Why You Will Never Get Equal Pay for Women

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

Isn't the plan that a lot of people will continue to work, since the "free money" everyone's going to be getting is going to be the very minimum needed in order to sustain a below average lifestyle? I thought the system is designed to push people to better themselves and improve their lives and not the opposite.

edit: Looking at the post numbers, you probably weren't responding to me.
 
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.
 
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.

Good day I could do about 1000 and the fast guys could maybe hit 1200-1500 but there were only a few of them (3 or 4). It was a smaller one, 16 isles about 100 metres long, built in 1981, supplying a few hundred thousand people along with smaller orders (corner stores and petrol stations in small town NZ).

You might have to drive over the whole warehouse to do a corner store collecting 150 items more or less one at a time. We stacked two pallets at once 1.3 metres high I think light stuff like large cereal boxes could go 1.6.

Only way to hit 1000+ was get a lot of large orders which happened rarely. I was good at stacking but threw my back out bending down low to get stuff at floor level. Getting 20+ items of the same unit was maybe once a trip. If you were lucky you might get 100-200 units of chocolate or something or a whole pallet of beer but that was a once a week or fortnight type thing.

And Tobacco is crazy expensive, small pallet 250k, a truck load several million.
 
We never had tobacco or beer, that would all be brought to the stores by other distributors. We used to have baby food and small spice boxes, if those things were going out in large quantities you could get a trip with over 500 cases, but then they sent those to the regular walmart warehouse and they sent us chemicals (heavy cases), paper and diapers (light, but the pallets are stacked 9 feet high). We still got ramen noodles where you might pick over 100 at a time, but the rest is mostly pick 1 item unless something is on sale, similar to your warehouse. But, looking at the video I posted earlier, most of the time they picked 1 case and then the next one would be 50 feet away. Yeah, that's not going to build up case count, but later when he did pick from several different slots in the same area, that's when the cases build up and what I see more often.
 
Can we rename this thread to "How Warehouses Work" or something?
 
:lol: Imagine coming to learn about warehouses and it's a gender debate from page one
 
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