Dave Jamieson of the Huffington Post explores America’s warehouse archipelago in a piece entitled The New Blue Collar: Temporary Work, Lasting Poverty, and the American Warehouse. He describes how big retailers like Wal-Mart outsource their shipping to subcontractors who hire temporary workers to move goods for piecework rates.

Warehouses could support local communities by providing non-outsourceable middle class jobs, but instead, many are miserable places to work:

As manufacturing jobs continue to head overseas, Americans need new sectors that can provide good, middle-class work for millions of people. Driven as it is by the consumer economy, the retail supply chain should be one of those sectors. But plenty of workers who are lucky enough to have jobs in the industry find themselves earning poverty wages. And while workers get squeezed in the name of lower prices, the overall benefits to consumers may be illusory. By many measures, the middle class is shrinking – and not just because of the Great Recession. There are simply fewer jobs that pay good wages. More than 46 million Americans – roughly one in six – are now living in poverty, the highest number ever recorded by the Census Bureau. Between 2001 and 2007, as the economy boomed, poverty expanded among working-age people for the first time ever during a period of growth. Workers on the whole made less at the end of the boom than they did at the beginning.

In the case of the warehouse industry, where permanent temps are now common, many workers performing the most difficult jobs don’t even enjoy the status of basic employees. They work at the pleasure of the agencies employing them. For many of them, getting hurt or slowing down means the end of their gig with no parting compensation – similar to the arrangement detailed in a devastating expose of an Amazon warehouse by the Pennsylvania Morning Call in September.

Jamieson won a Sidney Award in November of 2009 for a story about the intersection healthcare and homelessness. Spencer Soper won the October 2011 Sidney Award for his coverage of heat prostration and other indignities inflicted upon the staff of an Amazon.com warehouse complex in Pennsylvania.

[Photo credit: Roamallday, Creative Commons.]