, then it is absolutely OK to simply let its more efficient competitors out-compete it. That remains the case regardless of the cause of the unsustainable compensation structure.
Those people are subsidizing your low prices by taking 800mg of advil a day to be able to get a paycheck and deferring the health disaster they will have in a few years without insurance.
If you do not have unions or government regulation, big business sets the rules and you end up with that story and in the bigger picture, the criminal health care system that plagues this nation.
I find it absurd that the answer for the USA is to pull us down to the lowest level of workforce conditions elsewhere in the world to remain "competitive". The only people who win in a race to the bottom are the ones on top enjoying their 2nd vacation home purchase while everyone else working for them rents.
It might be that historically the diversity of the US is partly responsible; where there is wide social and cultural variation among both employers and employees then the establishment of a consensus about what working conditions are fair and reasonable becomes more difficult. If you've grown up and started your career in an atmosphere of tough working conditions and demanding expectations, then as an employer you're going to have similar expectations of the people you hire. To someone who has grown up in a more collaborative or cooperative situation designed to insulate colleagues from external pressures, the demanding productivity goals of the former context may seem irrational or oppressive. Perhaps there is some correlation with the variety of household income situation experienced growing up - marginal (waged) or fixed (salaried) economic inputs are likely to influence perceptions of appropriate output.
The issue with unions, as most people in America view them, is that they became to powerful themselves. This allowed them to make demands that would ultimately lead to their organizations becoming hamstrung and unable to rapidly adjust. Hence business look at them as the plague.
The issue as I see it is that business, labor, and consumers need to understand the concept of "moderation". Consumers do not need an abundance of cheap crap. Businesses shouldn't focus solely on short term profits. Unions should seek to protect their workers and not pry as much money as they possibly can out of their employer.
I still live in a 'union town' (Boston) so perhaps it is different elsewhere, but they certainly push their influence well beyond the scope of worker rights in this city.
It being discovered that you didn't vote on the union line or otherwise 'play ball' with their political or public stance will get you booted from the union. Which in some trades around here makes you unemployable unless you relocate. In other words, they use scare tactics to push their agenda.
Unions had a time and place. There were absolutely deplorable conditions of work in the US for a period of time and unions were a proper solution. Today they just lay the basis for overly cushy jobs and political corruption.
The threat of unionization, combined with PR issues with customers learning about how workers are treated, will probably cause companies to fix these issues pretty soon.
About 12 years ago I was working in a warehouse at -25 C slogging sides of beef at 25 to 50 Kg for at least 10 hours, my record shift was 26 hours. The pay was even less, $10/hr. It had to be -25 in the freezer because there was ice cream in there too and if it didn't leave at -25 it would melt by the time it got to the destination.
The only odd thing about the job was the look I got like I was crazy when I left to work tech support in the city for a dollar an hour less.
This to me actually sounds illegal. I've worked in other industries where significant hoops were jumped through to make it possible to call workers contractors. If I recall one test often used is whether the worker is on a set schedule, which the situation described would utterly fail.
IANAL
Likewise, the meatpacking industry is infamous for its brutal working conditions and low wages. It has bred many low income, working poor communities plighted by gangs, crime, and despair. The solution to righting the industry and its communities is obvious- pay employees real, middle class wages. But the industry has been fighting a race to the bottom, as the wholesalers of meat products will obviously pick the meatpacking company that can sell at the lowest cost. Because better wages would only increase the price supermarkets pay for meat by several cents per pound, one meatpacking company CEO has openly called for imposing higher wage levels across the entire industry (easier than done). The introduction of higher wages would boost local economies and in aggregate that contributes to the nation's prosperity.
The industries are examples of capitalism at its most efficient and of capitalism utterly failing society as well.
I don't know if the industry as a whole has changed, or if the place the author worked is far on the bad end of the spectrum.
"Competition isn't always an impetus to improve. Sometimes it's just impetus to fuck harder."
http://www.amazon.com/21-Dog-Years-Doing-Amazon-com/dp/07432....
That's right; it's an Amazon link. Ironic, I know.
> He looked at me for a long time, "A computer is telling you what to do on the job? What does the manager do?"
> "The computer is the manager. Manna, manager, get it?"
> "You mean that a computer is telling you what to do all day?", he asked.
> "Yeah."
This has always been the nature of these kinds of businesses, and until robots and technology take those jobs away completely (which opens up a whole other can of worms), it will just keep happening
There's no need for this kind of brutal efficiency. It is detrimental to our society and our economy. Workers who develop crippling health conditions and can never afford to retire are a massive burden on our systems of welfare.
However, for those that do, I'm not sure "self-righteous" is the right term. I think the word you were looking for was "non-hypocritical".
Anyway, I think this just shows that the checkout counter isn't the right place for us to exert our ethical standards. When no one's really watching, and the pain is significant, we're weak, atomized individuals. We even know that our individual purchasing decisions mean zero to giant economic forces. So it's rational to just go for the lower price. All progress with labor standards have come about in other ways - journalism, legislation, and unionization.
[1] http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~hiscox/Depelsmacker.pdf
Sadly, customers often act the same way as economists on this issue.
EDIT: Punctuation
In this case, it doesn't seem unreasonable. The pay rate and overtime they get means they make around $40,000 a year. In rural America with no skills other than the ability to walk and use a barcode scanner, that's not bad money. I'm all in favor of educating people so they can work 8 hour days behind a desk, but the reality is that that won't work for everyone. So having jobs available that let people good at manual labor have a decent life doesn't seem that horrible to me. I may be wrong, though.
Great quote there. That's really a key to being happy in any job. Her description of this job doesn't sound all that bad you get exercise and paid above minimum wage plus overtime.
It cant happen and wont happen, but this downward spiral of competing to the floor can only be stopped if the entire world sets minimum standards of employment. Even them places like the US and EU will need to revise down, while the likes of India and China will have to revise up!!!
Best bit, is we all cause this, no, we demand it when we are purchasing. Free shipping, lowest price for highest quality, etc.
Are "we" willing to pay more to get less, so that people don't get exploited? Nope...
Unions in the US also have government restrictions on what they can do. As one example, the Taft–Hartley Act prohibits a number of union actions, restricts First Amendment rights (eg, union offers must sign non-communist affidavits), and expressly allows a company to fire supervisors which support union rights.
The title of this essay uses "Wage Slave." The point is that "maximizing value" is not necessarily aligned with human rights. Is it your view that those two principles never be out of alignment, and if not, what happens in that case?
They didn't outsource to a temp agency, instead they had their own HR department. The starting pay was far above average for similar jobs with other companies and they readjusted for cost of living increases every few years, and the employee discount was wicked.
It's interesting to read about perspectives from employees of other warehouses, it sounds like I had it good.
Yes?
Then you weren't a slave.
I have been selling for the past 5+ years. They put a review on my account and when I called them to find out some more information about it, I was met with a call center rep in India who gave me absolutely no help.
They don't actually have call support for marketplace sellers. You have to email them. When you do, you get mostly automated responses.
After this ordeal, I finally left them for good. I still can't believe people are giving Amazon this much money (most categories are between 8-16% commission) to sell their goods (plus $40/month if you have a pro-account).
It's a slap in the face when you can't even talk to someone when you have any sort of account issue. On top of this, Amazon doesn't even abide by the same harsh rules they expect all of their 3rd-party sellers to follow.
