FLOATER

Journal for the American Worker

JOB:   Newspaper Carrier/Delivery

SHIFT: 2:00 am – 7:00 am, 7 days a week

SALARY:  $500 - $800 per month

AMENITIES PROVIDED: Tea, Instant Coffee and Hot water

RATING:

The small white map fell from the newspaper on the embroidered “Househusband” lettering of my kitchen apron.

Make extra money as an Adult Paper Carrier. $600-$800 a month.

It was a map of my neighborhood. Hhmmmmmmm. $700 a month… a few hours a day… In my own neighborhood? Looks like another job for FLOATER!

It was a big paper out of Denver, The Denver Post, looking to muscle more market share in our northern suburb. I called the pager number listed and punched in my number. ‘Jesse’ called me back. Sure enough, the route was in my neighborhood. “You’re paid while you train,” he said, ‘and you can start immediately.’ The Mid January forecast was for minus 10 degrees, so I told him I could start next week. I was to report to the warehouse at 2:00 am. Proud of my new found employment, I called the wife at work.

‘Are you nuts!!!??? You’re going to get up at 1:30am, every day?! I could have married a doctor with better hours then that!’ ‘A Floater, poops, I promise. Just a Floater.’ Next Monday the bedroom AM radio alarm rings 1:30, set to Rush Limbaugh because it’s the only AM station my 1968 GE radio can get, and he’s saying “Hillary, Hillary, Hillary.” And the feeling, 'I cannot get up' never changes throughout this stint.

I drive, a zombie, to an industrial park near a local brewery. A cavernous room is divided by plywood sectioned worktables. People stand among stacks of tie-wrapped and unwrapped papers. With a 20% chance of snow, tonight is ‘Bag Night.’ Grown men and women pull different stacked sections together, fold the mass, and stuff it into a bright traffic orange bag (the competitor’s bag is green). Then toss the bag into a five foot high, stainless steel leaning cart. From among the carts appears a heavy dude with broad shoulders, muscular with a pony tail. “Floater?” I nod, recognizing the voice as Jesse’s. He introduces me to my route trainer, ‘Fig.’

He says his name is Alan Prill, but everyone in the warehouse calls him Fig. Fig is a grown up nerdy kid, the kind you expected in fifth grade to mature to run a Fortune 500 company, but lo and behold, here he is, 25, with the same sophomoric fart wit, an assistant manager in the graveyard shift of newspaper delivery. What went wrong? All I remember that first night driving with him was falling asleep at the wheel and Fig screaming, ‘Watch the curb!’

By the third night I was on my own, driving up and down the suburban streets looking for house numbers. This job taught me never to put cute little address numbers that match the house siding. Homeowners with illegible or missing street numbers are the scum of the earth.  I took my ‘Max Million’ Million Candle light car spotlight and trained the laser beam into the bedrooms of these people, hoping just one of them emerges in bathrobe so I may ask them at 3:40am where the hell their house number is.

My first Sunday I learn my paper count doubles due to “S/O’s”, Sunday’s only delivery. By 7:30 Sunday morning I was only halfway done delivering the Sunday route, that’s when Jesse showed up in his Bronco. He slid the car into a 180 degree turn as I stood in the middle of the ice covered street looking for 805 Arapahoe.

“Pop your trunk” he boomed, and I saw those shoulders and arms swing into action. He scooped up 100 papers with both arms, dropped them into his passenger door. “I’ll finish from here!” I heard him say as he moved away down the street, octopus arms flailing papers from both sides of the car like a World War Two destroyer firing v path depth charges, disappearing in the morning light. He was a good man,  working for the evil empire. The paper paid every two weeks, and by then I had started to size up the gig. It was not the $700 I was told…

Deducted from my $314 two week check was a bunch of ‘Fees.’ The most heinous were ‘complaints.’ Every time a subscriber called the paper to comment on paper delivery, $1.00 was deducted from my pay. Subscribers may simply be asking to have the paper thrown in a different spot – Boom, the paper took out $1.00. I was paid $.06 cents per paper. My astute math mind saw each complaint deducted from my pay was 16.66 papers I folded and threw for nothing. At $26 per day, 5 complaints out of 300 papers thrown were 20% of my supposed salary, gone back into the pockets of the publisher.

A recurring complaint was ‘porching.’ Some people would lie and say they were handicapped. A few were handicapped. The bottom line was getting out of the car and porching the paper took time. In winter it means snow freezing, melting, then refreezing on your shoes all night long. If everyone demanded it, the route would be impossible to complete by the guaranteed 6 am, and management knew it. They banked on low percentage, but in reality many carriers battled a high percentage of porching requests. The woman behind me, Camille, was deaf, she and her son showed up every morning, dutifully folding papers and delivering. This family NEEDED every penny of the promised income. Since the publisher’s telemarketing salespeople promised anything as they pitched subscriptions, sales promises translated into daily printed messages posted over our plywood work areas: ‘305 Martin St. – Bagged and labeled everyday, hung on doorknob.’

‘Sandal Floor Apt.#212: Third Floor terrace, on west side of building.’

Multiply these two 1 minute round trip consuming requests by 350 papers…it would take 11 additional hours to comply if everyone demanded this service. So, under pressure of a guaranteed delivery of 6am, there were always complaints. Camille stares at her paycheck wondering why, after gas and car expense, complaints, insurance (no, not medical, ha, ha!) and just a plain old “Fee” of 10 bucks per paycheck, she’s drowning as she treads water with her son in the clicking gears of the Newspaper empire’s warehouse at 3am, every morning of every day of the year. Why does she keep it? Its one of only a few available jobs ‘accommodating’ her handicap, she writes me.

On Friday a local, smaller weekly paper appears on our workbench. This paper gives the impression it is a liberal, environmental, ‘hip’ thang. Its cut a deal with the Post to have carriers ‘insert’ and carry it on their back to throw along. The additional time inserting another paper adds 50 minutes and 40 pounds to the fold. But Camille and I see we get $.01 (that’s a penny folks) per inserting this hip paper into our Friday mass. Or in complaint math, one Friday complaint means deaf mother and child threw 100 of these hip publisher’s papers for free. Whatever the local paper agreed to pay the big paper, they didn’t bother about the amount the actual worker delivering this extra product would be making to do it. There of course, is no option about the Friday insert. 

Why go after Kathy Lee? Slave labor is right on your morning doorstep.

Strangely, in the State of Colorado, citizens cannot go after Newspaper’s operations with that crazy, communist, minimum wage argument. The paper hires each individual carrier as its own independent business! This saves the POST from any labor law violations (and there are tons here), but as you can read in Floater's review of the Boulder County Jail, the Bolder Colorado University Police broke the law and seized the papers I owned due to this law after putting Floater, the paperboy in jail. Nice, efficient justice in Colorado, folks, protect the powerful with lawless degradation of the poor. The Colorado University Police become thieves, when the powerful need them to be...*

Camille the deaf mother is her own business, whether she like’s it or not, understands it or not. If she and her 11 year old son are getting up at 1:30am to work for $1.50 an hour, that’s their own business, not the papers, not the State of Colorado’s.

I’m not deaf yet, I don’t have a kid, and I’ve learned not to rely on paid off politicians for justice. They don’t know it yet, but they’ve just chinked FLOATER into their chain gang. Some handwritten advice passed to Camille and her son to even the score: 

1)     Don’t throw ‘Bonus’ Papers:

Two or three times a week, the paper has “Bonus Days.” This means everyone on the route gets a paper, even if they don’t want it, didn’t order it, are not expecting it. The paper does this to artificially boost its supposed circulation numbers to potential advertisers. I experimented and found I could load some of the unfolded papers on my workbench into my cart, cover them with folded papers and wheel them out, never throwing a single extra paper. The next day I’d drop them off at Recycling. Not one person complained. This shaved over an hour off my route each bonus night. 

2)     Get ‘hard to deliver’ addresses to cancel their subscription (if they aren’t REALLY handicapped). The ‘Porchers’ as we carriers call them, are the Bain of the Profession. They turn fast, drive by, warm music on the radio car work into stop, walk, throw, sometimes miss, rethrow work. If allowed to get to a high percentage, Porchers can turn an already arduous route into a nightmare. It’s expensive, but playing hardball with the Porchers can sometimes get them to either acquiesce or stop the subscription. It means eyeing the manager with a stupid look on your face while he explains for the sixth time where the third floor terrace is at 418 Marine. One house kept demanding porch delivery, so finally I threw 10 old Sunday papers on its roof one Wednesday morning. He quit the next day. Victory! But it cost $15 in complaints over 15 days. 

3)     Take more papers then you need.

Having extra papers in the car means when you miss, simply throw another one! 

4)     Don’t insert the local paper. 

For a penny a paper, these guys deserve it. Like the bonus papers, smuggle ‘em out and visit recycling. So much for “editorially free.” 

5)     Make deal with other carriers.

I met the carrier for The Rocky Mountain News every night at the same apartment complex. He handed me 120 of his papers for 113 of mine. We halved our route mileage by delivering each other’s papers. Workers Unite!

6) Steal Coupons. Arm & Hammer ran a Sunday coupon for $2.00 off on their toothpaste. There was no limit on the coupon. Safeway was running a “2 for 1” Arm & Hammer special on toothpaste. I got 120 tubes of toothpaste for $.25 cents each. Gave ‘em out as presents, have a two year supply…

Summary

The waste of gas and labor, the added pollution, and extra expenditure having competing papers sending out separate carriers to the same neighborhoods is tremendous. Some smart entrepreneur should incorporate an independent business combining routes of different papers and passes these savings to the carriers, subscribers, and even the competing publishers. Carriers would drive less; deliver more papers in a smaller zone.

As it stands, if you’re a night person and need extra cash, take the job only if you follow Floater’s advice. For the abuses listed, this job gets Floater’s lowest rating, one (1) Star. To make matters worse, Colorado University Police threw Floater in jail one morning doing the route for making a right on red at Marine and Arapahoe at 4am in the morning (See Floater review: “Boulder County Jail”). The exposure and expense of driving your car around is a fortune.

Finally, if you are a paper subscriber, take the time to investigate the conditions of the people YOU employ before renewing your paper’s subscription.

Floater, © 1997

*added text (ed note)

Ed note: Addresses and names have been changed to protect the innocent

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