If you’re just looking for part-time work or temporary work rather than a formal job, all kinds of crowdsourcing platforms are pretty easy, but obviously, aside from having more freedom in choosing your working hours, they can’t compare with a proper job. On the „JD Seconds Delivery Rider“ app, you can sign up to work as a picker at a 7Fresh supermarket. I originally thought I’d work one day first to see what the hourly pay was, whether it was enough, and what the working conditions were like, but I didn’t even make it through half a day before I didn’t want to do it anymore.
A few days ago I came to the 7Fresh supermarket for an interview as a picker, selected a few days to apply, and today was my first day at work. On the interview day, the warehouse manager told me the working hours were 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. (in fact, if you’re not a regular employee, you don’t have to follow this schedule), so I arrived at the 7Fresh front warehouse at 8 a.m. I grabbed a „gun“ (PDA, used for taking orders and picking items), but the account wouldn’t log in and showed „no warehouse permission“. I contacted the warehouse manager who had interviewed me before, but couldn’t get through. The other employees in the store didn’t know how to handle it either. Later I got in touch with another warehouse manager, and she came over around 8:40. It turned out the account role hadn’t been set to „picker“. After changing the role, it still had to be approved, and it was approved around 9:00. I got a small receipt printer, but there was no special bag for it anymore. Putting it in my pocket didn’t work because there was no opening for the paper to come out. So I had to leave the printer near the packing station and charge it there. After finishing one order, I’d run over to tear off the receipt and then go pack the items.
The warehouse manager was wearing a green lightly padded jacket, issued by 7Fresh. But she was almost always sitting in front of the computer watching the data, occasionally guiding newcomers and handling issues like out-of-stock items. The only thing was the air conditioning in the warehouse was a bit too strong, but basically she didn’t have to go into the cold room. Yet many pickers would just go into the cold room wearing short sleeves to retrieve goods. The jackets weren’t given first to the people who actually needed them more, but were prioritized for the dependents of the bourgeoisie. Outside the cold room hung two warm military overcoats, and no one wore them. Two coats for the number of pickers was already far too few. It seems they never intended them for the people doing the actual work in the first place, and the pickers didn’t have time to put them on anyway, while management didn’t need to go in. The operating rules posted inside the cold room said that you had to wear a warm military overcoat when entering the cold room, but that sentence was purely decorative. During a brief lull with no orders, I heard the warehouse manager talking with another manager sitting at the computer about divorce. It seemed her husband had been cheating, or something else had happened. If that was indeed the case, then the warehouse manager herself was also a victim of patriarchal society. However, there wasn’t the slightest trace of pain, sadness, or anger on her face. The store was filled with cheerful air, and the two managers, one man and one woman, were laughing and chatting about finding a good lawyer to make the woman’s husband leave with nothing, with the house, money, and everything else going to her, as if seizing the family’s common property were some wonderfully pleasant thing.
At first I wasn’t very skilled and picked slowly, with a picking speed of 38 items per hour. Later I stabilized at an average of 50 items per hour, which, at 0.30 yuan per item, came to an hourly wage of 15 yuan. Time was very tight for newcomers. One order might allow only three minutes or even just a few dozen seconds, though some had five minutes or a little more. Sometimes certain items weren’t exactly in the designated spot, but nearby — maybe on the top shelf, or stacked in baskets on the floor beside it. When I ran into problems like not being able to find something and asked the regular employees, they were always eager to help. The warehouse manager, by contrast, seemed much more impatient. Yet she was clearly the least busy person there, so maybe my difficulties and overtime would affect her performance? At noon I didn’t rest, thinking I’d work a little longer before eating. At around 2 p.m., the warehouse manager told me to stop accepting orders and called me over. It turned out to be to deal with some expired products. These expired vegetables, meat, and so on could no longer be sold to customers, so they had to be dealt with. The packaging had to be torn open, the food thrown into one garbage bag, the packaging into another, and the labels had to be removed. The crowdsourcing pickers were paid purely by piece rate, with no base salary at all, and handling expired goods didn’t count toward the piece count — it was completely unpaid labor. Dealing with expired goods itself doesn’t generate profit for the warehouse, so capitalists don’t want to pay wages for this work. And crowdsourced part-timers have huge turnover, all of them are newcomers, and there are many overtime orders, which conveniently gives them a pretext to treat handling expired goods as a „punishment“ without paying for it. Unsurprisingly, all three crowdsourced pickers, myself included, had a pile of picking tasks that went overtime, so the warehouse manager told us to go handle the expired goods. I can accept that the work pressure is especially high. I can also accept that when you’re not skilled, the hourly pay isn’t very high. The cold room is very cold, but if you’re not staying in it all the time, that’s not a big deal. But asking me to work unpaid for a while — that’s unacceptable. Enough is enough. I pointed out on the spot that what the warehouse manager was doing was purely to save labor costs, and said that before we started working, no one had told us there would be such a punishment rule. The warehouse manager still had the same attitude as an old-school ninth-rank official dealing with elementary school students — the internet wasn’t wrong about that at all — and then said I could just leave. Leaving right away and dumping all the work on the other two newcomers wouldn’t be good, so I kept working with them for a while and said that any random job elsewhere would pay better than this. On platforms like Meituan crowdsourcing for delivery, even beginners can make 18 or 19 yuan an hour, and the pace of work is nowhere near as stressful as that of a picker, with no rule that punishes people by making them work for free. Then I suggested just leaving. However, there didn’t seem to be much response. But I couldn’t possibly finish dealing with all those expired goods, so I led the way and bailed.
Thinking about the matter of handling expired goods again, this is obviously caused by the anarchic nature of production under capitalist society. It reminded me of how, in the textbook’s discussion of economic crises, capitalists dump milk that can’t be sold. The crisis of capitalist society is inevitable, and it’s already sinking into crisis. Revolution is just around the corner!
