Seasonal Associate

One winter in the 1970s, I got a job over the winter break as a stockboy at Montgomery Wards. The chain referred to all its employees as associates. Once Christmas was over, I looked at the schedule for the next week, and found myself not on it, ergo presumably... dissociated. I thought it an odd way to let me know, but in any case I would not have continued to work when school resumes.

For that matter my father earned the money for the engagement ring he gave my mother by working evening hours as a holiday-season mail handler for the United States Post Office. That would have been about 1952. He may have been on break from graduate school, or he may have been employed by the Geological Survey.

I don't object to there being seasonal jobs. I do object to them being the model for employment in general.

[edit: corrected typo]

I work for an auto-repair chain in the midwest, and my bosses have repeatedly insisted or suggested on hiring "seasonal associates" to help around the shop. The most cringe-worthy and condescending reference to them came from a general manager who once called them "santas helpers" in a presentation.

Everyone puts off auto work until they need to go somewhere over the holidays and either relents to the shop time (and the shop rate) or is towed off the highways after an accident or breakdown during holiday travel. holidays and post-holiday are our most stressful and busy time in the shop. You need to tune out the Michael Bublé in the front office, pay extra close attention to detail, and try to stay sane.

What people forget about places like Amazon is they are a shop floor. You might not have tire mounting machines and drill presses, but you have fork trucks and conveyors. You are in an industrial setting, and if you'd like to keep your fingers and toes, you should never rush the work.

In my professional opinion there should never be room for a seasonal worker in a shipping warehouse. You either have enough capacity to perform safely or you do not.

That was powerful.

I once spent weeks packing donated children's toys and also spent a while in an auto plant. And there's this awful feeling I had at both. I would describe it as the place being contaminated by depression and if you stay too long you'll succumb to it.

These fulfillment centres are like Chernobyl in that sense. It all looks normal: there's merchandise we see at home, there's other people, there's music, there's employment. But it also just feels like you've entered a foreign environment that isn't capable of sustaining healthy human life.

I felt it again just reading this story. That urge to fight and cry is a sign that you're being exposed to too much contamination.

We need to get the humans out of there and send in robots to do that work.

She seems neurotic. The job may be soul crushing, but a 3 month temp position is hardly something to get worked up over. And the confrontation she had with her coworker was just painful to read. I guess she's never worked on a team with disagreeable people before.

{ I worked at an airport for a subcontractor of UPS one winter, around the holidays. On the one hand, it was an awesome job for someone who loved airplanes as much as I did (do). On the other, this was in Montana, and spending 3-4 hours every morning before school unloading an airplane's worth of packages, and then loading them into other smaller aircraft, in the ~0F weather plus 30mph windchill was pure misery. We were just tools, used to unload awkwardly sized containers full of packages onto a conveyor, and sort those packages to the right aircraft. Somehow this (in 2004) was still cheaper to use humans for, rather than some sort of automated barcode scanning system....but it was ~7.25 an hour in Montana, and for a HS student, that was good money.

Its not the same kind of repetitive mind numbing work that this article describes, but it was just as full of unexplained pitfalls, with the added benefit of being on a freezing cold active runway. I ended up losing that job, after a few months, which in retrospect, was probably a good thing for my education.

I immediately noticed an unusual (to my ears) usage of the phrase "down to you" in her article: "it’s not down to you ... it's down to others.". Where I'm from in the states, we usually say "up to you" to mean something isn't one's choice. Is this another odd difference between American and British English?

Required reading - The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair:

https://www.amazon.com/Jungle-Dover-Thrift-Editions/dp/04864...

This is the book that led to food safety reforms after the dangers of meat packing plants were revealed to the public. With the loss of unions in the US and around the world, social darwinism is back in full force. Unions may or may not be the answer to the problems facing humanity today, but the discussion about how to form a more equitable economy is long overdue. And the irony of listing the Amazon link for this book is not lost on me!

Edit: I remembered another required short read:

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Anyone else notice that one of the places you can order the book is... Amazon?

I have no idea what it’s like as a seasonal associate at Amazon today.

But I do know what it was like 20 years ago.

A genuine mixture of chaos, frustration, hard work, and passion trying to build what’s next.

Chaos was ever present with a large team of dedicated Problem Solvers. Associates who understood the system well enough to solve anomalies.

Frustration largely came from the incongruence of trying to keep customers happy while trying to hire new associates that allowed us to “average up”(each hire improving the overall average).

Hard work was constant, but it was achievable for anyone in mediocre health or better. The biggest issue was the overtime. We did run mandatory overtime for all associates that was challenging, but doable. Exempt management just worked silly hours, it’s part of why I eventually departed on good terms post Holiday madness.

Seasonal Associates were referred to as temps back then.

They were all sourced from a single temping agency Integrity.

Often times just a mob of warm bodies, numerous temps discovered to be intoxicated, and a few times armed.

Shifting from paper pick lists to handheld scanners was a big change.

I guess you could call it early human/computer interaction that allowed individual metric measurement to be scaled.

An earlier poster’s reference to Taylor’s Scientific Management is interesting.

Amazon’s reputation in Operations being harsh originated 20 years ago when it scaled from a small team of true believers to a large enterprise of regular human beings.

We fired people quickly and decisively like an assembly line.

Amazon Operations then, and I presume now, is not suitable for someone who is physically unfit or unhealthy.

Which when looking at the unsuitability of such a high percentage of young people being unfit for military service(obesity epidemic), leads me to believe that many who choose to work at Amazon are physically unsuitable due to lifestyle choice.

Where is it all going?

I would love to see a flattening of consumer spending to avoid the need for seasonal hiring, but that’s unlikely, especially, with the introduction of Amazon’s truly artificial holiday stress test Prime Day.

The very early folks like myself benefitted enormously from the low wage gamble we took in exchange for Amazon stock options.

More recently, the upside in compensation and stock units is far more limited, although promotion prospects within the company are considerable.

There just isn’t the profit per employee with Amazon as there is with Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Netflix that is often confused and conflated by labour advocates.

I just remember us all making fun of Walmart and being like the Rebel Alliance. Now it’s portrayed as the Galactic Empire a mere 20 years later.

With all the great humour/satire around “Red Shirts” and evil minions in Venture Brothers, I wonder if we will see any satire around Amazon inspired by dystopian stories like THX1138.

Happy Holidays to all, especially those seasonal workers moving all of our Chinese made consumer goods from A to B.