Six or seven other people apply for jobs along with me. The application process took place at a staffing office in a run-down city, the kind where there are boarded-up businesses and broken windows downtown and billboards advertising things like “Foreclosure Fridays!” at a local law firm. And though I was kind of excited to trot out my warehouse experience, mainly all I needed to get hired was to confirm 20 or 30 times that I had not been to prison. So I fretted about whether I’d have to abort the application process, like if someone asked me why I wanted the job. Anyway, to do otherwise might give people the impression that these conditions apply only to one warehouse or one company. (I wasn’t.) But I’d smudge identifying details of people and the company itself. I’d have to give my real name and job history when I applied, and I couldn’t lie if asked for any specifics. “We want you to go work for Amalgamated Product Giant Shipping Worldwide Inc.,” they said. Several months prior, I’d reported on an Ohio warehouse where workers shipped products for online retailers under conditions that were surprisingly demoralizing and dehumanizing, even to someone who’s spent a lot of time working in warehouses, which I have. But don’t take it personally and break down or start crying when they yell at you.” You’ll see people dropping all around you. They hire and fire constantly, every day. Because if you say, ‘This is the best I can do,’ they’ll let you go. Don’t say, ‘This is the best I can do.’ Say, ‘I’ll try,’ even if you know you can’t do it. So they’re going to tell you, ‘You’re not good enough, you’re not good enough, you’re not good enough,’ to make you work harder.
They have to break you down so they can turn you into what they want you to be.
But they’ll be yelling at you all the time. So they’re gonna give you goals, and then you know what? If you make those goals, they’re gonna increase the goals. They need you to work as fast as possible to push out as much as they can as fast as they can. “Oh, yeah.” This town somewhere west of the Mississippi is not big everyone knows someone or is someone who’s worked for Amalgamated. “Why, is somebody going to be mean to me or something?” “Don’t take anything that happens to you there personally,” the woman at the local chamber of commerce says when I tell her that tomorrow I start working at “Amalgamated Product Giant Shipping Worldwide Inc.” She winks at me. Sign up for the free Mother Jones newsletter. Get a daily recap of the facts that matter.
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