Pandemic Parcels

The warehouse is quiet in the morning. Most folks still seem to be half asleep, which is only natural as it’s still dark out. There are a few folks having their breakfast smoke or coffee, and fewer eating breakfast food. Two in the morning isn’t exactly breakfast time. I force myself to eat something anyway: a bowl of cereal before my commute, a protein bar as I walk the warehouse to my trucks, a banana once I’m at my spot on the belt. I know I’ll need the energy for the morning ahead. A loud, jarring buzzer blares at the two minute mark, and the straggling boots take their places at the belt. Some greet me or greet one another, some hide in their truck. There’s tension in the air, waiting to be cut by the sharp sound of the final buzzer. 

As usual, Scott is to my left. He’s wearing the same Jets hat he wears backwards every day, with his black ponytail hanging underneath it. He talks like you’d imagine a corner perched New Yorker would talk, despite growing up on Lake Mahopac. Dale is the manager on duty this morning, my preferred choice of the two. He alternates with Gil, who used to serve in the Navy and loves to tell you about it. Maybe because you wouldn’t guess it by looking at him. Dale is an ex-insurance salesman who “needed a break from corporate” and “wanted to try his hand at something hands-on.” Just because I respect him for it doesn’t mean I don’t think he’s crazy. Alex to my right is closer to 25 than 30. Bald, nearsighted, with a wiry frame. Sometimes he plays music from a speaker he hangs off the door of his last truck: angry rap, angry punk, angry metal. He was up for a promotion to driver last week. Seeing he’s stationed next to me, I don’t ask him how it went. It’s not as easy as you may think. The company has plenty of drivers, not enough loaders, so they’ll keep you down if they can. Alex is positioned at the front of the belt, as usual, deeming him the splitter. The conveyor belt runs straight through our section of the warehouse, bisecting the 40 trucks in our zone. There are 20 on either side of the belt, one group facing out of the warehouse and the other facing inward. Everything is extremely organized from the micros to the macros. Everything and everyone operates as a well-maintained machine. The shipping machine that is our warehouse.

Today I have four trucks, because I’ve been doing well. At least that’s what they tell me. I would much rather only have the singular truck I started with. In the thirty seconds before the belt takes its first breath, I reminisce on learning the skills of a preloader. Scanning and marking the boxes, all with one hand, then tossing them on the shelf while searching the belt for the next. The irony is not lost on me that there are many skills to be learned in order to perform “unskilled labor.” Nor is it lost on me that my unskilled labor is now deemed “essential.” I’m essentially unskilled, and paid like it. Yet my coworker across the belt from me, Chris (who everyone refers to as Bean because he wears rubber L.L. Bean boots as opposed to traditional work boots), is late for the third time in two weeks. Management is annoyed; with him, but more so because they know they can’t do anything about it. They can’t afford to let go of anyone. Firing someone would open up a gap on the belt not so easily filled. Bean stays employed, stays at home, and the company stays paying his gap left on the belt.

There is a high demand for unskilled laborers that are now harder to come by. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ report, published November 15, 2022, the U.S. labor market experienced a period of unprecedented volatility during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their monthly survey of nonfarm establishments recorded a decrease in employment of 13.6 percent (20.5 million jobs) between March and April 2020, the largest one-month drop since the survey began in 1939. The survey then showed an employment gain of 3.4 percent (4.5 million jobs) from May to June 2020, the largest one-month increase since the survey began. The statistics are a net result of the simultaneous adding and eliminating of jobs and worker gaining and losing employment between singular months. At the height of the pandemic, there was a clear panic, as both employers and employees alike struggled to profit given new and extreme circumstances. Is remote work an option? Can we afford on-site safety adjustments? How can we keep productivity consistent? Questions such as these plagued the workspace and immediate solutions were often hard to find and provided false relief. This would lead to the mass labor turnover as seen in the statistics.

I started at UPS in April 2020, when I decided I had too much time to kill before leaving for my first year of college in the fall. I went from a student-athlete finishing his last year of high-school and performing in the school musical as preparation for my approaching life as a Drama and Film major, to some guy living at home with nothing to do but Zoom school. This was not enough for me to fill my empty hours, so I scoured job sites, hoping to get a headstart on the college tuition struggle. I sought, “no-experience necessary” listed at the top of postings, and found the UPS warehouse where I would wind up. When COVID froze the world, people locked themselves in their homes, and were told not to come out at all costs. Their means of survival arrived on their doorsteps in cardboard boxes. Thanks to continued shipping labor every day, someone got their means for survival: food, makeup, or home gym. Shipping went unhalted, and I decided to be a part of it. My goal: use the pandemic to gain an edge, instead of waiting for the world to heal and an opportunity to open up. 

The buzzer blares its final blast and the belt takes its first slow step. The day has officially begun, and anticipation builds. When will the first box come down the belt, what will it look like, whose truck will it be for, how many oversized items will there be today, will we have to stay late? There are too many unknowns to stew in, too many anxiety inducing distractions. Think too much and your boxes pass right by without you noticing. You end up building on your neighbor's work who's already got their own trucks to worry about. They don't need to be managing your missed boxes. Best option is to listen to your music or the sounds of the warehouse, empty your mind, and only think about what's in front of you. 

I spot my first parcel by the punch-code on its sticker. Yellow: IN.032 - 480. I’m on the yellow belt today, my favorite of the six to be on. I’ve got trucks 30, 31, 32, and 34, which are all facing into the warehouse. Truck 33 had a steering fluid issue. The IN code communicates to the splitter, Alex, to slide the box to my side of the belt. I know before I pick up the package, which is a pretty standard-sized box, it’s going in the 400 section of the truck’s shelves. Right side of the truck, bottom shelf, and closer to the end of the section since it’s listed under 80. First package spotted and already placed in my mind before it’s even close. Then I see my second. Then my third. Then my fourth. Now I’m simultaneously tracking nine of my boxes on the belt and calculating how to grab them by truck, scan them, mark them, and place them before the next wave arrives. Five months ago that would’ve worked my anxiety overtime. That is no longer the case. 

According to the U.S. International Trade Commission, compared to the same period in 2019, containerized imports rose 9.5 percent, by volume, in the second half of 2020, and year-over-year grew 16.4 percent in the fourth quarter. In mid-2020, increased economic activity and sharply rising consumer demand led to a recovery in merchandise trade which in turn caused capacity shortages in the maritime freight sector. During that time, container shipping firms struggled to restore capacity to previous levels. For example, U.S. imports from Asia were nearly 30 percent higher in December 2020 than in December 2019, precipitated by the surge in online purchases. The number of shipping containers in circulation during the second half of 2020 was insufficient to meet customer storage demands and higher than anticipated consumer demand for imports. The unexpected recovery in demand shocked the distribution system and firms had trouble getting products to customers. Moreover, labor shortages impacted global supply chains. For example, onshore transportation systems (including rail and trucks) faced labor shortages that delayed the availability of goods and increased costs.

I was hired for the part-time position of pre-loader, meaning I clock in at 5 a.m. Do my job right, and I get to clock out on time at 9 a.m. On my first day, there was an announcement given by the managers of each belt, “4 a.m. call time tomorrow.” Call time? Was I already back in the theatre? The next day I arrived in accordance with the new start time. At the end of the day, “3 a.m. call time tomorrow.” I looked around to see if anyone was expressing the shock I felt internally, but the entire belt was unfazed. By the start of the next week, daily call time was 2 a.m., and that lasted the entire summer. There were days that were worse. Call time the weekend of and days immediately following July 4th was 12 a.m. They were expecting a mass surge for the holiday. It put a damper on my independence celebrations to say the least. Hard to feel free when you can’t get your next day’s labor out of the back of your mind. As promised, the weekend proved challenging, to say the least. The parcel waves were unprecedented. We filled each of our trucks with two hours still left to go in our shift. Those two hours were spent making neat piles of packages that would have to go out with the trucks the next day, on top of the new work that would be coming in. Those neat piles became mountains, and the day’s backed up work became the next week and a half. I was bitter. I struggled to understand how “essential” the countless Sephora boxes I loaded were.

The pandemic further disrupted the flow of goods by halting international travel for maritime workers and increasing maritime personnel costs. As what was once an outbreak became a global pandemic, many governments imposed travel restrictions and certain quarantine procedures that reduced labor mobility in the maritime sector. The International Labour Organization estimated that 800,000 seafarers were unable to embark on or disembark from their vessels in 2020. Starting in May 2020, this problem abated as several countries allowed firms to charter flights in pre-approved “safe transit corridors” to allow seafarers to travel from their home countries to select ports in order to relieve other seafarers. These and other factors increased labor expenses, particularly hardship pay to compensate workers stranded on vessels, higher travel costs to reposition workers, and COVID-19 testing and quarantine expenses. One source estimated that the higher labor-related expenses caused maritime personnel costs to rise 6.2 percent in 2020. These expenses became the unspoken reason you took pictures of your timecards, especially when it came to overtime. Word went around fast that Corporate would try to shave your pay if they felt they could get away with it, so you had to be responsible for keeping a backlog of your own hours. I yearned for the day I could lie down on my couch and delete the hundreds of time card pictures from my camera roll.

Education comes with experience. You don’t realize how sharp cardboard is unless you’re throwing it around seven hours a day. Most loaders wear work gloves. In the early days I’d wear latex gloves because I was told to. Two weeks later and I ditched the shredded tatters that the latex gloves would become after the first hour. Instead I’m barehanded. I don’t mind the cuts or dirt because I feel like I grip the cardboard better, and there’s no sensation more gratifying than washing my hands of the seven hours of work and grime at the end of the day. Additionally, the latex was only recommended because of COVID. Yet every day, almost ritualistically, we each get one disposable surgical mask from our manager, loop it around our ears, then pull it under our chins. When someone is out of work with COVID, you expect to see them back on the belt in the next couple days. We feel like we’re in our own bubble in the warehouse, as if it’s too early even for the virus to spread. There’s a sense of invincibility, a certain superiority, that comes with waking up before the rest of the workforce. 

My mind is empty at the moment. Belt box truck, belt box truck, belt box truck. Over and over and over again. Somebody once told me, “Good writing should make something banal interesting.” Preloading is as banal as it gets. How do you keep your mind alive while you’re suffocating it in a cardboard box? There were days my mind was completely blank. I’d clock in, blink, clock out. Where does the mind go during the mundane? At times, it races. I keep a journal on one of the truck shelves, next to my “lunch” bag, where I write down thoughts. Some are in the form of poetry, prose, or song. I look back on them when I’m home and wonder if these gems would have ever come to me if I hadn’t thrown myself into the mundane. If I had not boxed in my boredom. Sometimes the thoughts are too many and too loud that I need to drown them out with music from my headphones in order to actually perform my job. Sometimes I feel lonely without them, when my brain is too blank. I see these thoughts as gratuity for the job I don’t get paid enough for but stick to anyways. The job is the definition of the phrase, “Gotta make a living.” My desire to be here on the belt has only decreased with each passing day, yet I maintain my goal in mind of paying my impending tuition bill.

At 18, I’m the youngest person on the belt by five years, but the work that I’ve done and experience that I’ve gained in my short time has earned me veteran status. Time works differently while in the warehouse. You sleep, wake up, commute, and work all in the dark. By the time you clock out, the nine-to-fivers have just sat down at their desk, barring unforeseen circumstances. Such circumstances included paying for a looming college tuition bill, a fact I kept in mind as I put in countless hours of overtime by going out on the routes with drivers as their assistant. Day after day, week after week. Spending my last summer as a “kid” under white fluorescent lights, falling asleep in the big brown truck, and loading and delivering for thousands of people I’ll never know. I build my future box by box, house by house, telling myself I’m getting ahead, convincing myself I’m not crazy for being here in the midst of a pandemic, in the midst of the most major transitional period of my life. Often I struggle to believe myself, but I can be persuasive. Maybe I am crazy, because I have to be.

At the end of my shift I go to see Dale. It’s a significant Saturday: my last day on the yellow belt and last day at UPS Yorktown Heights. I say good-bye and thank you, and he says, “Good luck with the whole theatre-movie thing. If it doesn’t workout, you’re a helluva loader so… I mean I think you’d make a damn good insurance salesman too. Give it a thought.” I smile, thank him, and walk out of the warehouse, nodding to the security guard, for the last time. “Insurance salesman,” I think to myself, “I’m not that crazy.”