LinkedIn Post: Making Less at UPS Than in Prison

Source: NSFW Podcast ep. 122 — "The Colonized Mentality" with Shannon Smith (returned citizen, activist, currently Atlanta-based)

Topic: What happens when honest work doesn't work

I have a friend who came home from prison at 49 after 25 years inside.

First job was at UPS. He's taking two buses and a train to get there, over an hour each way. He gets there and they put him in a truck stacking boxes in the dark. The observation room above the sorting floor had one-way glass. Cameras everywhere. He told me it looked just like a prison dorm from where he was standing.

After the commute and the transition housing costs, he had about sixty dollars left at the end of the week for food.

He was making less than he made in prison.

And this was the good option they gave him. The one they celebrated. This is how you get your life back.

He pointed out that if the people stacking boxes could work together instead of each person isolated in their own truck, they'd get more done. He told his supervisor. The supervisor said the rules don't allow that.

So he'd be in the truck alone, rushing because the conveyor doesn't stop, boxes falling on him, a wall collapsing because someone on the night shift rushed, and above him a room of people watching all of it on cameras.

He lasted a few weeks. Not because he wasn't tough enough. Because the job was designed around an idea of toughness that requires you to leave your body behind at the door.

When I think about what it actually means to work — not as policy, not as economy, just the physical daily experience of it — his story is one I keep coming back to. What we call opportunity and what actually functions as opportunity are not always the same thing.

draft from corpus — based on NSFW Podcast ep. 122 (2021/2022)