QPAW and the Hellabore MediX Company

QPAW and the Hellabore MediX Company

Sweatshop Sagas, No. 2

James Duvall, M. A.

Big Bone University

Dept. of Medical Signs and Unwanted Favours

A few weeks ago I wrote an essay about working for the Solo Soupcan Inferno. Perhaps no one is interested in such things, but a taste of reality is a good thing. At the least I can include them as chapters in my Autobiography, which I intend to write posthumously.

Quicko-Printo Advertising World (QPAW) — I change the names to protect you from reality — is a sweatshop in Kenton County. (Yes, they have them there too.) Even the guy at the temporary service, KAT (Kill-a-Temp) seemed surprised when I agreed to take this $8/ hour job with 12 hour shifts. "You will?!" While I was working at QPAW I noticed one of their signs going to a style shop "Hot, Hot, Hot." I don't know what the style was, but it couldn't have been as hot as that shop.

Everyone working in the packing department was temporary, except for the lead, a hard-looking woman with a smoker's voice, and a complexion like cantaloup rind. She had the work badly organized. The shop keeps going through people for some reason. My employee number in this small "short-history" firm, was 9121. Ain't that a lot of people!

The shift was from 6 am - 6 pm, but, fortunately, I was called late, when someone else walked off the job, and didn't get there till about 9.30. Everyone else had been sweating for four hours when I got there, and their pace had slowed to a crawl. I call the whole enterprise "Penny wise, pound foolish." It is my theory that, except in special cases, you are not getting the best out of any body after five or six hours, especially in the heat. Why not raise the pay a little and give the people an incentive to stay? Henry Ford had been paying workers on his assembly line 50 cents a day, and went through thousands of workers. Over his opposition, the management of Ford talked him into raising the pay to $5 a day, an unheard of amount at that time, and soon the factory went from complete turnover every month or two to having a waiting list, and profits soared!

It would have been crazy to work like wildfire in that heat. To last twelve hours at almost anything you have to pace yourself. In my view the firm (infirm?) is wasting money. They can't afford to pay $8 an hour, to be efficient they should pay about $10-$12 for a six hour shift, so that packing would be efficient. Printing presses nowadays are very fast. The real trouble with printing is handling what you produce; no matter how fast your presses go you can't send out product and get your money any faster than the stuff is packed. That is the bottleneck, and low pay and turnover only make the bottleneck worse.

The place was filthy. No soap in the bathrooms, etc. That shows lack of respect for the workers. All the workers (except me, while I was still fresh) had the slows. One girl's t-shirt expressed the feeling of most: "I get enough exercise pushing my luck!" I could have taken three of my oldest children and gotten most of the work done in about half the time it was produced by QPAW. There were no Hispanics. I had left them behind, working efficiently for $7.50/hour, at SSI, while I went on to sweat even more elsewhere. Wait till they find out there are $8 an hour jobs available; but perhaps even they would not work in such conditions.

I got about $50 for the day for my efforts. It is certainly a challenge to try to feed 7 children, 3 dogs, about 10 cats, and a large white rabbit for a week on that amount. (The ducks and chickens don't count; they're not family, they're food. But they still have to eat.)

I didn't get anything at first this week, except an offer to return to QPAW, which I declined. The 40 miles or so there (and that distance home) took a good bite out of the %50. I did get a promising job interview: part-time permanent, at minimum wage, and no guarantee on the number of hours. (Great economy, ain't it, Jerry Mort!)

Friday I got a chance to work at the Hellabore MediX Company, in the Industrial Park. This was the best job yet, at $9 an hour. I was the bottle and glue man, on a Hellabore packing machine. Two bottles go into a box, one was 1900 millaliters (about the size of a half-gallon of milk), and the other was 500 ml. (about the size of a bottle of witch-hazel, or rubbing alcohol). One line held 21 of the big bottles, and the other held 35 of the small bottle, so you can imagine which had to be filled the most often. I also had to dump dried glue chips into the heater about every half hour. There's a good job in Boone County now. All I had to do was enjoy it.

I did learn a bit about Hellabore — not there, but from my big herbal at home. There are three kinds of Hellabore — black, green, and white — they are all considered poison, but the small bottle was the antidote. (Of course not all poisons will kill you instantly, soap, for instance; it can take awhile.) In the old days Hellabore was a prescription for lunatics, so I suppose most of the product is going to Washington, D. C. Perhaps the antidote should be suppressed!

I am normally very interested to learn people's names, but this day I decided not to. I wasn't exactly jealous, but one of the men on the line was just so much more of a man than I am, if these things are calculated in gross tonage. He fell once and knocked off a lot of medicine bottles, which rolled all over the floor. We wiped them off with paper towels, but I was told later it didn't matter about germs and dirt, as the doctor or nurse just punches a hole in the box and never touches the bottle.

The other person on the line was a pockfaced individual with scraggles of red hair and beard under a beret. He wore long coach's shorts, with white nylon support hose up to his knees — the kind that the little lady greeter at Walmart tried to sell me late one night, as I was walking out of the store — she sells them on the side, and perhaps does a brisk business amongst fact'ry workers. He wsa fast at packing, and could apparently sit for hours at a time — I wonder why he wsa wearing a huge orange back brace? Perhaps all this "Repetitive Motion Sickness" is not so good for you. It was hot, but there were fans. That helped some.

At lunch I sat down to write a few notes of my impressions. A woman with no teeth, who was gumming her potato chips, kept watching me write. It always seems to be a shock to fact'ry workers when people write anything more than a word or two on a cardboard box with a magical marker. (I nearly caused a sensation at SSI when I wrote an essay of five pages during a short period the line was down.) I heard the Mr. O set aside a huge figure of the so-called "stimulus money" for tattoo removal. Several of the fact'ries I have worked in could suck that up in a few days. I suggest Hellabore might solve the problem better.

There are a few other thoughts that come to mind. The first is that Henry David Thoreau's family owned a pencil fact'ry. Henry D. have the knack of being able to pick up exactly 12 pencils at a time in each hand, and so he used to work in the fact'ry packing pencils. It is a great comfort to me that even a nature-lover like Thoreau used to do this kind of work, sometimes.

The other is that the Industrial Park is looking better. I hadn't been out that way for 15-20 years, and the trees that were small then have really grown. In some places you can barely see the big ugly buildings. In 20-30 years — after the Earthquake — it may look better yet, and then we will have something that Europe has (besides high unemployment): ruins! By then the whole "park" will be a forest, and Henry David will be selling pencils on the roots of one of the big trees. I might be selling them sooner than that — I was called in late again (someone didn't show up, or a line went down too soon), and I made about $50 for the day, and the week. I showed up the next day, and was sent home; not enough work. Those dogs are going to have to go on a diet!

Written 21 Aug MMX. Typed 31 Aug MMX.

Big Bone University
Nec ossa solum, sed etiam sanguinem.


AQQ:  An Archival Quality Quotation:

"The present is a fleeting moment, the past is no more, and our prospect of futurity is dark and doubtful." 

Edward Gibbon, Autobiography