Students Are Already Workers
"I know that I haven’t updated in about two and a half weeks, but I have
an excuse. UPS is just a tiring job. You see, before, I had an extra 31
hours to play games, draw things, compose music . . . do homework. But
now, 31+ hours of my life is devoted to UPS. I hate working there. But I
need the money for college, so I don’t have the option of quitting. My
job at UPS is a loader. I check the zip codes on the box, I scan them
into the database, and then I load them into the truck, making a brick
wall out of boxes."
—“Kody” (pseud.), high-school blogger in a UPS “school-to-work” program,
2005
The alarm sounds at 2:00 am. Together with half a dozen of her
colleagues, the workday has begun for Prof. Susan Erdmann, a
tenure-track assistant professor of English at Jefferson Community
College in Louisville, Kentucky. She rises carefully to avoid waking her
infant son and husband, who commutes forty miles each way to his own
tenure-track community college job in the neighboring rural county. She
makes coffee, showers, dresses for work. With their combined income of
around $60,000 and substantial education debt, they have a thirty-year
mortgage on a tiny home of about 1,000 square feet: galley kitchen,
dining alcove, one bedroom for them and another for their two sons to
share. The front door opens onto a “living room” of a hundred square
feet; entering or leaving the house means passing in between the couch
and television. They feel fortunate to be able to afford any mortgage at
all in this historically Catholic neighborhood that was originally
populated by Louisville factory workers. It is winter; the sun will not
rise for hours. She drives to the airport. Overhead, air-freight 747s
barrel into the sky, about one plane every minute or so. Surrounded by
the empty school buildings, boarded storefronts, and dilapidated
underclass homes of south-central Louisville, the jets launch in
post-midnight salvos. Their engines lack the sophisticated
noise-abatement technology required of air traffic in middle-class
communities. Every twelve or eighteen months, the city agrees to buy a
handful of the valueless residences within earshot.1
Turning into the airport complex, Susan never comes near the shuttered
passenger terminals. She follows a four-lane private roadway toward the
rising jets. After parking, a shuttle bus weaves among blindingly lit
aircraft hangars and drops her by the immense corrugated sorting
facility that is the United Parcel Service main air hub, where she will
begin her faculty duties at 3:00 am, greeting UPS’s undergraduate
workforce directly as they come off the sort. “You would have a sense
that you were there, lifting packages,” Erdmann recalls. “They would
come off sweaty, and hot, directly off the line into the class. It was
very immediate, and sort of awkward. They’d had no moment of downtime.
They hadn’t had their cigarette. They had no time to pull themselves
together as student-person rather than package-thrower.” Unlike her
students, Susan and other faculty teaching and advising at the hub are
not issued a plastic ID card and door pass. She waits on the windy
tarmac for one of her students or colleagues to hear her knocking at the
door. Inside, the noise of the sorting facility is, literally,
deafening: the shouts, forklift alarms, whistles, and rumble of the
sorting machinery actually drown out the noise of the jets rising
overhead. “Teaching in the hub was horrible,” recalled one of Erdmann’s
colleagues. “Being in the hub was just hell. I’d work at McDonald’s
before I’d teach there again. The noise level was just incredible. The
classroom was just as noisy as if it didn’t have any walls.” In addition
to the sorting machinery, UPS floor supervisors were constantly
“screaming, yelling back and forth, ‘Get this done, get that done,
where’s so and so.’”
Susan is just one of a dozen faculty arriving at the hub after midnight.
Some are colleagues from Jefferson Community College and the associated
technical institution; others are from the University of Louisville.
Their task tonight is to provide on-site advising and registration for
some of the nearly 6,000 undergraduate students working for UPS at this
facility. About 3,000 of those students work a midnight shift that ends
at UPS’s convenience—typically 3:00 or 4:00 am, although the shift is
longer during the holiday and other peak shipping seasons. Nearly all of
the third-shift workers are undergraduate students who have signed
employment contracts with something called the “Metropolitan College.”
The name is misleading, since it’s not a college at all.
An “enterprise” partnership between UPS, the city of Louisville, and the
campuses that employ Susan and her colleagues, Metropolitan College is,
in fact, little more than a labor contractor. Supported by public funds,
this “college” offers no degrees and does no educating. Its sole
function is to entice students to sign contracts that commit them to
provide cheap labor in exchange for education benefits at the partner
institutions. 2 The arrangement has provided UPS with over 10,000
ultralow- cost student workers since 1997, the same year that the
Teamsters launched a crippling strike against the carrier. The
Louisville arrangement is the vanguard of UPS’s efforts to convert its
part-time payroll, as far as possible, to a “financial aid” package for
student workers in partnership with campuses near its sorting and
loading facilities. Other low-wage Louisville employers, such as Norton
and ResCare have joined on a trial basis.
full: http://marcbousquet.net/Bousquet_4.pdf
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