A Visit to the Warehouse of Soul-Crushing Dreams

This is EXACTLY what the republicans want our workers to become.

This is a warehouse where people ship stuff for big online companies that you've definitely heard of. The company, which I won't name, provides staffing for a nationwide logistics contractor that handles getting those Internet purchases from their origin—usually Chinese factories—to your doorstep.

-SNIP-

"How much do these people make?"

About $9 an hour. When I said that wasn't very much—when I worked at the moving-company warehouse starting in 1998, I made $10 an hour—she replied, "For them it is. They have no jobs." Also, it's 50 cents an hour more than the people on the previous shift make. In a state with 8.6 percent unemployment, fierce competition for limited job openings, and a minimum wage of $7.25, you could do a lot worse.

Technically, these workers are all temps. They're hired as temps by the warehouse company, which is contracted to handle temporary staffing by a logistics company. If they make it 90 days, they have the opportunity to become full-blown employees of the logistics company, which means benefits and an extra dollar an hour. It's been six months since the logistics company graduated someone here from temp to employee status. At one of the other locations Susie manages, no one has been hired as a real employee for two years. One of the workers in this warehouse has been a temp for a year and a half.

After we walked past workers stuffing inflated plastic air pockets in boxes and a guy continuously taping shut the bottom of just-made boxes, we went to Susie's office. "Hold on, I gotta fire somebody real quick," she said, picking up the phone. She called a guy who'd been working for her for two months. She was sorry, she told him, but she had to let him go because one of the supervisors had caught him talking on the floor. The man, who she guessed is in his late 40s or early 50s, protested that he had only asked a new guy where he was from. That's just not the culture, Susie told him. You know the rules. The logistics company sets them, and she has no choice but to enforce them.


Read the rest: http://motherjones.com/rights-stuff/2011/07/ohio-warehouse-temps-unemployment

n/t

Pitchforks and torches seem reasonable.

...And the highest corporate profits. A form of class warfare, where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. This is the GOPs ultimate goal for the American worker: To sink wages so low that companies will return to the U.S when we all are finally getting paid 40 cents an hour.

Comment from the first poster:

"Isn't this the American worker that our Republican friends are fighting so hard to get? Mindless under educated and demorilized drones that do whatever they're told and are willing to work in clasical sweatshop conditions for the privilege of having a job. No unions , no rights, no benefits and no breaks. Yes, these are the things that American labor and America needs to survive in this dog eat dog world."

and take notes.

...but on average half of us don't, and if the half that voted, voted their wallets and not their tribe, or their creed, or where they come from, that'd be good, too.