by
Sarah Smarsh
View all notes
It’s a hell of a thing to feel—to grow the food, serve the drinks, hammer the houses, and assemble the airplanes that bodies with more money eat and drink and occupy and board, while your own body can’t go to the doctor. Even though no one complained or maybe even realized it, I could feel that the people around me knew they were viewed as dispensable.
When I was a kid, the United States was a few decades away from reckoning with the reality that the next generation would be worse off, not better off, than the one before it. But my community had been facing dwindling odds for generations. They knew that children like me likely wouldn’t and shouldn’t aim for life on a farm. Few country kids were pressured to keep a farm going.
Well ahead of middle-class America, for all my family’s emphasis on hard work, on some level we’d done away with the idea that it always paid off. Being as we got up before dawn to do chores and didn’t quit until after dark, it was plain that the problem with our outcomes wasn’t lack of hard work. The problem was with commodities markets, with big business, with Wall Street—things so far away and impenetrable to us that all we could do was shake our heads, hate the government, and get the combine into the shed before it started to hail.
President Dwight Eisenhower, a native of rural Kansas, said, “Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of America.” The countryside is no more our nation’s heart than are its cities, and rural people aren’t more noble and dignified for their dirty work in fields. But to devalue, in our social investments, the people who tend crops and livestock, or to refer to their place as “flyover country,” is to forget not just a country’s foundation but its connection to the earth, to cycles of life scarcely witnessed and ill understood in concrete landscapes.
i like the phrasing of the last sentence
When I was an adult, the Kansas legislature passed a law forbidding using cash assistance to buy tickets for ocean cruises, as though poor people are notorious for spending weeks in the Bahamas on taxpayers’ dimes. The same law limited the amount recipients could access as cash; regardless of their total monthly allotment, they could take out only $25 at a time via an ATM. It was a needless measure that benefited private banks contracting with the state, since every card swipe racked up a fee. Where once poverty was merely shamed, over the course of my life it was increasingly monetized to benefit the rich—interest, late fees, and court fines siphoned from the financially destitute into big bank coffers.
christ
Grandma was right: I did think I was too good for the environment I’d been born into. But I thought she was, too. I thought everyone was. So my intention was to get as much attention as possible. Not because I reveled in it—I was a quiet loner, most often—but because I knew that was the only way I’d ever receive the chances I wanted.
What we lost in stability, by way of our economic lot, we gained in adaptability, in hard clarity about what does and doesn’t last. During the Great Recession in 2008, both my parents lost their jobs and entered one of the hardest stretches of their lives. But, while some members of the middle class saw their assets dwindle for the first time, people like my family had known economic trauma before.
Perhaps for that reason, my parents had no illusion that banks or markets were a safe investment. Mom didn’t purchase more house than she could afford with the idea that she’d live there forever. She did so precisely because she didn’t believe in security and figured life is short so you might as well have a big bathtub when you can get it. Like Dad, she knew all about a “mobile home”—an oxymoron, seemingly, but encoded with a deep truth: No house is truly secure. The body is the only permanent home, and even that one comes with an eviction notice.
reminds me of Evicted
also, maybe similar idea for N's mother during 2008
If there was something to get out of, some place or class, in many ways I am still there and perhaps always will be. I am there by choice, to some extent, appreciating its riches that shaped me—the wildness of a childhood untended, freedom from expectation, a robust, learned understanding of my own capabilities.
To experience economic poverty in a country famous for its abundance is to live with constant reminders of what you don’t have, like running a hot marathon next to a cool reservoir from which you’re not allowed to drink. [...]
I did not leave one world and enter another. Today I hold them simultaneously—class being a false construct, like any other boundary or category we impose. You don’t really climb up or down, get in or out. Mine isn’t a story about a destination that was reached but rather about sacrifices I don’t believe anyone, certainly no child, should ever have to make.
The other big advance that’s made life miserable for low-wage workers is algorithmic scheduling. Work schedules that used to be drawn up by managers now rely heavily on algorithms that analyze historical data to predict exactly how much business a store can expect in the upcoming week. As it’s most accurate with the most recent data, this means many workers’ schedules vary wildly week to week and are made and posted the day before they start—making it impossible to plan anything more than a week in advance.
Businesses also save a ton of money by scheduling the absolute minimum number of workers to handle the predicted business. And they save even more by scheduling slightly fewer people than can handle the predicted work at a reasonable pace. If workers can push themselves to cover the duties of a sick coworker, doesn’t that just mean they’re not giving it 100 percent the rest of the time? Why can’t they work that efficiently every shift?
The answer’s obvious if you’ve covered for a sick coworker at a fast-paced job—because you’re stuck in the weeds the entire day, and just because you can put up with a miserable day once in a while doesn’t mean that the weeds are a sustainable place to live.
From a boss’s point of view, though, the weeds are where workers should be—at maximum productivity, all day, every day.
Even the concourse is crowded, and it has to be twenty feet wide. My gawking has started to disrupt traffic, and, embarrassed, I merge back into the confused herd of new hires. We’re walking in a long train from the on-site temp office, where we’ve just received lanyards and white ID badges with our names and photos, to… somewhere.
Less confused people with blue ID badges—the mark of the full-time “Amazonian”—flow around us. Most of the year, roughly two-thirds of the more than three thousand workers who keep SDF8 running twenty-four hours a day are “blue badges,” while a third are “white badges” like me—temps hired through Integrity Staffing Solutions.
But right now it’s “peak”—the crazy holiday season between Black Friday and Christmas when Amazon’s business increases exponentially and fulfillment centers hire massive numbers of seasonal workers through a few associated temp agencies like Integrity.* There’s maybe a couple hundred of us starting this cold morning.
possibly useful details
Next slide is policies and procedures. “The first one is going to be attendance,” says Miguel. “We expect you to work the full shift, including any scheduled overtime. You can expect us to tell you about required overtime as soon as we can, and no later than the start of the lunch break during the shift on the day before.
“Now, some of you might be looking for full-time job opportunities with Amazon. Which I’m not saying you’re gonna get. But you might get,” Miguel says, his tone suggesting that a full-time blue badge is a prize only to be claimed by the übertemp.* The best way to show we really want that blue badge, he says, is perfect attendance.
Miguel directs our eyes to the hotline number on the folder on our chairs. If we’re going to be late or sick, we must call in at least two hours before the start of our shift. If we’re no-call-no-show two days in a row, we won’t just be fired—we’ll be blacklisted. Our relationship with Amazon will never progress beyond the white badge.
“We will not consider excuses for being late outside of approved exceptions,” says Miguel. Temps don’t have sick days or vacation: instead, we have a point system that Miguel explains was developed to give us as much freedom with our schedules as possible.
also potentially useful
consider: new tag for details on shitty workplaces?