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NEWS & LETTERS, DECEMBER 2003YouthMy life as a warehouse workerby Brown Douglas I work at a warehouse here in Memphis. Many people don't know that Memphis is known as the "distribution center of the United States." Jobs picking products (finding their location in a huge complex of wooden pallets and rows and rows of boxes), packing them, and shipping them all over the world are found everywhere here. Many people you talk to have at one time or another had some type of job in a warehouse or at the FedEx shipping hub, whose world headquarters are here. The products that we pick are Nike products, all from their line of golf apparel. All of us walk around for 10-12 hours surrounded by boxes that say "Made in Thailand" (or Vietnam, or Sri Lanka) looking at a screen on a scanning gun that tells us where we can find the piece of clothing and how many we need to pick. It's all pretty alienating, solitary work. If it weren't for the camaraderie of your co-workers, it would probably be unbearable. INTERNATIONAL WORKPLACE My warehouse is largely Latino and Black and most people are under 30 years old. Maybe most people don't think of it this way, but work for me is the most multi-cultural, international experience that I have. You learn a lot about where people come from and how and why they ended up in the southern United States packing Nike golf shirts and pants for rich people. In a city that is still so violently segregated, work becomes a place that throws you in with all sorts of people that you may live near, shop with, and see all the time but never get to know. From the time you walk in to the time you leave, production is the name of the game. You have to pick or pack as many pieces as quickly as you can, or the supervisor thinks you're not working hard enough. After the first few hours, even the most experienced workers' legs start to ache, but you don't want to get caught sitting down anywhere or even walking any slower because they might fire you right on the spot. One young co-worker said to me, "They just want you to forget about your life when you come in here," because of the never-ending stress on production, production, production. FIRING IMMIGRANTS So far, the most disturbing thing that has happened has been seeing three co-workers told not to come back to work because of their immigration status. They were three of the most hardworking and fun co-workers in the whole warehouse. Someone told me that little by little, the Latinos are disappearing from the site because of the employment agency's audit process, and how the agency has to have all their workers "clean." The whole thing made me think about how capitalism makes it so that people have to leave their lives and home countries to find work, but when they get here they are constantly kicked out of the workplace for not being "legal." It's so contradictory how capitalism needs human labor to fulfill all its needs, but at every step proves itself to have an overall inhuman direction. Another thing that I think about a lot when I'm with my co-workers is the attitude that some people on the Left have towards working class politics. Some will go so far as to say that there's no more working class in America, or that it exists but that workers are already bought off by the system and completely happy to pursue the "American Dream" of wealth and prosperity, therefore not worth listening to. It seems to me that the only way to have this opinion is to have not ever worked a job or taken part in anything involving working class people, because it's just not true. Workers aren't happy with capitalism for making them work six or seven days a week for over 10 hours a day. And they aren't bought off merely for wanting stability for themselves or their families. As long as capitalism exists, there will be people producing, packing, shipping, and distributing products that they have little to no control over, from the moment they work on it to the moment they buy it in the store--even here in the richest country in the world. That will continue until capitalism is overthrown and we build a human society based on more than an inhuman profit motive. |
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