Invisible Workers

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Wisconsin Public Radio

Prx, Philosophy, Knowledge, Wpr, Ttbook, Wisconsin, Society & Culture

4.7 • 844 Ratings

🗓️ 3 April 2016

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

If you think about it, every day we receive countless services from complete strangers — the newspaper delivered to your door, the trash picked up at the crack of dawn, the fresh fruit for sale at the supermarket. There's a whole army of invisible workers powering our economy who we rarely get to hear about. From the warehouse workers who fill out our online orders, to the migrant laborers who pick our food, even down to the unpaid office intern, this hour we're talking about the hidden workers who make it all happen. True Stories Of A Warehouse Worker; A Day In The Life Of A Migrant Worker; Questioning The Ethics Of Unpaid Internships; The Hidden Jobs That Fill Your Day; Dangerous Idea: Embrace Laziness; Christie Watson on her novel 'Where Women Are Kings'.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Support for WPR comes from People's Food Co-op, a community-owned natural food store in LaCross and Rochester, offering gift cards towards any purchase in the store or for a membership.
0:11.3	More at pfc.c.c-o-o-op.
0:18.3	It's to the best of our knowledge from PRI. Today, Invisible Workers.
0:23.6	I'm Anne Strain Champs, and here's a story.
0:28.6	Every day, millions of us shop online.
0:32.6	We fill our virtual shopping carts, then we hit send, feel seamless, automated, kind of like a digital assembly line.
0:42.1	But, you know, there are real human beings filling those orders.
0:45.8	Yeah, I was basically, you know, a robot piece in this assembly line, and my only job was to pick
0:53.0	items as quickly and as efficiently as possible.
0:57.0	Meet Mack McClelland. She's a journalist who's reported from all over the world, and for a recent
1:02.5	assignment, she went undercover to work at an online retail warehouse right here in the U.S.
1:09.0	The warehouse was absolutely enormous, several floors, and it's just rows and rows and
1:16.6	rows and rows of stuff.
1:19.3	There's all manner of toys, sex toys, actually, lots of, which I was surprised to see,
1:25.7	groceries.
1:27.0	There was a battery-operated flower sifter.
1:31.0	Anything you could possibly think of exists in this warehouse.
1:35.2	So there she was. One of 4,000 temporary workers brought on to help out with the early Christmas
1:40.9	rush, and all of them working in this cavernous space.
1:44.6	And it was absolutely silent. Just no noise, even though there were thousands upon thousands of people working, like silent little worker bees.
1:56.8	You can have conversations where you're sort of like running past each other, you know,
2:02.8	sort of like a high-speed drive-by conversation where you're just like, hey, how's it going?
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Wisconsin Public Radio, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Wisconsin Public Radio and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.