I read an excellent book on how the blue collar work system works in the US. While it cannot compare to doing daily wage work in India or other developing countries, I was still quite surprised by how it’s actually a whole world away from white collar work. It is required reading for anyone who works in tech and perceives automation to be for the “greater good”.
The author worked for a few months each at Amazon (picker/packer in a fulfilment centre), Convergys (call centre worker) and McDonalds (store worker). In all 3 instances, she observed that:
- The companies expect workers to be as robot-like as possible. Every task is designed such that thinking is minimised and efficiency is maximised. At Amazon, workers’ tasks were exclusively controlled by their scanner that told them what to do. At the call centre, employees were never allowed to veer off script, and had to attempt to make a sale even if the person they were speaking to was calling to cancel a subscription for a deceased family member (!!!). Any extra minute of being late to log on to shifts was measured and held against workers. Since the workers are often hired by 3rd party companies as contractors, there is no concept of paid time off, health insurance or the usual benefits that apply to FTEs. Even an extra bathroom break outside of the stipulated 1 hour break per day is payable by staff. “Efficiency” takes on a whole new meaning here.
- There is very high turnover rate. The people who work there cannot take the monotony/stress/pain/rigidity of their jobs and just quit. But this doesn’t seem to be particularly concerning to the company, they just go ahead and hire someone else. The high turnover further reinforces point 1, so that the job is made even more “dumb” such that anyone can be recruited in and asked to perform.
- Staffing is always at the absolute minimum such that workers are always “on fire” and running from one task to another in a frenzy of efficiency. Workers are expected to be be amped up to execute at the highest performance level all the time. When you have to push yourself everyday to perform to the maximum possible level, you tend to burn out pretty quickly.
One particular vignette that is still haunting me: Pickers and packers at Amazon need to be on their feet for the entirety of their shift and walk many miles everyday. Understandably, workers are under a lot of pain from doing this job (even if they are generally fit) and need a respite from their feet. Amazon’s solution to handle this problem is just downright baffling to me. Instead of increasing breaks, increasing the staff count or improving the health benefits, Amazon decided that their answer to this issue was to install vending machines of free painkillers for the staff to use. No wonder America has a drug abuse problem.
What’s the alternative to these jobs though?
It seems that all blue collar work is becoming very similar to one another in the above aspects, making it the “new normal”. Even if someone did quit an Amazon warehouse, another company’s fulfilment centre isn’t likely to be much better, plus the pay in many instances is even lesser with less-safe working conditions. Besides, there’s always someone who’s hungrier than you who is willing to do that shitty job for a lesser pay. That’s the price that one pays for globalisation.
The way to get out of this vortex seems to be to somehow bust yourself doing really good work, to get promoted to become a manager. But even then, it’s not all good news, because the pay isn’t that much higher and work is a lot more intense.
At this point, I have only questions and not many answers. But at a high level, I think we need strong government policy to skill up / train people so that they can migrate out of blue collar work, and for the ones that continue to do such jobs, we need to be humanising the jobs and guaranteeing fair working conditions.
As part of the tech industry that’s bringing automation to everything, I think we have an obligation to society to prioritise people in addition to optimising for efficiency in our solutions. Developing a good understanding of the people behind the job, and getting actual experience of physically performing the job should be essential before we can even begin to design empathetic solutions.
Shweta Padmanaban 