Hamilton eats the burgers as he drives and then punches in to start his shift arranging incoming product inventory just before 5 pm. In the middle of the night, he takes thirty minutes of unpaid break time and reheats the chilis. By the time he clocks out at 5:30 am, his car has frozen, so Hamilton sits huddled in the dark until it warms enough that he can drive home. The four workers interviewed for this piece also say that their managers speak less about safety and instead emphasize speed during this period. All have been involved in organizing fellow employees to try and improve working conditions, but none work at a facility where a unionization petition has been filed. Two of Crane’s seven children, sons aged 20 and 31, also work at the same fulfillment center. They both work the night shift, but the family, with Crane as a single mother, has only one car, so they pass the car back and forth in the parking lot every morning and night between shifts. When Crane gets home from work after her day shift, she has three teenage boys at home to feed and put to bed. “I can’t come home and sit down and sleep like I would like to,” she says. When she hands over the car to her sons at the start of her day shift and the end of their night shift, the exhaustion on their faces is painful to see. “I’ve got a 20-year old who comes out walking like he’s a 50-year old man,” Crane says. Fee works with one other person to manage five stations that are part of the process of moving packages from planes onto trucks. Her department is significantly understaffed compared to peak season last year, she says, creating additional pressure to work as fast as possible. If she and her coworkers don’t move fast enough, the chutes that deliver packages from the floor above will fill up, turning on a blue warning light. Too many blue lights and the workers upstairs have to stop work. “It’s sort of like a jam-up point,” Fee says. Ortega works on one of the teams that feeds those chutes, maneuvering large boxes full of bags, and moving bags or boxes onto robots. On her floor, alarms sound every time a conveyor belt or chute is jammed or full. In peak season, they sound more often because more packages come through, and more of them are larger, Ortega says. “Most of the day now the conveyor alarms are going off, it’s just so loud in there,” she says.
