How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (Cultural Front) by Cary Nelson & Marc Bousquet

Author:Cary Nelson & Marc Bousquet [Nelson, Cary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NYU Press short
Published: 2007-12-31T23:00:00+00:00

According to at least one long-term Teamster full-timer, the part-time students working the night sort are driven particularly hard: “They cram eight hours work into five.” Agreeing with this characterization of the workload for undergraduate employees, one student worker said, “Around finals time, I’d go for days without sleep. The scary thing is, I’d see the sleepless period coming, know there was nothing I could do about it other than quit school or quit work, and then learn to psych myself up for it.”

Most bloggers complained of the pay (“pathetic”), schedule (“random, terrible hours”), injuries (“I was killing myself physically”; “constant muscle pulls/strains, a lot of safety hazards”; “horrible; you’ll sweat like a dog in the summer and freeze in the winter—unsafe—watch out for sharp objects and falling boxes”), and supervisory harassment. As a whole, the evaluations were resoundingly negative: “This was the worst job I ever had”; “You can imagine it’s bad when the highest UPS scores with me in any category is a minus 2”; “If you’re thinking of working here, DON’T DO IT!” Many of the bloggers give a vivid portrait of the nature of the stressful nature of the work. Every error is tracked, and a minimum standard for error-free sorting is one error in 2,500. How often do you make an error while typing? If you’re like me, you make several typing errors per page, for an error rate per word of 1 in 60 or so. At UPS, an error of 1 in 500 is considered extremely poor. The student workers are particularly likely to be placed in these high-stress positions. If younger, they are commonly inexperienced at work generally. If older, they have typically suffered substantial economic or personal distress. Either way, those who don’t express rage and disappointment, or vote with their feet by quitting, appear likely to internalize management’s construction of them as slow-moving failures. Students sometimes contribute to weblogs like “Brown Blood” less to complain than to get coping advice (“Is there a better way of doing this without going miserably slowly?…I want to show that I can be competent in some form of employment.”)

The work of the loaders intensifies during the holiday rush:

I hate how UPS is always fucking you over. On a normal day I load 3 trucks and lately it’s been a total of about 800–900 packages…. They told me I would only have the 4th car one day per week. Well guess what…they gave me 4 cars 3 days this week. Today I had a total of over 1600 packages with no help, the bastards. My loads were shit and my drivers were bitching, but what the hell can I do about it?

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