14.3 Nine to Nowhere / Dead End Jobs

While America enjoys unprecedented prosperity and a federal budget surplus unknown for a generation, many of our fellow citizens don't share in what life in America can offer. Around us, farmland is being converted into luxury home sites at a furious pace. Our expressways are crowded with SUVs (sport utility vehicles), a bounty of expensive toys is touted to give us pleasure, and the stock market has brought investment wealth to large numbers of ordinary citizens.

Some segments of society don't share the dream. Unlike street people, most are invisible known as the working poor. While many folks climb the ladder of success, they hold it up. Many will never escape their predicament. A large class of workers is consigned to a Dickensian time warp laboring for meager wages under dehumanized and dangerous conditions.

Automation which has liberated many has created for others a new and insidious toil in many high-growth industries. Their work is subject to Orwellian control and electronic surveillance. They are reduced to limited tasks that are numbingly repetitive, potentially crippling and stripped of any meaningful skills or the chance to develop them.

On Thanksgiving Day in 1960, Edward R. Murrow shocked a Holiday television audience with his "Harvest of Shame," a television documentary about the plight of migrant farm workers working for pennies to feed the best fed nation on Earth.

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This article is based largely on a Wall Street Journal report in 1994 about how America's demands for prisons, recycling, low cholesterol chicken, and financial services have fueled the growth of some of the nation's harshest jobs. These reports follow in the tradition of Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" which exposed the Chicago Stockyards as a brutal world of crushed limbs, severed fingers, and workers slipping into open vats.

Some of these occupations will be familiar to you, though you probably haven't thought much about them. Others we don't notice--but modern society depends on them. They are people who do the dirty work. Many have no way out. Pay is poor and there is no way to get promoted. They are caught in a trap. I apologize to the many other workers in other dead end jobs not acknowledged in this article.

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I. POULTRY WORKERS; LIFE IN THE "BROILER BELT"

By 1994, poultry processing was the second-fastest growing factory job in America since 1980 and had a work force roughly equal to that of steelworkers. These jobs pay less than any other manufacturing industry except apparel. It is dangerous work. It is the nation's 11th most dangerous industry with an annual injury and illness incidence rate of 23.2 per 100 full-time workers. (My note: Do you think this is bad? Try meat processing. There it is 44 per hundred annually.)

Accidents and injuries in poultry processing are almost double that of coal mining and construction. Yet for thousands of Americans this is the only employment available. Turnover is high, exceeding 100% a year at many plants. What is the work environment like for these people?

The smell of dead chickens suffuses the air while feathers litter streets outside. In some towns, these labor-intensive factories are the only places to work. They are frequently ringed by company housing, often trailers crowded with workers who pay rent through payroll deduction. Chicken is big business, bigger than peanuts in Georgia, tobacco in North Carolina, cotton in Mississippi and bigger that all crops in Arkansas or Alabama.

Each job is known by the grisly tasks involved: "scalding," "evisceration," "skinning' and so on. Anything that doesn't go out as chicken for the supermarket is ground and cooked into animal feed. (My note: remember the unit on Mad Cow disease and animal cannibalism?) The worst job is performed by the "live hangers," people who fasten incoming birds to shackles at the rate of 25 or more a minute. Those birds scratch, peck, and defecate all over the workers. The birds are stunned with electricity before processing.

Workers work quickly and often cut themselves and others. Motions are fast and repetitive. Poultry processing ranks 3rd for cumulative trauma injuries such as carpal tunnel syndrome. (Meat packing is first and car-body assembly is second.) There is no control over the fast pace of work. Cold temperatures add to the risks. The noise is overwhelming.

Going to the bathroom requires permission. Un excused absence from the line is grounds for dismissal. Employers define it as a voluntary quit. Many who "gotta go" hang on by crossing their legs. For some it is easier to pee in their pants. There is just no time, except during the short breaks when the bathrooms are crowded. Soap dispensers are usually empty, toilets overflow, and drains are clogged with cigarette butts.

The line is often so fast paced that it looks like chaos. Arms, boxes, and poultry fly in every direction. Fat globules and blood soon speckle glasses, bits of chicken stick to collars, water and slime soak the feet and ankles, and nicks injure the wrists. A woman wraps her forearms in plastic tape because bits of chicken penetrate her wounds and cause infection.

The work is monotonous and the chances of getting out are slim. Only a handful can rise to the better-paying supervisory ranks. A growing percentage are Hispanic who fear they will loose their jobs if they make trouble. It is a situation ripe for exploitation. The industry itself is very competitive and profit margins are low.

Injuries often go unreported. There is intense pressure under report or not report injuries at all. Injured workers in some states must go to a company doctor, himself disinclined to make reports that make the company look bad. This in itself restricts opportunities for claims.

Many fear the hard labor in the plants have them on a treadmill to nowhere. Those in their thirties have acquired callouses and injuries. They feel trapped. One said, "I can tell a chicken gizzard from a chicken liver, I can do that well. What can a man do with that?"

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II. RECYCLING, DIRTY MuRFs AND OFFAL*

In poultry, meat, and recycling, *offal is the unwanted or undesirable residues be it animal parts or inanimate waste. Who handles it and, these days, who sorts it? You may live in a community that requires you to sort trash before it goes out the door. In Chicago, they have chosen to issue and collect 'blue bags' which are later opened and sorted by waste haulers. The Chicago press has generally been kept out of those sorting facilities. The workers are the people who do the dirty work of keeping America clean.

As state after state passes recycling laws, household garbage that once went to landfills or incinerators now often goes to a 'materials recovery facility.' In the trade they are often called 'dirty MuRFs'. At such a facility, workers recover cans, bottles and other recyclables from raw trash dumped on conveyer belts. At other facilities (there are many variations) recyclables arrive pre sorted by residents into plastic bags. But many people don't cooperate. Some households don't get the idea that disposable dirty diapers aren't recyclable.

Some MuRFs employ prisoners for 40 to 75 cents per hour plus time off for good behavior. In my area, Kankakee County, developmentally disabled have been used. The Kankakee Country Training Center took over the program on the promise that it would make money and help the client workers. What has happened is that waste haulers and city employees skimed off aluminum cans and--if prices are high--cardboard. As I write this (11/99), the program has been abandoned by KCTC.

At some MuRFs, turnover exceeds 100%. Conditions can be terrible. Cold temperatures in winter are only the beginning. Smells are overwhelming. Trucks dump garbage onto a vast 'tip floor.' From there it goes on a 'trash line.' Workers reach into a foot high trough of garbage, plucking out loose cans and bottles. Between loads they use snow shovels to heft trash that has fallen on the floor back onto the conveyer. The unceasing river of trash is a maelstrom of soaked paper, cans, rotten meat, broken glass, tampons, kitty litter and more. A drizzle of trash particles permeates the air. Chicago has a "blue bag" program. The press was kept out of the facilities when the program began.

Pay is close to minimum wage. Although steel-toed boots, hard hats, and safety glasses are required, hazards abound such as used hypodermic needles, bleach, and smoldering ashes from barbecue pits. Rats, dead pets, sex toys, used condoms and snakes add to the risk.

Many of the facilities remain primitive in terms of safety. Hazards include infection, back pain, repetitive-strain injuries, needle sticks and lacerations from cans and glass. Workers with backgrounds in farm or slaughterhouse labor shrug off the risks. Their neighbors steer clear of them when they come home from work due to the lingering smell. One says his kids greet him with 'Daddy, you stink!" But, he says, he gets paid on Friday and has cash to bring home.

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III. LOCK BOX PROCESSING

This unit is about what happens when you pay a bill or send a contribution to groups like NOW, Greenpeace, or MADD. How is that mail processed? Described here is the darker side of financial "lockbox" processing done by one of the less worker-friendly companies.

Usually, there is little evidence of finance processing facilities seen from the street. Often they are located in building that were formerly warehouses or in abandoned factories that once housed labor-intensive industries now lost to the Third World.

Inside, long lines of women sit at Spartan desks, slitting envelopes, sorting contents and filling out 'control cards' that record how many letters they have opened and how long it has taken them. Workers here in 'the cage' must process three envelopes a minute. Nearby, other women tap keyboards, keeping pace with a quota that demands 8,500 strokes an hour. (My note: That works out to be more than two strokes per second!) Computers keep track of keystrokes--and errors.

The room is silent. Talking is not allowed. There are no outside windows. That would be a distraction. Coffee mugs, pictures of the kids, or other personal artifacts are forbidden.

There is continuous surveillance. The work floor resembles an enormous classroom in the midst of final examinations. Desks point toward the front where a manager keeps watch from a raised pedestal which workers call "the birdhouse." Often, such a pedestal is located behind the workers to create more unease. Some have hidden cameras like a gambling casino who can check on any worker by using zoom capability to scrutinize even the slightest potential infraction. Clients who purchase these services like the tight control and the security they provide.

For the workers, it is something else. "The office of the future can look a lot like the factory of the past," says Barbara Garson, author of "The Electronic Workshop" and other books on the modern workplace. "Modern tools are being used to bring 19th century working conditions into the white collar world."

The telephone, camera, and computer are the new tools of time-and-motion experts. (My note: the most famous time motion studies were done not far from here at The Hawthorn Works of Western Electric in Cicero, Illinois. Both the company and the physical plants are gone. At Hawthorn were the first studies of the effect of background music, lighting, colors, and much more on employee productivity. They are fascinating reading.

The total focus may boost productivity, but it makes many workers feel lonely and trapped. Some manage to talk to fellow workers by not turning their head and hiding their lips. In most employee settings, work is your social life, especially if you are divorced and have kids. During breaks, workers crowd the parking lot and chat nonstop. Some don't eat much because the less you chew, the less you can talk. There are no other scheduled breaks and workers aren't allowed to sip coffee or eat at their desks during the long stretches before or after lunch. Hard candy is the only permitted desk snack.

New technology and the breaking down of labor into discrete, repetitive tasks also have stripped jobs such as these of whatever variety and skills clerical work once possessed. Now, when data entry folks make a mistake, the computer buzzes and the warming message flashes on screen "check digit error!" All of this makes the work simpler but deepens the monotony. One worker commented ruefully: "I won't pay bills because I can't stand to open another envelope. I'll leave letters sitting in the mailbox for days."

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IV. OTHER EXAMPLES OF NINE TO NOWHERE

(1) Correctional Officers, many of whom come from poor rural areas where prison-building has exploded with the tripling of America's inmate population since 1980. Desperate for jobs, these new rural turnkeys often are unprepared for the stress of policing urban convicts. (My note: Illinois has a policy of building state prisons downstate away from the gangs and in towns hungry for any kind of employment. The newest in in Tamms.)

(2) Nursing Home Aids, caring for the aged in facilities that are more crowded than ever with severely ill residents released at the earliest chance by cost conscious hospitals. Often they are part-timers (thus with no benefits) who have little training, nursing home aides suffer from soaring injury rates yet frequently lack health benefits themselves.

(3) "Gut Rehab" workers who reclaim buildings in decayed urban cores, using picks and shovels to clear abandoned buildings that have been used for years as dumps, dog kennels, junkies' dens and makeshift brothels. Many are day labor, themselves an invisible workforce.

..... CJ '99

Resource:

Horwitz, T. "9 to Nowhere" Wall Street Journal December 1st, 1994.