Please move over your argument as to how we could afford a universal basic income that provides enough money so that people can choose to not work into my inflation thread. You are once again conflating production with money
Please move over your argument as to how we could afford a universal basic income that provides enough money so that people can choose to not work into my inflation thread. You are once again conflating production with money
1500 cases here would have you be doing about 85% rate... It really varies from warehouse to warehouse how they are set up and what they have you do to compare case count from one place to another.Warehouses are cold, drafty, or to hot in summer, you are on your feet 8-12 (or more) hours on concrete and can wrack up 10 000 steps by lunchtime. In the DC a fast picker could get around 750-1000 units a shift, a unit could be a box of tampons, large pack of ramen noodles a sack of spuds, 12 large cans of dogfood or 27kg container of whatever (or a beer keg come to think of it 50L ones are 63 kg here). Only one female picker she could pick in the 750-100 range but the fastest 2-3 males were doing in the 1000-1500+ range.
1500 cases here would have you be doing about 85% rate... It really varies from warehouse to warehouse how they are set up and what they have you do to compare case count from one place to another.
Spoiling some of this for those not much interested in orderfilling info:
Spoiler :Some of the many differences: Single jack doing one pallet at a time, or double jack filling up two pallets at a time? How high you stack the pallets (some videos seem to show only filling a pallet up to about 40 cube and not 70 cube.) I know someone who worked at a different company and they had to put a label on EVERY single case where I only need one label since the whole pallet is going to one store, labelling every case slows things down significantly. How far apart the cases are and how big the boxes are. When a store doesn't order very much you might have to drive all 25 aisles (each aisle is about 2 football fields long) to fill up two pallets and that takes an hour, then you have another store that fills up two pallets from one aisle and that only takes 15-20 minutes.
15 years ago our top 2-3 were aiming to get in the '5000 case club'. But lots of things have changed since then and that kind of production isn't really possible anymore and now it is very rare to top 3000 cases.
I'd say the average case is about 20 pounds (spaghetti sauce). We get 2 pound ramen noodles to the 40-50 pound cases of flour/sugar. If you have to pick 150 cases of spaghetti sauce, or even flour/sugar you sure are not given 2.5 hours to do it, which is what the ergonomics calculator (if it was entered/used correctly) would have us do, but more likely 0.5 hours.
Meat can be up to 98 pounds, but that's another department and they have different standards because they lift heavier stuff so they aren't expected to pick as many cases so for some it is actually easier because the stacking is certainly easier in the meats.
Women can do my job, and since building a pallet of different size boxes is like building a puzzle, not being the strongest can be made up for in smarter stacking. I've seen many strong men not survive the job because they just couldn't figure out the stacking. But sure, more men are capable of doing it than the number of women that can because of the physical requirements.
Height also helps, so men, who are generally taller than women, have an advantage. Sure, some jobs can adjust things to help out shorter people (adjustable seats/tables to accomodate people's differences in height), but some jobs there just isn't a feasible way to make it 'even'.
Forklift driver and other positions in the warehouse that don't require as much lifting can also be dominated by men. In some warehouses those positions are all filled up by those with the most seniority (they started out lifting cases for x years before they became a lift driver). While someone could start out in checkout at a store and then transfer to the warehouse, these cases are exceedingly rare. People generally don't want to go to another place that is completely foreign to them. I feel bad for the woman I saw transfer to a lift driver position when then found that being on a forklift (which she had never done before) was not a comfortable experience for her one bit and she never got the hang of it and of course was never able to meet the production rate.
I can handle forklift if I only had to lift stuff up to 10 feet high. But raising a pallet of product weighing 4000 pounds, 40 feet above your head....that requires nerves of steel (and good depth perception).
If the lawsuit is comparing checkouts to warehouse it deserves to fail, as someone said before. The stockers in the store at least have a better argument in that they are actually lifting some cases, but still there are many more differences. 'Comparable work' or 'similar work' are just such vague wording that can be stretched to whatever you want it to be.