golbatgender:

Also, pro tip: any company that claims to care about the people producing their food? Well, maybe they do, maybe they don’t, but they sure don’t care about the people shipping and handling their food. Kind bars, for example? Fair trade ingredients, but the warehouses they’re shipped through aren’t climate controlled in summer and have bare concrete floors. Or the ones with chocolate are shipped through refrigerated warehouses where half the necessary tasks for processing them can’t be done with gloves on. (At least, not without way more experience than most temp workers have. I could put shipping labels on boxes while wearing gloves now, but I couldn’t then.) Or the tasks could and should be automated but aren’t, because it’s less expensive to pay a temp than to keep a machine in good repair. But despite all the cruelty involved in shipping the ingredients to the factory and shipping the bars to your grocery store (never mind at the factory itself), these granola bars are sold as the humane, fair-trade choice, because Unilever pays the farmers a little bit more for the cashews or cranberries, and probably still far less than what they’re really worth.

Warehouses are liminal spaces. No one thinks about them. They store product and reroute it, often repackage it; they rarely add anything to what the consumer perceives as the product itself. They also employ millions of people, usually at minimum wage or less than 150% of it. (If the starting wage is above $10/hr in my area, it means the working conditions are especially bad.) It’s a very hard environment to work in, even at the “good” ones. It destroys your clothes and your body. Some workers are union (particularly UPS), but the majority are not and many are temps.

If you publicly care about labor rights, please do not leave warehouses out of your activism. I have never seen an article that talks about warehouses as their own entity, only retail, food service, and factories. A few articles about Amazon, but those act like the problems are unique to Amazon, not every company that has “logistics” or “distribution” or “solutions” in its name and large buildings with loading docks. We break our feet and our backs so you can have your groceries or birthday presents. Don’t forget us.