How are you dealing with the pain from standing all day?

UPDATE Mar. 24 2024: This is a project that's sat totally dormant for a few years in my itch.io "drafts" folder. Originally made (quickly) for a multiform/multimedia/interdisciplinary poetry workshop in grad school (while simultaneously organizing for our grad union), over the past few years I've been uncertain about some of my impulses/execution with this piece. The lack of citations, for instance, as well as the ways in which my methods decontextualize and de-author the original posts (many of which are about very real suffering, all of which I collated from the comforts of my pandemic bedroom). They're concerns I have, more generally, about my own forays in collage and documentary poetry as well.  I've since lost all of my notes, documentation, and screenshots from when I originally composed this piece and don't intend to update it at all. Still, as I'm now turning more intentionally toward the form of game poems I've decided to pull this back out and acknowledge my own uncertainty about it head on, as a kind of record of thinking through these things and their faults, too.

This project developed after I spent hours and hours reading through posts on the various employee subreddits for companies with large distribution warehouses and/or sales floors -  primarily Amazon's Fulfillment Centers, but also Wal-Mart, Target, and more. Common themes emerged in these posts around surviving/mitigating the physical, mental, and emotional duress inflicted on workers by their employers, especially considering corporate demands for efficiency and discipline.

I also encountered another clear theme: A rising (though geographically distributed) solidarity between workers as they supported and guided one another through the daily rigors of their labor.

A few initial resources for organizing workplaces:

AFL-CIO's overview of workers' legally-protected rights and activities.

Labor Lab's more detailed description of worker's rights to unionize.

Labor Notes' Secrets of a Successful Organizer handouts (the full book is also an excellent resource).

United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America's Five Basic Steps to Organizing A Union