I don’t even know where to begin with this one. And forgive me if I’m not making a lot of sense or if I meander verbally, my blood sugar is still low and I’m still really mad about this.
Okay, for starters: we have so much backstock cluttering up our store that we’re down to about maybe half of our receiving area on a good day. Part of this is because of seasonal auto-orders, part of it’s because we’re understaffed as hell, and part of it’s been because they’ve been cutting hours and threatening dire consequences to anyone who gets overtime. (Never mind that the Fair Labor Standards Act declares that it’s illegal to even threaten dire consequences due to having overtime; if they don’t send you home, then it’s yours to keep, and no, you don’t have to take a longer lunch to make the overtime go away.) Yes, it’s November, and they’ve been cutting hours, and they haven’t even so much as hinted at the possibility of hiring seasonal help, much less the number of staff that we’re actually supposed to have. So we have backstock coming out of places we didn’t even know we had. Now, if we had enough people, that might not be such a big problem. But it becomes a much bigger issue when nobody can find anything; there are those new Prego meal pouches that I love because I can just throw one in my backpack and nuke it in between classes, but there are none on the shelf. A barcode scan revealed that there are like 84 of just the flavor I wanted somewhere in the store, but God only knew where. (Probably one of the many pallets leaving only about a foot of room in front of a fire exit, with another shipper stacked on top of it.)
Oh, and speaking of that, we got a fire marshal visit not too long ago. We’re not allowed to park a line of backstock pallets down the back hallway to give us more room to unload. I mean, our fire exits are pretty much nonexistent when we’re unloading a truck, and I’ve got a whole folder of pictures on my computer that are nothing but blocked fire exits, but we can’t use the back hallway now. We can’t park them along a little-used “back alley” on the salesfloor, it’s now an instant firing if we lock them in the roller cage outside, and we’ve been threatened with fire and brimstone if we haul full pallets of new freight to their departments before 8PM because there are too many customers before then. (It’s fucking November. There are going to be too many customers at 3AM, but what do I know?) The poor guys in TLE only have one open bay now, because their other bays are full of backstock, but apparently we’re in a holding pattern at least until Thursday because fuck you, that’s why. This has been going on for YEARS now, there are people who’ve worked there for multiple years who still have no idea what most of the walls look like, and yet nothing changes. In fact, it gets worse.
See, I’m diabetic, or at least hypoglycemic. I’ve never had it formally diagnosed because money, and because my General Practitioner is the only doctor in this entire fucking state I’ve been able to find so far who takes my particular Medicaid. (I’ve got a whole ‘nother rant on that here.) I just know that if I go too long without eating, I start going blind, get very aggressive, and eventually just run out of gas. So I’ve finally found a good thing about those vests: they can carry snacks. And I’ll be working the line, getting my freight onto pallets with one hand while I’m cramming something with peanut butter in my mouth with my other hand. I’ve also got this issue where I don’t like being distinctive. I don’t like things that make me stand out from the crowd. Plus, as a decent human being, I don’t like being the only one who needs to take a break because I’m pretty sure everybody else would like to pee, sit down, smoke, and eat a Snickers too. So I’ll hang on as long as I can, until I’m shuffling and slurring and can’t read shipping labels anymore and trying not to drool on myself, until my body stops listening to me and I have to sit down before I fall down, and believe me, those floors are not a pleasant thing to fall on. I’ve actually lost count of the number of times I’ve had to be picked up off the floor.
And today? Today. Fuck today. Fuck today sideways with a rake. Because today, we were not offered a break. At all. Normally, if everything runs on schedule, we work two hours, get a paid 15, work 1 hour 45 minutes, go to lunch for an hour, work two hours, go to break, work 1 hour 45 minutes, go home. And normally that’s a little skewed for us, because we go to break when the truck’s done. Sometimes we’re done in two hours, and lately, because it takes us so much longer to unload from all the sideways walking through pallet-mazes and having to stop to change out pallets, it just makes more sense to go to lunch after the first truck, and then I have to have a very predictable and often-repeated fight with my supervisor because he insists, insists, that it is perfectly acceptable to go to first break at say, 7:30 and then go to lunch at 8. The lower my blood sugar gets, the harder it is to get it back up, especially since it’s a lot easier to refuel a car when the engine is stopped. Me eating peanut butter on the line doesn’t stop a bottom-out, just slows it down. I’ve had this discussion multiple times with this supervisor, a man who’s picked me up off the floor himself and who’s had to poke the buttons on the microwave for me because I couldn’t read them anymore.
Because it takes us so long to get started nowadays, we usually spend the first hour of our shift trying to rearrange backstock pallets enough to give us some room to unload, and then we get started straight on the truck and I’m nibbling on peanut butter by hour 3 at the latest. The thing that gets me is that they could stop the truck, they just won’t. Because that would require pausing it on our Task Manager, shutting and locking the bay door unless somebody was back there to guard it, and then having to search for a salaried member of management to open up the truck again when we come back because they re-keyed the whole store and now nobody but Salaried, not even Loss Prevention, has a key to fucking anything. (LP has a key to their office, that’s it. You’d think security would be given a little more leeway, but apparently not.) They could pause the truck, but they won’t because “we gotta keep rolling on it.” Occasionally they’ll send us one or two at a time to break, which ends up being a really long wait for some people and which sucks a lot for the rest who suddenly have a lot more line to cover, but sometimes (like tonight) they don’t even do that.
I didn’t go to break tonight. At all. And no, the time I spent in the break room trying to make my eyeballs function again because I bottomed out, that doesn’t count. And since a co-manager was there tonight, I confronted him about it.
As it turns out, even though the paid fifteen-minute breaks are literally built into our paychecks, we are only offered said breaks as a courtesy because apparently they’re not required to give them to us anymore. And according to this manager, he’s being really generous by letting me eat my peanut butter on the line, because we’re not supposed to have food in the back rooms, I guess because of crumbs and pests or because of productivity or something. And because I’ve not filed a formal accommodation request with Sedgewick, the outside company which handles medical claims for Walmart, he’s not really required to do anything like give me a break, and gosh he wouldn’t consider even going to break until all his work was 100% done, and by the way, why was I off the clock when the rest of my crew was still back there? (I bottomed out, numbnuts. I was barely gonna be good enough to drive back home, much less go back to unloading the truck. And by the way, according to my state labor law, he is correct on that. Federal law, I haven’t checked in a few years, and I’m sure my Walmart employee handbook has changed since I got it, if I even still have that thing.)
He said it wouldn’t be an issue if we’d just get done on time. He was back there with us for at least half an hour tonight, he knows exactly why it takes so long now! But apparently that’s still somehow our fault. If the line gets backed up, what the blue-checkered shit does he think we’re doing, standing around scratching our asses? We want to get done, so we can go to fucking break.
He did offer one little nugget: if I really need a break, I should just go to break. Whenever I need it. No matter how behind schedule, backed up, or understaffed we are. So therefore, next time I work I’m gonna test that theory. (And then watch me get written up for abandoning my station, because “we gotta keep rolling.”)
Goddamn it, it didn’t used to be this way. The only thing they’re doing is driving off the good people who are smart enough to realize that they don’t have to put up with this shit. I’m about to be one of them. (God, if I didn’t need this fucking job...)
Wednesday, Dec 2, 2015 · 10:23:27 AM +00:00
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Jimmy Rustler
For all of you suggesting that I try organizing for a protest/union: I’ve TRIED. Not very publicly, because I like having an income, but I’ve approached sympathetic people and the only thing I can get out of them is a promise to not report me to management. Most of them are older workers who have been there so long that they have stories of how good it used to be to work there, and whose ages mean that losing their WalMart wages would be a disaster. I tried joining a couple of online groups, and only one of them has found a single other associate (whom I don’t know) in my store.