Human Farm: A Dark, Familiar Tale Seems To Have Renewed Itself, by Caitie Steffen
My middle school education never felt easy to me. It felt like I was always trying much harder than my classmates. My grade point average was just that, average. And as much as I studied and tried, I never felt like I really understood what I was learning. There was this moment though in sixth grade that I have never forgotten.
We were reading Animal Farm. That book to this day, is still a favorite of mine and it is because of this moment. We were almost through the end of the book and had just recapped the part where Boxer, the loyal, hard working Clydesdale, was irreparably injured and preparing to retire, or so he thought. Then, the glue truck comes for him. My sixth grade teacher posed this question to the class, "Why did the pigs send Boxer to the glue factory instead of allowing him to retire in the front pasture of the farm?" My school was small so the class was maybe 30 students. No one raised their hand. Suddenly, this interesting thought popped in my head. I sheepishly raised my hand. The teacher called on me and I quietly said, "Because he was not useful to them anymore?" My teacher leapt to his feet and wanted me to say more. I continued, saying, that he was the hardest worker but being old and injured the pigs could not use him anymore in the same way. I couldn't believe that I had gotten the answer right, and it was a rather insightful revelation for a girl of 11. So, where am I going with this story?
My boyfriend and I binge watched the HBO series "Chernobyl", which actually inspired me to reread Animal Farm. I realize that this TV series was "so 8 months ago" but we tend to be late to jump on the bandwagon when it comes to popular TV shows. And after finishing the 5 episodes in 3 days, per my usual curious self, I started reading all about the incident. I just could not wrap my head around the concept that something so horrible, deceiving, and corrupt could occur on such a large scale. I imagined what it would be like to live in a country so jaded by an idealism that clouds any sense of rational judgment. And then I remembered George Orwell's book, "Animal Farm" from 20 years ago.
I remembered bits and pieces of the story but after re-reading it, it finally dawned on me how sad and frighteningly relevant the book remains. It creatively warns about what is wrong with communist, socialist, fascist, and ultimately human society. As I helplessly observed Napolean's hypocrisy, apathy, cruelty, and deception play out, I was frightened that the origins of so many ideologies start with good intentions and end with the worst.
Napoleon at the start of the book seems like he is for a just cause and truly cares about the other animals on the farm. He could never find himself becoming the human he hates so much. And yet, by the end of the book, the animals could not differentiate man from pig.
The Atlantic published an article written by Will Evans on November 25th titled "Ruthless Quotas at Amazon Are Maiming Employees". With endless Black Friday shopping deals hitting me in the face everywhere I looked and Amazon being a frontrunner in that assault, I decided to give the article a read.
Evans introduces Candice Dixon, and I already know that this article is the last thing Amazon wants me to be reading right before their largest shipping days of the year. Candice worked in one of the distribution warehouses as a "stower." She is responsible for scanning items from endless boxes of goods as well as the rack number they are going to be stored on, so the new location gets logged in the system. In order to meet Amazon's quota, Evans quantifies that workers need to scan a new item every 11 seconds. In a normal 8-hour workday there are 28,800 seconds. (This being a busy season, these "stowers" are working 12-hour days, but for the purpose of this example we'll assume it is an 8-hour workday.) If she needs to scan a new item every 11 seconds, she was expected to scan a total of 2,618 items during her workday. Her scan rate was 300 items an hour which computes to scanning a new item every 12 seconds. All of that data is tracked and also stored in the system, so that managers can monitor employee performance and give write ups to under-performers who ultimately get fired. Does any of this sound kind of familiar? Oh and did I mention that Candice is 54-years old?
As I was reading this article, I could hear Boxer's voice ringing through my head: "I will work harder!" Evans writes, that the employees of this particular warehouse hit a new record and shipped a million packages in 24 hours last year. And guess what? Amazon rewarded them with fat bonuses. NOT! They got t-shirts saying they were now part of the "Million Unit Club." Whatever the f**k that means. Candice ended up irreparably injuring her back and was ordered by her doctor to stop working. She was offered a workers compensation check that, according to Evans' reporting, is going to run out. Now she is worried she won't be able to find work, may lose her home, and is kindly reminded every day with chronic back pain. Evans discovered that this particular warehouse that Candice worked at, was sited for 422 injuries last year with hers being one of them. Despite these alarming statistics at Amazon's fulfillment center, their spokesperson, as Evan's accounts in his article, wrote in a statement that the "injury rates are high because [Amazon is] aggressive about recording worker injuries and cautious about allowing injured workers to return to work before they're ready." Gosh, I never realized that Squealer could take a form other than a pig, but that is all I could think about while I was reading such blatant propaganda.
Evans found that the injured Amazon employees had a difference of opinion and either felt "cast aside as damaged goods or [were] sent back to jobs that injured them further." Candice is quoted in Evans' article saying, "[A]ll they care about is getting the job done and getting it out fast and not realizing how it's affecting us and our own bodies." The workers are expendable and replaceable after their bodies break. And once again, I saw the truck flash before me with the words, "Alfred Simmonds, Horse Slaughterer and Glue Boiler, Willingdon. Dealer in Hides and Bone-Meal. Kennels Supplied." I can't stop thinking about those gut-wrenching words written on the side of the carriage taking Boxer away; Boxer was alone, scared, and hopeless.
It's shocking to think that a book written in 1944 would be so relevant to a company's practices in 2019. How did we get here? What's worse? Being treated as a laborer that is one of many and replaceable, or being treated as a laborer that is replaceable in a democratic country working for the richest person in the world.
I'm not writing this to persuade you to boycott Amazon. It won't make any difference anyway since the conglomerate is convenient and everywhere. I guess for me personally, I just wanted to open my own eyes a little wider to what I walk by everyday. Working in the Financial District of San Francisco can be like living in a rose colored bubble of wealth, memes, and self-involved people worried about whether they're gonna make their pilates class in time. But I see so many homeless people who are alone, scared, and hopeless. I find myself reevaluating if the incessant need for instant gratification and the ease in which we throw away things have led us to this point where we can no longer differentiate between discarded brown boxes and discarded humans.
