Time is money/Safety is everybody’s job

During this two-month training period, I’m paid hourly — $12, plus 25 cents for working the night shift. But after 60 days, grocery selectors are paid on a piecework basis, per case, with an adjustment for accuracy. The rate is about 11 cents a case to start with, but is decreased to 8.25 cents if a selector makes too many mistakes. From time to time, a truck load of pallets is audited in order to see how accurately the order has been filled.

Picking groceries is essentially solitary work, with each guy cruising around the warehouse on his own, with his own list of things to get, and there’s no feeling of everyone being part of a single project. The usual courtesies of trying not to get in people’s way are colored, on one hand, by the knowledge that if you hold somebody up you’re costing him money, and on the other by the awareness that if you try too hard not to hold other people up you’re cutting into your own pay. People are, however, organized into “teams” that work on the same truckload of stuff, under the supervision of a person who is organizing that load. Being on a team doesn’t affect a worker much, except that the company cuts the pay of everyone on a team (for two weeks) if anyone on the team picks too many wrong cases.

The company has a strong interest in fast work, since a given worker’s benefits cost the same whether he picks 500 cases in a shift or 2000. And the worker can go from making pretty lousy money to doing pretty well, if he can really move a lot of cases. During our training period, although we’re not working “on incentive,” we have a quota to meet, which increases each week. I picked an average of 650 cases per shift in my second week, which just barely met this quota. (If I were being paid on a piecework basis, I’d be making about $8 an hour.) By the end of the 60 days, we’re supposed to be picking about 1500 cases, and anyone who doesn’t will either be kept on as a “trainee,” still making $12.50, or told to move on.

Hurrying, then, is fundamental to the job. And guys who are picking at a high rate do move fast, throwing themselves up into the racks to reach high items at the back of a pallet, ducking under racks to get bottom-slot cases, tossing boxes onto their pallets and jumping back onto the jack to move onto the next thing. Wrapping finished pallets with the Saran wrap-like film used to bind them together, they run in circles around the pallets, first upright, then bent at the waist with their heads pointed to the floor as they wind the film to the bottom of the pallet. Federal law allows for two 15-minute breaks in a 10-hour shift, but unlike the 30-minute lunch break also mandated, we don’t clock out for them, so it is possible to skip them in order to increase the case-per-hour rate, and people often do.

Many factors beyond a selector’s control can lower the pick rate: having to get a new battery for the jack; getting stuck behind forklifts in the aisles a lot; or most common, just getting a bad shot — one that requires a lot of travel around the warehouse for relatively few items. Other slowdowns, more within a worker’s control, include losing part of a load due to excess speed and/or bad stacking, and cleaning up spills when something gets broken. The only way to keep the pick rate up in the face of such adversities is, of course, to hurry more.

There are no banners urging workers to move faster, just “SLAM the job” (“stop, look, assess, and manage,” remember?), “You count and others count on you — be safe,” “If it’s not safe, don’t do it,” etc. But the language of money speaks more eloquently than these safety messages, and the importance of speed eclipses caution for the most part. Getting on or off a moving jack, having fewer than four points of contact (i.e, both feet and hands) while on a jack, moving a jack while not standing on the deck, and reading a shot list while moving all fall into the category of officially unsafe and forbidden practices, and all are a constant part of the job. To observe the rules strictly would slow the pace down so much it would be impossible to make remotely decent money.

Last week, a selector in the freezer warehouse hit a railing, catching his leg between the railing and his jack and suffering a broken femur and a gash from hip to knee. The next day another guy’s hand was injured — “crushed” was the word we heard — when something fell on it. In the first accident, the worker was making a corner at “rabbit speed” (that is, having engaged the overdrive activated by the “rabbit button”) while reading his shot when he lost control. I don’t know the circumstances of the other incident.

The guy with mangled leg, if he returns to work, will have his pay cut. Preventable accidents, along with inaccurate picking, absences and some other misdeeds, are among the things the company punishes workers for by cutting their per-case rate.

I have felt some desire to do this job well, which is to say quickly, but I soon resigned myself to failing in this regard. For one thing, a 20-year-old may be able to get away with throwing his body around at a 1500-case-per-shift pace, repeating movements all night that are a perfect recipe for a back injury, but at almost 40, I can’t. For another, one of the few truths I think I understand about life is that, in the absence of a true emergency, hurrying is almost always a mistake. And while I think a lot of my co-workers get caught up in a competition to be fast (I hear guys bragging they picked “two grand” in a shift), I would feel like a sucker if I were driving myself at the pace the company wants. So I work at a fairly quick but humane and dignified pace that, if I stick around long enough, will get me fired.