Harrowing, Heartbreaking Tales of Overworked Americans

These stories are part of our package on how corporations are shoving more work on to each employee, helping to goose their profits by 22 percent. Read the essay and look at 12 charts that will make your blood boil. Do you have your own workplace speedup story to tell? Share it in the comments.

Sylvia: Warehouse loader, California
It's a big old warehouse out in the desert, a distribution center for [a major pharmacy chain]. It's way bigger than a Walmart, but with no air conditioning. Our temperature gets up to 115 degrees. Sometimes it feels so hot in there that you just can't breathe. You have a lot of people go home sick from the heat. To stay cool people put towels around their necks. They go back and forth getting ice to chew on.
In my part of the warehouse, we load products like cigarettes, shampoos, or lotions into totes that get sent down the rollers to where the trucks are. We're given orders by scanning our badges and totes into a computer system, which tells us what to pull and how quickly it has to be done. Back when I started in 1999, the rate wasn't so bad, but for about a year, they've been gradually ratcheting it up. Say the old rate was 100 orders a day. Now they're up to 160, sometimes even higher.

I've talked to some of the coordinators who add up the numbers at night. They've told me that it's impossible to meet the rate that they want with the amount of people that we have. So we have to work longer. We already worked 10 hours a day. Now we work another hour or two hours overtime, sometimes with last-minute notice. If we refuse to stay longer, we get disciplined.
On the job you're bending down constantly, reaching forward using the same movement in your hands to open up boxes or unwrap packages. My group's supposed to just handle lighter stuff but now they make us pull whole cases of water and Gatorade. These are older ladies doing this. One woman hurt her back and she's off on workers comp. It builds up on people's bodies, and that's why people call in sick. So that might be another hour that other people have to work.

On the job I used to get anxiety attacks. One time we were about to go out to lunch and I just couldn't breathe, couldn't get no air. I just started panicking. But I calmed myself. I don't know what other job I could get that would pay the bills. I'm in my fifties and I have six children and then I have my grandchildren. Sometimes I get home and I don't even spend time with them. I'm just so tired I go to sleep. Five hours later, it's gotta get up, gotta walk in there.

"Mom," my kids always ask, "are you going to work today?"

"Yeah."

"What time are you getting home?"

"I don't know." That's the answer I tell them all the time.

Full Article
Source: Mother Jones