All In Presentation, WT7, First Meeting
[Day selected for All In by Weiland Empire National Director Board. Authorization for the use of inmate labor to cover the Centre’s production needs during the presentation has been approved by the 7th Territorial council in a 4-1 vote. Executive personnel should also be aware that High Councilman Caleb White has been quite vocal in opposition of our operations, and in particular, has been adamant about his stance on our use of prison labor for even a brief period during this meeting.]
Statement of Purpose: To begin the presentation, it is vital that it be highlighted that the WT7 location has created 1400 jobs, and to congratulate everyone present for their hard work and success in making this facility a key link in the network of Order Processing Centres based in the Weiland Empire.
[Spoken]: It is the vision of Ganges now, as it has always been, to always be focused on the customer. It is the customer whose orders we rely upon to keep us moving, keep us improving, and keep us innovating. Without the customer, we don’t have a business, right? So we have to always be keeping them in mind.
Most other businesses, in most other industries, they focus a great deal of their attention on their competitors. Not here at Ganges. At Ganges, our river flows from these Centres, into our trucks, then into various delivery services, and finally, to the customer. We’re not worried about what the other guys are doing, because what we’re doing is not for them. It’s for our customers. Ganges tries everything in its power to ensure we get the broadest selection, across the most categories, and at the best prices, for the customer. They are our obsession.
Now, let’s take a look at some early numbers from our very own facility here.
[Use interface to pull up and project slide showing WT7’s First Quarter Column Chart]
Spoken: As you can see here, the Weiland Empire Territory 7 Order Processing Centre has already shot up into the top 3 of our national network’s order completion rates, which is something that you should all be very proud of. Whether you’re in Selection, Packing, or on the shipping dock, you are integral to starting off and maintaining at a high pace that most other warehouses simply can’t compete with. Give yourselves a round of applause!
[Pause for workforce to applaud themselves]
Spoken: And as you can see by the lower comparison portion of this slide, WT6-2 has been sending a high volume of their overage to us here at WT7. This is going to balance out, I assure you, as our system starts to re-route some of our regular customers to having their orders originate here. Before completion of this facility, all orders for the 7th Territory were processed and sent out for delivery from WT62, a step which is no longer necessary. Moving along.
[Move to next slide, ECONOMIC SUCCESS STORY]
Spoken: We look now, right here, and we see a breakdown of the various departments we have here at this Processing Centre, and our associate totals. We have here, in the 7th Territory, created over 1300 new employment opportunities. All of you have contributed, by the simple merit of being here, and being a part of this team, to an explosion of growth in this region! You should give yourselves a round of applause for helping make this Territory a proud, productive part of this economy.
[Pause for applause]
Spoken: Now, everybody here, has their own Ganges story, and it’s a very special kind of story. It’s a story with a beginning, and a middle, but there’s no ending, not just yet. And that middle part of the story, the meat of the story, it’s being written right now, every day, by each and every one of us. Now, here’s my Ganges story.
[Whoever is selected within the management of the Centre to perform the presentation will, at this point, share their own GANGES STORY. This text should be presented to Samuel Mortimer at sammortimerpro@ganges.com at least three weeks prior to presentation, so that edits can be made and a final draft approved.
Upon conclusion of Speaker’s GANGES STORY, open Q&A session, but only for five questions. Speaker should keep responses generalized where possible, and brief, so that the associates can resume work within a reasonable period of time.]
END OF PRESENTATION
**
“So, how bad was the Q&A,” Mitchell asked, eyebrow raised. Valerie hitched a sigh, shaking her head as her eyes barely registered the salad she poked at listlessly.
“It was fine until somebody asked about the job loss totals in the Territory,” she replied. “He already knew the information, had a printout from the Territory’s Labor Department website that he was flapping around.”
“What did it say,” Mitchell asked, taking a sip of his soda. The pair sat in the second level Human Resources offices, one of the only areas in the facility that enjoyed any kind of decent air conditioning. Their mild purple vests, worn over their shirts, were the only concession Ganges required to any sort of uniform for the department. While Mitchell’s was still fresh and crisp, Valerie’s had begun to fray around the hem. She had been with Ganges for four years now, while Mitchell was one of the facility’s native area hires, only with the company for the six months WT7 had been in operation. “Well, the Territory lost a total of four thousand jobs since the facility’s opened,” she finally answered. “And this guy knew that. It kind of took the wind out of my sails.” She finally dropped the plastic disposable fork onto the remains of her food, clipping on the clear cover and dropping the whole thing in a trash can located against the wall behind her. “I didn’t really find my footing again for the rest of the presentation. Why weren’t you there?”
“I was busy with the Parker Project,” Mitchell responded. “They’re going to have me spending the next couple of weeks putting together a lot of research.”
“Really? Why?”
“It’s my field. My degree’s in sociology, with a minor in communications science. If you’re wondering,” he said, pausing to take one last sip of his drink. “They didn’t have anymore positions open in the Marketing Department, so they suggested Human Resources and I said sure.”
The duo split off then to their separate work cubbies in the office, Valerie navigating through the company’s internal network to check for red-marked employee numbers. She didn’t particularly care for this part of her job; Valerie was effectively tasked with using the internal camera system to locate employees who were exceeding the allowed ‘time off task’, a set amount of time that they were allowed to be between registered tasks according to the company’s standards and rates.
At the moment, she only had two red boxes. The first one she clicked on brought up an immediate camera view of a young man seated in the Site Aid office, a kind of on-site medical assistance area. The associate was cradling his right wrist in his left hand, so she simply right-clicked the camera view to minimize the view and then clicked on the red box with his assigned employee number. This brought up two side-by-side options, ‘Excused’ and ‘Unexcused’. She hovered over ‘Excused’, scrolled down to ‘Site Aid’ among the options, and clicked it. The associate’s box turned gray.
The second red number she clicked on switched to a camera view over a woman in her mid-to-late 20’s, standing among the packing stations with a small notepad and pen in hand. She appeared to be taking notes of some kind, instead of packing orders. Changing camera angles and using the zoom options, as well as other controls on her computer, Valerie got a closer look at what had distracted this associate for the last three minutes.
Clipping a two minute video sequence, Valerie backtracked the associate’s day thus far, from the moment she scanned her badge to enter the facility. There were three other instances of time off task to review, and when she was done, Val sent off a quick e-mail to her department head.
Within twenty minutes, Lora Grimes stood by Valerie’s elbow, watching the footage she’d clipped. When the playbacks were done, Lora looked down at Valerie and said, “Don’t talk to anybody about this.” Lora took over on the keyboard for a moment, rapidly executing numerous commands and overrides, until finally the screen was set back to its normal display.
Before Lora left, Valerie asked, “What are going to do about this?”
“We aren’t going to do anything,” Lora replied with a grin. “This is why we have higher-ups.”
Christina, Act 2
The first few days at the Processing Centre had been simple enough to get through, though Christina made the same mistake that many undercover reporters make on their first couple of assignments under an assumed nom-de-plume; she didn’t immediately respond to her cover name when it was used to address her.
‘Nancy Tulane’ had been that cover, a complete citizen profile worked up by one of her contacts who worked in what she thought of as ‘the gray area’. What the man did was technically illegal, according to the black letter of the law, but not only was law enforcement aware of his activities, they actively allowed him to operate. In exchange, he worked his trade to create false histories for undercover officers and investigators within the police department.
The minor hiccup of not responding right away, thankfully, seemed easy enough to explain away within the facility itself. Between the constant and omnipresent rumble and rattle of conveyor belts everywhere, along with the hum of transport trams, forklifts, and storage robots peppered throughout the facility, it was difficult to hear under the best of circumstances. As such, her lack of response wasn’t seen as notable in the early going.
The orientation had been, frankly, rather eye-opening for her, as one of the walk-through guides, a grumpy, wild-haired man in his likely mid-50’s by the name of Hank, was one of the most blunt men she had ever met. “A little more than half of you will not make it past your second week,” he had said to start her group’s first day of orientation. “That’s why we bring so many of you in at a time. So, if you don’t want to stick it out, or don’t think you can, you know where the door is; I don’t give a shit.”
Hank’s second day with her group had been no less brash. The older man, wearing a blue-and-orange vest labeled with the term ‘Guide’ in tall white letters on its back, talked briefly about each primary role that members in her hire-on group would be working. When he got to the packaging lines, he turned to address the group through the headsets they were all wearing for the internal tour.
“This is where we lose most of our people,” he said flatly. “Packaging lines, of which we have four in this facility. One of the big reasons we lose folks here is because here, you’re not just trying to maintain your expected hourly quotas; you’re directly competing with one another. That drives a lot of folks who aren’t properly motivated out the front door. Just bear in mind, if you’re making your expected rate, that’s all we really need or ask of you. But, if you want to make yourself more valuable to us, you should go above and beyond.”
Looking up and down the lines of employees hurriedly flitting to and fro to fetch order items, Christina saw not a single smile among them, and spotted nobody who seemed to be trying to move much faster than any of their coworkers nearby. The whole idea of going above and beyond didn’t seem to be carrying any water with these folks.
The next section they toured was stowage, clear on the opposite side of the facility. Here, long corridors were set up in a rising series of sub-floors alongside the shipping dock, with wire mesh walls that allowed workers to look down onto the dock and see pallets of product being brought to freight elevators for transport up to one of four sub-floors.
Spaced out about every fifteen feet were roller lines, large boxes placed on them from individual pallets. Workers used computer-synced hand scanners to register each product, and a large, yellow cloth-and-plastic storage cubby cart was guided by little ladybug-like robots along a central floor space to the workers’ stations. The employees would then either place the product in a reachable cubby, or use a sliding ladder attached to an ankle-high guardrail of sorts to climb up for better access to the higher cubbies.
The whole arrangement looked to Christine like a disaster waiting to happen. In just the few minutes her group observed the stowers, she spotted one employee almost slip and fall off of her sliding steps twice, and catch her foot on the base of the roller bracket three times, almost falling on the concrete sub-floor.
At the end of the second day, Hank brought them all back to the orientation room and gave them their folders with their individual area assignments. As she’d expected, thanks to her falsified resume, Christine had been assigned to the shipping dock area as an outbound truck loader. Her specific designation was ‘NFlTL’, shorthand for ‘Non-Forklift Truck Loader’, of which the facility was, apparently, slightly shorthanded, since most of the shipping dock associates were licensed forklift operators. As such, many of the forklift drivers were forced to rotate off in order to do the hand-loading, a circumstance they didn’t largely care for.
Reading through her job description, Christina found herself somewhat confused by the rate breakdown for her position. According to Ganges, all outbound truck loads were set to an expectation not of packages per hour loaded, but the completion of a loaded truck per period, of which the standard 11-hour shift possessed three.
Still, the whole thing struck her as vaguely robotic, mechanical. This tracked with everything she learned from former employees she’d spoken with thus far, so she wasn’t expecting much in terms of being turned around on her perception of the company thus far.
She just hoped she’d be able to pull off the more intricate maneuvers of her investigation whilst working in the facility now.
**
When the alarm sounded to indicate the end of her first full week at the Ganges facility, Christina sent a silent praise to the Lord God for His mercy upon her. She had survived a grueling week, and had seen more than enough to conclude that, by the end of her self-assigned timeline of three weeks, she’d be in possession of a plethora of notes and observations to work up a full story in The Sentinel.
Making her way back to her apartment, she felt her cell phone trill at her, an e-mail alert. Pulling into a nearby McDonald’s parking lot, she unlocked her screen and opened up her Gmail, noting that the alert was for her recently-established cover account, linked to her Nancy Tulane identity. Switching over to that account, she found a message from Ganges, informing her that Mandatory Overtime had been announced for the next work week.
Looking over her schedule, Christina found herself wondering how the company could justify what they were asking for from its people. According to the calendar spreadsheet, everyone in the facility would be working five 12-hour shifts, and an attached FAQ included in its first listed question, “What will the overtime rate of pay be?” The listed response from the company: ‘Your standard hourly rate’.
When she finally got into her apartment, Christina let out a deep sigh and tossed her messenger bag carelessly on the kitchen table before flopping over the back of her sofa into a prone, face-down position. Everything throbbed, and a sharp, pointed spike of discomfort had settled in between her eyes like a cat kneading a blanket and smooshing itself into position.
She wasn’t sure how long she’d slept, but when she came to, the sun had finally risen outside, splashing wide beams of illumination into her living room. Shit, she thought with a groan as she sat up, head hung down between her hands. Didn’t even make it into the bed. Christina rubbed her face and made her way into the bathroom.
After her necessary, she leaned on the white ceramic sink counter, running lukewarm water and splashing her face several times. A shower would be on the agenda, once she had the coffee going. Bouncing from prepping and starting the coffeemaker back to the bathroom, Christina paused just long enough to fetch her cell phone and plug it in out in the living room.
Even the typically therapeutic habit of sitting in the high heat stream of her shower head didn’t eliminate or tamp down the aches that had settled in and set up camp throughout her body. Turning around and facing away from the temp knobs, letting the water cascade directly down on her lower back, had little effect, either. She hadn’t worked a physically demanding job in a long time, but her recollection of even those days seemed to pale in comparison to the constant, low-hum hammering her body had taken at Ganges.
As she reviewed some of her older interview notes twenty minutes later, seated on the couch with her coffee in easy reach, Christina felt a twist in her gut at some of the notes she’d taken in the margins beside quotes from former or current Ganges employees. One of these side notes made her physically wince: ‘Seems like this guy should have known what he was in for’, it read. This, after a long-time warehouse worker named Phil had tried to convey that working at Ganges was, to quote him, “-like having little imps smack you all over with hammers, not at full force, but constantly, without stopping to rest”.
And that, she realized as she finished her review of her notes, was one of the key differences between Ganges and other warehouse environments. People in unskilled labor markets tended to, in her experience, keep their heads down for the most part and plow ahead in their work. They understood that they could call off here and there if they were feeling sick or overworked, and it would hurt their paycheck, but otherwise they’d be perfectly fine.
At Ganges, however, every employee had a set number of hours of unpaid time off, ‘UPT’, and paid time off, ‘PTO’. If all of their hours were at a zero balance, regardless of cause, the associate was terminated from employment. In other words, no matter the reason, be it illness, family emergency, vehicular trouble, injury, no matter what, if those hours counts dropped to zero, the employee was gone.
When Christina had first heard about this policy, she’d tried contacting the company through official channels associated with The Sentinel. She had, as one might expect, been given a run-around for a while before finally being given what amounted, to her, to a non-answer. ‘Our associates enjoy some of the best benefits and comparative pay for their industry and in their economic regions’, had been the body of the e-mail she had ultimately received. Not one word had been reserved to address the attendance policy in the Order Processing Centres.
Feeling curious, Christina signed into her cover employee account on the Ganges website and checked her schedule. According to an internal FAQ on the site, employees who fell ill during a shift or who suffered an injury on the clock would be allowed to leave early, but the remainder of their shift would be covered automatically through the use of UPT or PTO. A follow-up in the FAQ clarified that if the injury in question was determined to not have occurred through any fault of the employee themselves, then the balance of the used UPT or PTO would be restored upon determination.
Christina found herself wondering if that would bring someone terminated back onto staff, and if so, how they would be notified that they could come back to work. The whole arrangement struck her as immensely unfair to the hourly workers at the facility, which should not have surprised her in the slightest. Zack Dorros may have more money than God, but the man wasn’t likely going to blow it all on labor costs if he could avoid it.
Christina went through her usual e-mail routine, checking in via live chat on NetFriends with her editor after reading through a brief message from him. His only couple of questions mostly centered on how she was dealing with the demands of the ‘job’, which she responded to via the live chat. “It’s brutal,” she typed to him. “I’ve only been there a week, and I feel like I’m falling apart. On my third day there, my Area Manager essentially came and ripped me a new one for not making their expected rate.”
“Isn’t there a grace period for new hires,” he sent back.
“There’s supposed to be, and he came back a little later and said he didn’t realize I was new. The internal communication among management seems to be almost non-existent.” She thought about the schedule, and typed, “And even though I’m new, I’ve got mandatory overtime all next week, five twelve-hour days. I don’t even have it the worst; some folks are slated for fifteen-hour days.”
The ‘typing’ bubble came up on her end of the chat, and she waited for a minute while her editor fervently clacked away on his end. When his text finally came up, it read:
“I normally wouldn’t ask you to put yourself on the line like this, but if you can, try to see if you can get on those fifteen-hour days. Twelve hour shifts are harsh enough, but I can’t imagine how scorched people are going to be on the longer ones.” Christina thought about it for about five minutes, trying to reason her way through refusing. However, when she considered that she was only going to be working at the facility for two more weeks, she concluded that the beating she’d be putting her body through would be worth it for the sake of the story.
“I’ll see about getting on those fifteen-hour shifts,” she typed, hopping back onto her Ganges employee profile and contacting the Human Resources Live Chat. It took less time to convince the company’s HR rep that she was okay to work the fifteens than she would have thought, given the green light within six text exchanges before she logged off of her computer altogether.
She only hoped that if she witnessed an injury on site, it wouldn’t be her own body taking the damage.
**
As a species, humans have been warned for thousands of years, in one way or another, to be careful what we wish for, because we just may get it. Fables, parables, and folklore of all sorts exist to give us brutal examples of just how terrible it can be to have a wish granted. Midas is a popular one, for certain, and never got around in most versions to letting audiences know what happened to the poor guy when he had to go to the bathroom…
Three days of fifteen hour shifts had already pummeled Christina’s body into a roiling bundle of sore muscles and joints, slowing her thought processes, numbing her inner monologue. She had taken only a handful of notes on these days, unable to fully clear the fog in her mind, and when she had pulled the pocket notebook out of her pants to jot something down, she did so in plain view of her coworkers and the ever-present overhead cameras throughout the facility. Normally, she was a lot more conspicuous about jotting down her observations, but she just couldn’t seem to maintain her habit of caution.
Caution, here, is the catchword of the day, friends and neighbors, make no doubt of it. Christina had been back at her area from the first period break for about half an hour, mechanically taking up boxes from a large roller cart that had been brought to her by another associate, and carefully stacking them in the back of a shipping trailer as quickly as she could. She heard a handful of forklift horns blapping their incessant honks up and down the shipping dock as operators flitted to and fro, but this seemed to just be part of the routine hum and thrum of the area of the facility she worked in.
An interesting point of order to note, for both Christina and readers of this work; most traffic accidents occur when people are driving along their normal, routine routes. The sense of calm, of familiarity, the ability to almost slip into a kind of autopilot, is the leading cause of a person’s inability to quickly adapt and react to circumstances that are outside of the norm.
The phrase ‘Falling asleep at the wheel’ applies quite well, and with disastrous consequences.
Christina was waiting for another cart to show up when it happened, and what she witnessed, she seemed to perceive in horrifying slow motion. One of the forklifts was barreling along in her general direction, with no signs of slowing, and its operator slumped forward over the controls, literally having fallen asleep at the wheel.
And crossing right in front of him, another associate carrying a lone package at a jog, a bright yellow vest worn over his street clothes. Christina recognized the sort; these vests were to be donned by packagers if they had to bring a ‘catch-up’ order to the dock to complete an outgoing truck load. With no horn honking at him, and the expectation that he had to get this package to the docks as quickly as possible, the poor man never stopped to consider that he should be checking his surroundings, his vision focused solely on Christina’s loading station.
She was close enough to hear the ‘crunch’ of the man’s skull as it slammed to the concrete floor, and the squelch of his innards as the forklift rolled over him. Everything that followed in the next few minutes came as if through an additional layer of muffling; the screams of terror from nearby associates, the crash as the forklift rammed finally into a trailer loading station just past her own. Frantic cries for someone to call 911, the klaxons blazing to signal that the facility was on immediate lockdown.
Christina didn’t clearly recall how she’d gotten outside, standing amid dozens of her coworkers, looking numbly at the back side of the facility, where the trailers were parked and set for loading. The passage of time warped and shifted; she saw the police cruisers and ambulance arrive, watched as a black bodybag was carted out.
Checking her watch, she finally snapped back to the present moment when she realized that almost two hours had passed while she was standing outside with everyone else from the shipping dock. Her Area Manager swept into view as she looked up from her watch, his pale, gaunt countenance filling her field of view.
“Nancy,” he said, waving his hand in front of her eyes. She blinked rapidly at him, then looked around at her coworkers; they were heading back inside. “Come on, we’re clear to head back in,” he said, starting to turn away from her.
“What? Are you fucking kidding me,” she replied, shocking even herself with her abrupt vulgarity. Tim looked around, a queer grin quirking his mouth.
“We’re already behind schedule now,” he said, as if this should be obvious, walking away from her. Christina followed him back up a set of metal steps into the facility, staring in disbelief at the scene before her. Someone had set up blazing orange traffic cones and yellow caution tape around the spot where the packaging associate had been run down, and the long streak of gore and blood that had been dragged along behind the forklift had been covered in what she assumed was either kitty litter or spill control sand.
And all around the dock, people were just getting back to work, as if nothing horrifically traumatic had just happened here. Christina shook her head, pulled off the gloves they’d given her each day, and tossed them on the floor. As she started walking away from the shipping dock, Tim came jogging over toward her, waving his arms over his head.
“Hey! Where are you going,” he called to her. “Nancy, we’ve got a lot of loading to catch up with!” Christina halted in her tracks, pivoted toward him abruptly, and hawked a wad of phlegm in his direction, narrowly missing his face.
“Fuck you, Tim,” she snarled. “I’m out.” She had seen more than enough; Ganges and its practices had to be spelled out plainly for the public, and as soon as possible.