performance against the time standards.
The second metric Trimm looked for was any gap in time. These were the moments when the driver was not on the grid. Any loss of a few minutes or more was recorded. The drivers were told to keep a written log of their lost minutes, called “indirect time,” to account for the moments when they were off the grid. Indirect time might include the time to take a bathroom break, drink water, or stop to ask someone a question. Only a small number of activities could justify taking indirect time off the grid. Chatting with coworkers, for example, was not accepted. When Trimm saw gaps, he questioned drivers and made sure they could provide an explanation for their lost time. If they made an emergency phone call home, or defecated, or stopped to eat, they needed to have it recorded in their indirect log. Employees were reprimanded if they could not explain the purpose of their indirect time.
It was a relief, then, when Travis McKinney scanned into his last location of the day and logged out for the night. It was the first moment of his day when he could enjoy indirect time, direct his own movements, and not have to explain his actions to anyone.
* * *
On payday, McKinney and the other warehouse workers sometimes drove a few blocks away from the warehouse to have a beer at a local strip club called the Nicolai Street Clubhouse. To get there, McKinney drove west from the warehouse, across a set of railroad tracks, and past rundown factories and industrial warehouses. The club was located in a one-story redbrick building on a corner. A white sign facing the street advertised “Crazy Beer Specials” and “!DANCERS!!”
These beer-drinking sessions were the closest thing the warehouse workers had to the raucous union hall gatherings that Steve Hammond knew from his youth. Since that time, the union hall had been moved to a new building closer to the warehouses, but almost no one went to the meetings anymore. The meetings were usually only attended by the IBU’s small leadership council, who gathered in a small conference room. They talked over pension finances or issues with the health care plan. One or two forklift drivers might show up for the meetings, and they were depressingly sober.
When McKinney arrived at the Nicolai Street Clubhouse, he could easily find his coworkers in the dim and tiny bar. Most of the tables were just inside the front door. The guys sat there and drank cheap beer from plastic pitchers. The patrons stared over toward the small wooden stage, right next to an open door that led into the kitchen. The stage was horseshoe-shaped and surrounded by a row of cheap, metal-framed seats. When it came time for their shift, the women mounted the stage by way of a small staircase and danced beneath a fluorescent-tube sign advertising Playboy Energy Drink. A cheap plastic fan mounted on the wall behind them cooled the stage. The narrow wooden ledge around the stage was known as “the rack,” and the men gathered in the seats around it, looking up at the stage and placing their newly earned dollars along the ledge. At a certain point in the routine, the nude women approached the men and swept up the dollar bills in their hands before leaning forward and performing acts of astounding physical intimacy and athleticism.
Some guys sat in the back of the bar, at a row of video lottery machines, slouched there amid the beeping and buzzing. McKinney said it was something of a sport to “watch the guys gamble away their paychecks” in front of the video screens. The forklift drivers could swap stories and complaints and gripe about the LMS over their beers. They could talk about their weekend plans and fishing trips and their kids. They shared a kinship that closely approximated solidarity.
But even this pale form of solidarity began to fade. Over time, fewer people stopped by the Nicolai after work. They were fried after working under the Labor Management System. But there was more than fatigue to blame. The LMS wasn’t just tiring them out. It was turning them against each other.
* * *
The LMS accrued huge volumes of data on each employee. Koch Industries used this data to further motivate its workers to become more productive. Warehouse managers collated the log reports and printed sheets that ranked all the warehouse workers on their performances. The sheets were divided into three colored