Extreme heat and uncertain employment—realities of Central Indiana’s job market

An overall look at Central Indiana employment, particularly in the environs of Indianapolis, originally published on Examiner.com in the late summer of 2012.  Unfortunately, things have not changed for the better since then--GF

Last August I worked a temp job in a Central Indiana warehouse that was the coolest it’d been inside in a long time—it was only 105 degrees!  It had gotten up to 120 degrees there, and workers were still expected to work; never mind heat prostration, warehouses are warehouses, and those goods have to be moved.  As it was, I had to take a break from work lest I find myself collapsing; fortunately, I was allowed to go to the air-conditioned break room for fifteen minutes instead of being fired.

The massive online retailer Amazon came under national scrutiny in September 2011 when the Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania newspaper The Daily Call ran a story on heat prostration at the Amazon warehouse in Allentown, where temperatures had gotten to 110 degrees; http://www.mcall.com/news/local/mc-allentown-amazon-complaints-20110917,0,7937001,full.story.

The story was picked up nationally by the Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/20/amazon-allentown_n_971851.html, and Amazon came to national notoriety because of its warehouse working conditions.  Amazon working conditions also came under scrutiny the British press as well, in a 2008 story carried by the Times of London.  As Amazon is an international company that has warehouses across the country and overseas, it does come under the scrutiny of intrepid reporters who actually search out and report news for newspapers where editors know a good story when it comes across their desk, and aren’t dictated to by the advertising departments.  Which is far, far cry from newspapers in Indiana, where only sports are covered extensively, advertisers cow everyone, and besides, Hoosier readers don’t care anyway.  So how could a mere warehouse in Plainfield, Indiana, a small town west of Indianapolis, be  newsworthy to Hoosier editors and reporters, even if warehouse temperatures in Plainfield are more notoriously scorching than those that brought opprobrium on Amazon.com?

 

With the steep decline of manufacturing jobs in Indiana, once the mainstay of employment for its largely low-skill, ill-educated workforce, the Hoosier state has moved to become a warehouse hub, especially in Central Indiana because of its midpoint location, where interstates and railroad lines crisscross, and Indianapolis International Airport is nearby.  This makes for a significant economic opportunity for the many small towns that dot the perimeter of Indianapolis such as Plainfield, Whitestown, Noblesville and others, which now boast warehouses as a major source of blue-collar jobs and community revenue. 

Welcome to the new “logistics economy,” where manufactured goods are now moved from one location to another, as there are precious few manufacturing jobs here anymore.  The new warehouse jobs don’t pay much, only from $9 an hour to a top end of perhaps $15 an hour, and the seasonal nature of much of the work means that they’re largely filled by temps recruited by various temp agencies.  In fact, warehouse jobs filled by a plethora of temp agencies contracted to fill these seasonal and fluctuating job openings have become one of the few sources of employment readily available in Central Indiana,.  Meaning that most of these warehouse workers are not employed full-time all year around, but are at the mercy of whatever comes in to the temp agencies that assign such workers

Such as myself, who is considered by industry and Indiana’s state Department of Workforce Development (DWD) alike as just another unskilled worker with a college degree that renders them (and me) “overqualified.”  But in Brain Drain Indiana such college graduates are plentiful and are employed cheaply, as they are often desperate for work in a state where driving a forklift is considered more of a job skill than analytical reasoning. (See George Fish, “Indiana's Brain Drain the problem that won't go away,” originally posted on Examiner.com, August 3, 2009, and reposted on "Politically Incorrect Leftist;" for a prime example of just how the DWD views its college-educated potential workers, see also George Fish, “Add another Frustration to Being Unemployed: A Case in Point from Indiana’s WorkOne State Employment Agency,” New Politics, December 12, 2011, http://newpol.org/node/564.  The DWD refers to its branch offices and employment assistance programs as WorkOne.)

Gregory Travis wrote perspicaciously on what he called “Indiana’s warehouse economy” in the Bloomington Alternative of October 19, 2008, http://bloomingtonalternative.com/articles/2008/10/19/9782.  It’s an economy, Travis notes, that tries to put a smiling Pollyanna face on what are actually diminished expectations, declining wages, and precarious employment—the “ideal” solution for a state that has hemorrhaged manufacturing jobs due to plant closures and goods made for sale in the American market now produced in China, Vietnam and elsewhere, while only the parasitic financiers symbolized by Wall Street prosper in the U.S. anymore.  Here alone is Indiana dubiously leading the way for the U.S. economy as a whole.

 

 

Amazon.com’s Whitestown, Indiana warehouse is a hell of a place to work

Here also are three articles published between 2011 and 2013 on Examiner.com on work conditions in Central Indiana.  I have worked industrial and warehouse jobs there as a temp since 2005, and these are complementary to two articles Central Indiana work conditions that also originally appeared on Examiner.com in 2014, and were reprinted by me on "Politically Incorrect Leftist"  in February 2015:  "Work, fatigue, frustration, and--finally!--creativity again" and "Dispatch from the work shift from hell.  "Work, fatigue, frustration" also covers working at Amazon, which I have done since 2009, and am presently employed doing; while "Dispatch" describes the hellish conditions at another Central Indiana warehouse--there not being a whole lot to differentiate conditions from one warehouse to another.  Choose your poisonous work environment, they are all toxic--GF

Online retail giant Amazon.com has its largest warehouse in the U.S. located in Whitestown, Indiana, about 30 miles north of Indianapolis.  A sprawling rectangle of a building that appears to stretch on endlessly, this Amazon warehouse seemingly provided me a pretty good job; or initially, what I thought would be a pretty good job. But as I write below, not nearly so good a job after all, not by a long shot.

As is pretty well known now, Amazon has come under national scrutiny for its working conditions ever since when, in September 2011, the Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania newspaper The Daily Call ran a story on heat prostration at the Amazon warehouse in Allentown, where temperatures had gotten to 110 degrees; http://www.mcall.com/news/local/mc-allentown-amazon-complaints-20110917,0,7937001,full.story. 

The story was picked up nationally by the Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/20/amazon-allentown_n_971851.html, and Amazon came to national notoriety because of its warehouse working conditions, of which heat was only one of the problems. (The Whitestown warehouse is now air-conditioned, so while I worked there extreme heat was not a problem.)  Amazon working conditions also came under scrutiny the British press as well, in a 2008 story carried by the Times of London.

Still, such scrutiny and surely embarrassing resultant media coverage hasn’t dented either Amazon’s profits nor its market share, where it dominates the online retail market that has only bourgeoned in recent years.  Shopping online having become a commonplace now for all kinds of goods, quite a change from what it was only a few years ago.  The sluggish economy has also helped Amazon, as its warehouses everywhere across the U.S. and even overseas are an economic opportunity for many a fortuitously-located small town.  This is especially noticeable in Central Indiana, as the Hoosier state has moved to become a warehouse hub because of its midpoint location, where interstates and railroad lines crisscross, and Indianapolis International Airport is nearby.  This makes for a significant economic opportunity for the many small towns that dot the perimeter of Indianapolis such as Plainfield, Whitestown, Noblesville and others, which now boast warehouses as a major source of blue-collar jobs and community revenue. With the steep decline of manufacturing jobs in Indiana, once the mainstay of employment for its largely low-skill, ill-educated workforce, this new “logistics economy” of warehouses moving manufactured goods from one place to another steps in to replace those jobs lost; jobs often lost because goods that were produced in the U.S. are now made overseas. 

These warehouses have become a major source of employment now, especially for Amazon in the peak Christmas season, where thousands of temporary employees are put on the payroll, and constitute for many an opportunity that otherwise wouldn’t exist. And Amazon is a big employer in the Indianapolis area, with three warehouses in the vicinity—one in south Indianapolis itself, and one each in Whitestown and Plainfield, a small town 25 miles west of Indianapolis.  (The Whitestown warehouse alone increases its employment by 3,000 jobs over the Christmas season, from a normal of 2,000 to 5,000 at the holiday peak.  This was stated to us as we started work there in 2012, and comes from managers themselves.) This despite the relatively low wages common in Central Indiana for warehouse temp work, which range from $9.00 an hour in many places to Amazon’s top-end standard wage of $12.50 an hour, which even rises to $14.50 an hour when it’s difficult to fill these Amazon positions, as it was in the Christmas season of 2012.

That’s because Amazon really is a hell of a place to work.  Hell as in hellish, hellhole, “You don’t want to work here if you don’t have to.”  As this writer can personally attest, having worked as a temp three times now since 2009; and the Whitestown warehouse is the worst, the most hellish, the most demanding in its pace of work.  It chews up people and spits them out.  As I directly experienced there both in 2011 and 2012.

 

There are three categories of workers where temps are widely used during the holiday season:  in receiving, in inventory stowing, and in order picking, and the pace of work increases upward with each of these three categories.  There are production quotas to be met in each, and proficiency in meeting the quota is demanded after only a week’s experience learning the job and adapting to the harsh physical demands of the labor pace.  People are routinely dismissed for not meeting the pace and the expected quota, which would be grueling even for a twentysomething, but which positions also draw a lot of older workers—there being little opportunity elsewhere.  Of course people falling short do get warnings, and often written reprimands, but no slack is cut; these warnings are simply ultimatums, and only three are allowed.  Managers are sometimes up-front about the physical demands of the job, but not always; and one can leave early usually if the pace interferes with the physical ability to do the job, but there are penalty points assessed for that, and only a maximum of six points allowed for absences or leaving early, unless scheduled—one-half point for leaving an hour or less than before the end of the shift, a full point if leaving more than an hour before.  As for assistance in meeting this work pace, all management will do, in accordance with Amazon policy, is recommend that the workers wear athletic shoes and drink lots of water from the ubiquitous water fountains.  (Employees are also allowed to bring clear personal water bottles.) Gatorade was provided free in Amazon warehouses up to October 2012, but that was discontinued.

At Whitestown the normal work week was four 10-hour shifts, for a 40-hour full-time week.  There are no part-time positions.  During the Christmas season peak this increased to a 50-hour week, then to a 60-hour week (five days of 10-hour shifts, and five days of 12-hour shifts, respectively) and the overtime work is mandatory, with not working it subject to the same absentee/leaving early policies as given above.  There are day and night shifts, and I worked the night one. During the 12-hour shifts, the time allotted for the second break was lengthened, but the allotment for the first break and lunch remained the same.  Also, at the start of the shift and after returning from lunch, there are short bouts of stretching exercises gone through, but no resting during the time of actual work, and, of course, no sitting down during work time, ever.

I worked in receiving during 2012, which I thought would be a job I could handle, as my time spent in 2011 stowing had not worked out; but would this time, as the pace of receiving was slower.  As I found out, not slow enough not to be a major physical strain, especially when the 10-hour shifts became 12-hour shifts.  I had really wanted this job to work out, as I badly needed the money, especially the time-and-a-half for the mandatory overtime.  In fact, I was making quota pretty consistently, and was not having trouble with the 10-hour shifts, but the extra two hours that later got added on turned out to be more than this person in his mid-sixties could handle.  I left the shift exhausted, and even after waking from a very sound sleep, was still exhausted.  I somehow managed to get through two days of 12-hour shifts in a row, but on the third day major exhaustion made me have to leave early—and I do mean major exhaustion, complete with grogginess, disoriented sense of space and time, and of course, making a lot of mistakes—which fortunately I caught, but which slowed me down considerably.  The day after leaving early I woke up still absolutely exhausted and barely able to move.  So I called the office of Integrity Staffing Services, the temp agency that fills these Amazon positions nationwide, and resigned; that ended my career at Amazon, as there is a policy that one must give two weeks’ notice when resigning, no matter for what reason, in order to be allowed to ever return.  I had been able to return in 2012 despite problems working in 2011 because instead of resigning, I had luckily called in sick (because I had a virus).

When the group of us in receiving started work, we were told that the work would be demanding, but the grueling extent of this “demanding” work was not indicated.  An impression was given that it would be strenuous, but not as severely so as it turned out to be, at least in my case.  I believe fully that Amazon is aware of just how grueling the work is, but that it’s much more profitable to work employees as inexhaustible mules rather than make conditions more humane.  That is why it especially uses this small army of temps to handle its peak business times, and tries to psych its employees, temp and regular alike, into thinking Amazon is a hip place to work with the offering of Amazon.com logo merchandise, special meals occasionally, and other small perks. (However, even when a special meal is provided, served cafeteria-style during the normal lunch break with a queue in line to get the food, no more time is allotted to eat than the normal half-hour; but it may take up to ten minutes in line just to get the food.)  One special way Amazon tried to psych up us workers during the 2012 season’s mandatory overtime period was to have a live DJ play a continuous stream of pop music interspersed with occasional promotional patter for the last five hours of the shift; music and patter that was piped throughout the warehouse at quite loud volume.  While this helped make us feel better, distracting us from the actual harshness of the workload and thus making the work more pleasant as the adrenaline provided by the music overcame the exhaustion, this turns out on examination to be only an all-too-typical Amazon palliative, a psychological cheap shot to make the worker feel good, not actually work good, work at a pace and in a way that enables proper rest of body and mind.  Which is to say that the workers at fiercely anti-union Amazon very badly need a union: need a union because, without one, the work will still be hell, people will continue to be chewed up and spit out, leave at end of shift  exhausted, and manipulated by psychological perks to perform in a way that simply shouldn’t be tolerated.  But as of now, Amazon has prevented unionization anywhere in its sprawling network of warehouses and order call centers, which makes it the Wal-Mart of online retailers.  (In contrast to unionized Powell’s Books, still a significant competitor of Amazon despite allegedly costly unionization.)        

   

Work, fatigue, frustration, and—finally!—creativity again

Also originally published on Examiner.com--GF

 

Exhaustion from my previous long-term job at Amazon.com essentially killed my creativity and desire to write the first few months of 2014, from January into early April, when I lost that job.  I was too busy fighting work fatigue to do much of anything else—my life had essentially reduced itself to work, sleep, eat, recover from work on my days off, and then work again.  The few days I had off I mostly just lay around inert.  A real creativity-killer indeed, and also a real killer of desire to do anything but loll around, letting the fatigue and muscle soreness heal itself before I returned to work again.

 

Indiana itself is a killer as well of creativity and the urge to write.  The tsunami wave of Indiana’s hidebound mediocrity overwhelms even the talented and creative one, drowns that person literally body and soul, chokes off the creative urge as it chokes off the better part of one’s personality and talent.  It so overwhelms that the simple urge to create and write is no longer there, that all desire to write and create now becomes totally submerged.

 

That was especially so in my case those prior four months, those months where, even at age 67, I was financially forced to hold down a physically exhausting full-time job at the Amazon.com warehouse in Whitestown, Indiana.  (On which I’ve written before for examiner.com, having previously worked for Amazon at Whitestown, and at another Amazon warehouse in Central Indiana; see George Fish, “Amazon.com’s Whitestown, Indiana warehouse is a hell of a place to work,” January 20, 2013; this article will be subsequently re-posted on this blog.)  My most recent job at Amazon as an order picker required me to walk 10-15 miles each 10-hour shift four days in a row.  It’s a job that pushes one physically to the limit, especially for an older worker such as myself, as it would severely challenge the physical capabilities of even a twentysomething, and makes each shift worked the equivalent of an Army boot camp hike, or several strenuous gym workouts done back-to-back.  But in addition to just the demands put on the body by all that walking is the demanding quota system of orders to be picked in an hour, an exacting computer-determined and computer-monitored system that makes the picker but an appendage to the order-processing machine, with every motion, every order picked, every order bundle placed on the conveyor belt, rigidly calibrated and monitored down to fractions of a second. 

 

A New Yorker article earlier this year pithily summarized this well:

 

Amazon employs or subcontracts tens of thousands of warehouse workers, with seasonal variation, often building its fulfillment centers in areas with high unemployment and low wages.  Accounts from inside the centers describe the work of picking, boxing, and shipping books and dog food and beard trimmers as a high-tech version of the dehumanized factory floor satirized in Chaplin’s “Modern Times.”  Pickers holding computerized handsets are perpetually timed and measured as they fast-walk up to eleven miles per shift around a million-square-foot warehouse, expected to collect orders in as little as thirty-three seconds.  After watching footage taken by an undercover BBC reporter, a stress expert said, “The evidence shows increased risk of mental illness and physical illness.”  The company says that its warehouse jobs are “similar to jobs in many other industries.”

 

(George Packer, “Cheap Words: Amazon is good for customers. But is it good for books?”  A Reporter At Large, The New Yorker, February 17, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/02/17/140217fa_fact_packer?currentPage=all.)  Indeed, a co-worker of mine at Whitestown told me that a fellow picker who’d worked during the Christmas rush brought an odometer to work, and calibrated that, during this busiest, most demanding, of peak seasons, a picker actually walked 20 miles during a 10-hour shift.  Ironically, warehouse jobs at Amazon are among the better-paying jobs in Central Indiana, and are sought after; after losing my Amazon job in April, I got another warehouse job through a temp agency, same as with Amazon, but had to take a $2.00 an hour pay cut.  While the work at my new job is not much easier or less demanding that at Whitestown, it only pays $9.50 an hour compared to the $11.50 an hour I was making.  In Central Indiana, Amazon’s pay is on the high end of what’s paid warehouse workers; unskilled temp jobs at other warehouses only pay within the $9.00-$10.00 an hour range.

 

Moreover, although a college graduate, I have found myself for the past few years, same as many other college graduates, having to work unskilled physical labor because those are the only jobs available in Brain Drain, low-education, low-skill, low-wage, job-hemorrhaging Indiana.  Documentation of these crucial Hoosier lacks is extensive, and below I will list a substantial part of that documentation. 

 

On the Brain Drain and its impact on the college graduate population, there are, for example, two articles of mine: George Fish, “Indiana’s Brain Drain: The problem that won’t go away,” examiner.com, August 3, 2009, which will be re-posted on this blog; and George Fish, “Add another Frustration to Being Unemployed: A Case in Point from Indiana’s WorkOne State Employment Agency,” New Politics, December 12, 2011, http://newpol.org/content/add-another-frustration-being-unemployed-case-point-indiana%E2%80%99s-workone-state-employment-agenc. See generally George Fish and Dave Fey, “Mediocrity—a Hoosier affliction,” Bloomington Alternative, July 12, 2009, http://bloomingtonalternative.com/articles/2009/07/12/10039.  According to the Status of Working Families in Indiana, 2011 report, issued in April 2012 by the Indiana Institute for Working Families, http://www.incap.org/statusworkingfamilies.html, p. 20, 60% of Indiana’s college graduates leave the state, a key reason being lack of jobs.  Further, in the “Hoosier Mediocrity Fact Sheet” contained in Fish and Fey, op. cit., http://bloomingtonalternative.com/f/Hoosier%20Mediocrity.pdf, 46.6% of Indiana’s college graduates leave the state within one year of graduation (citing data that originally appeared in the Indianapolis Star).

 

On Indiana’s per capita income, although it has increased 9.8% from 2006 to 2011, according to Hoosier Data webpage provided by Indiana’s Department of Workforce Development, going from $33,087 in 2006 to $36,342 in 2011, Indiana’s per capita income in this time has actually dropped as a percentage of the national per capita income, from 86.8% in 2006 to 85.9% in 2011. (http://www.hoosierdata.in.gov/dpage.asp?id=2&view_number=1&menu_level=&panel_number=2.) Standing at $38,812, or 87.1% of the national per capita income, in 2013, Indiana’s per capita income ranked only 39^th among the states.  But Indiana ranked 34^th  in 1983, 28^th in 1993, 36^th in 2003, so while per capita income has grown, it has declined compared to growth at the national level—Indiana continues to fall behind due to job loss and low wages.  (STATS Indiana, compiled by the Kelly School of Business, Indiana University, http://www.stats.indiana.edu/sip/inc/inc2_18.html.) As the Indianapolis Star reported, “Income for Indiana residents last year was $38,812 per person, a 2.3 percent increase. That compares with $44,543 for the nation, a 2.6 percent increase.  Indiana’s income ranking has dropped in recent decades, down from 30th in 1980, and 21st in 1950. The drop has been tied largely to the decline in high-paying manufacturing jobs.” (Maureen Groppe, Star Washington bureau, “Indiana’s per capita income ranks 38^th among states,” Indianapolis Star, March 26, 2014, http://www.indystar.com/story/news/politics/2014/03/26/indianas-per-capita-income-ranks-th-among-states/6934411/.) Even in recovery, Indiana still continues to lose jobs.  For example, while Indiana gained 144,007 jobs in the three months September-December 2010, during this same period it lost 131,387 jobs, for a net gain of only 12,620 jobs. (http://www.bls.gov/cew/ew10table14.pdf.)  And even though Indiana’s unemployment rate continues to drop, and in April 2014 stood below the national average at 5.7%, that still leaves 182,900 Hoosiers without jobs. (http://www.bls.gov/eag/eag.in.htm.) [Jobs, unemployment data from the Bureau of Economic Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor.]

So statistically one could say I’ve been one of the lucky unlucky ones, having generally secured unskilled labor employment through temp agencies since 2003, even though, as a college-degree holder, not the work I would desire by any means.  But, as indicated, this “luck in unluck” employment took its toll on me creatively and as an active writer, and that certainly generated frustration and chagrin.  However, and felicitously, since April Fool’s Day that creativity and urge to write has actively returned, and I’ve been on a somewhat consistent writing jag since then, having written several poems which I’ve shared in fellowship at the Tuesday afternoon gatherings of poet colleagues here in Indianapolis.  And despite the economic hardships involved with my new employment, I have gained in not being so overwhelmed with fatigue I could not create, only sleep and loll around in utter exhaustion after a grueling workday and workweek.  A mixed yet palpable gain for this poet/economist/laborer/journalist.