{"id":58507,"date":"2019-07-16T00:22:22","date_gmt":"2019-07-16T00:22:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=58507"},"modified":"2019-07-16T00:22:22","modified_gmt":"2019-07-16T00:22:22","slug":"the-life-and-death-of-an-amazon-warehouse-temp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=58507","title":{"rendered":"The Life and Death of an Amazon Warehouse Temp"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Life and Death of an Amazon Warehouse Temp<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Huffington Post<\/a>
\n2015-10-21<\/p>\n

Dave Jamieson<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\nJeff and Di-Key with their children, Jervontay, Jeffrey and Kelton (left to right). Family photos courtesy of Di-Key Lockhart.<\/em><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

What the future of low-wage work really looks like.<\/em><\/p>\n

On Jan. 18, 2013, as the sun went down, Jeff Lockhart Jr. got ready for work. He slipped a T-shirt over his burly frame and hung his white work badge over his broad chest. His wife, Di-Key, was in the bathroom fixing her hair in micro-braids and preparing for another evening alone with her three sons. Jeff had been putting in long hours lately, and so the couple planned a breakfast date at Shoney\u2019s for when his shift ended around dawn. \u201cYou better have your hair done by then,\u201d he teased her.<\/p>\n

As he headed out the door, Jeff, who was 29, said goodbye to the boys. He told Jeffrey, the most rambunctious, not to give his mom a hard time; Kelton, the oldest, handed his father his iPod<\/a> for the ride. Then Jeff climbed into his Chevy Suburban<\/a>, cranked the bass on the stereo system he\u2019d customized himself, and headed for the Amazon<\/a> fulfillment center in nearby Chester, Virginia<\/a>, just south of Richmond<\/a>.<\/p>\n

When the warehouse opened its doors in 2012, there were about 37,000 unemployed people living within a 30-minute drive; in nearby Richmond, more than a quarter of residents were living in poverty. The warehouse only provided positions for a fraction of the local jobless: It currently has around 3,000 full-time workers. But it also enlists hundreds, possibly thousands, of temporary workers to fill orders during the holiday shopping frenzy, known in Amazon parlance as \u201cpeak.\u201d Since full-timers and temps perform the same duties, the only way to tell them apart is their badges. Full-time workers wear blue. Temps wear white…<\/p>\n

…He and Di-Key reconnected in their early 20s. The two made a striking couple\u2014a tall, imposing white guy and his petite African-American girlfriend. \u201cI had a really tough childhood,\u201d says Di-Key. \u201cI didn\u2019t think anyone could love me, but he showed me differently.\u201d She had left school at 17 and had two sons from previous relationships\u2014the oldest, Kelton, is legally blind. \u201cI had a hard time finding a job, and ended up going on assistance,\u201d she says. But after she and Jeff got together, they slowly started to build a more secure life. Jeff pushed Di-Key to get her GED<\/a>. They had a child together and got married, and Jeff adopted Di-Key\u2019s sons. \u201cHe always treated those boys just like they were his own,\u201d says Jeff’s sister, Laura Lockhart. Di-Key worked a series of jobs in retail and office cleaning, and Jeff stayed on at the building supply store. Eventually, they even managed to buy a house\u2014a three-bedroom starter in Hopewell<\/a> for $86,000. Then, not long after the housing crash, the building supply store closed down, and both Jeff and his father lost their jobs…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What the future of low-wage work really looks like.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,14647,8,20,693],"tags":[18404,30012,30013,30015,10108,30014,2425],"class_list":["post-58507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-economics","category-media-archive","category-usa","category-virginia","tag-amazon","tag-dave-jamieson","tag-davide-bonazzi","tag-di-key-lockhart","tag-huffington-post","tag-jeff-lockhart-jr","tag-the-huffington-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58507","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=58507"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58507\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58509,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58507\/revisions\/58509"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=58507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=58507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}