Mac McClelland at Mother Jones has another great undercover piece:
“Leave your pride and your personal life at the door,” the lady at the chamber of commerce says, if I want to last as an online warehouse worker.
[…] Speed-walking back to the electro-trauma of the books sector, I wince when I unintentionally imagine the types of Christmas lore that will prevail around my future household. I feel genuinely sorry for any child I might have who ever asks me for anything for Christmas, only to be informed that every time a “Place Order” button rings, a poor person takes four Advil and gets told they suck at their job.
I suppose this is what they were talking about in the radio ad I heard on the way to work, the one that was paid for by a coalition of local businesses, gently begging citizens to buy from them instead of off the internet and warning about the importance of supporting local shops. But if my coworker Brian wants to feed his new baby any of these 24-packs of Plum Organics Apple & Carrot baby food I’ve been picking, he should probably buy them from Amazon, where they cost only $31.16. In my locally owned grocery store, that’s $47.76 worth of sustenance. Even if he finds the time to get in the car to go buy it at a brick-and-mortar Target, where it’d be less convenient but cost about the same as on Amazon, that’d be before sales tax, which physical stores, unlike Amazon, are legally required to charge to help pay for the roads on which Brian’s truck, and more to the point Amazon’s trucks, drive.
Did you ever read “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” by Solzhenitsyn? This article is written in such a way that it reminds me WAY too much of that book. Except that in the prison camp “terminate” had a more literal meaning.
By the way, $11/hour would be a princely wage here in WV. I would have had to work twenty years at the national chain supermarket where I was employed to make that much, starting from $7.25/hour. And I was a union (IFCW) employee.
People can’t afford to buy local because their wages are too low. Their wages are too low because nobody can afford to buy local.
And there’s nothing normal people can do about this. The Democratic party needs to do something about this. But it never will, no no small part because upper-class twit internet ‘Democrats’ just don’t care. Sure, if the Dems step out of line on abortion, then there’s a firestorm. But economic issues? These over-educated elitist pricks just don’t care. They’d rather get outraged at the apathy they themselves cause than do anything about it.
Republicans may be evil, but I only truly hate the Democrats. You know what a Republican is – they don’t pretend to be anything else. But Democrats? Their politicians are liars and hacks, and so are their supporters. Their supporters promised all manner of things when the Democrats were out of power. But when the politician got in there, did the supporters do anything to make them follow through? No. Not one bit. All they did was cover their politician’s asses and pretend that there was nothing they could do.
Democratic politicians are are all corrupt, and their supporters are lying shills.
Republicans may be evil, but I only truly hate the Democrats. You know what a Republican is – they don’t pretend to be anything else.
Of course they pretend to be what they aren’t. They do that 24/7/52/365. have their own political language, full of euphemisms and phrases designed to mislead and obfuscate.
Only recently, under the gun of infinite and perpetual “debates”, have they begun to show some of their hand.
Hate whoever you like, but there is such a thing as the greater of evils, and it starts with an R.
Our ancestors in this country fought and died to get rid of just these kind of working conditions, and here we are again. Truly, those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it. I for one refuse to shop at amazon since the article in the Allentown Morning Call came out.
As for R versus D, they are two sides of the same coin.
And a consequence of the crazy on the R side is the D side moving ever more rightward.
Good comments all, but if you really want to get pissed read the full MJ mag article. Globalization brings back the 19th Century workplace!