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.