Time Off Task

The story of a rug about Amazon workers.

“Time Off Task,” 2022.

I got really good news this week: the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston acquired one of my rugs! I’m so happy, but it’s also bittersweet to realize I never got a chance to exhibit the piece before it left my hands. It had a story, and it’s one I still want to share.

I started making “Time Off Task” at the beginning of 2022, when it seemed like everyone was talking about Amazon. The ALU had gone public, winning a historic first union vote at a Staten Island warehouse. Lead organizer Chris Smalls was propelled into the spotlight, quickly becoming a well-dressed people’s champion. It felt like breaking new ground, but in truth, this was only the latest chapter in a long story that had captivated me for over a decade.

When I was a high school student in the Lehigh Valley, a journalist with local newspaper The Morning Call published a report on the region’s newly-built Amazon fulfillment centers. Spencer Soper interviewed more than 20 employees about their experiences at work, and each talked about laboring in extreme temperatures for long hours. With sparse ventilation and no cooling systems installed, heat indexes in the warehouses often rose to 110 degrees in the summer. Ambulances lined up outside to receive workers who fainted or collapsed during their ten-hour shifts.

Amazon had promised the Lehigh Valley that its warehouses would bring good careers and growth to the community. Instead, the employees interviewed in the Morning Call article described a brutal workplace they couldn’t wait to get out of. Soper’s 2011 report lit a spark over Amazon’s warehouses, and it went on to start a fire.

For the next several years, Amazon workers in warehouses around the US continued to come forward with visceral details of their lives at work. They told stories of getting injured on the job with no payouts for medical care. They worked absurd shifts at an urgent pace that left no room for breaks.

Organize Amazon Workers contingent in the 21st Annual Peoplehood Parade in Philadelphia, PA, organized by Spiral Q. Photo by Joe Piette

An unlikely symbol of the scandal emerged: a water bottle filled with piss. Amazon’s PR outlets denied that its delivery truck drivers had to pee in bottles to save time. However, workers responded with photos and stories proving that the company was well aware of the practice, and the pee bottle was as ubiquitous as the smile emblazoned on the side of every truck.

The reports were astounding, but public shock and awe wasn’t enough to give Amazon employees the power to improve their working conditions. For nearly a decade, Amazon’s response to stories of its unsafe work environments were little more than band-aids to preserve its public image. It would take another decade of hard-fought organizing before an Amazon union could bring about any real change.

A year before the ALU’s Staten Island victory, I was anxiously following a highly-publicized union vote at a fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama. At the time, my younger sibling happened to work the night shift at another Amazon warehouse in Chattanooga, Tennessee. In my conversations with Jaime, I got to hear bits and pieces of their experience. I learned about the new ZenBooths: a tiny “mindfulness” closet that Amazon seemed to have rolled out in response to criticism over its labor practices. It was laughable to imagine how employees without five spare minutes for a bathroom break would find time to use the ZenBooth.

Just like the stories from the Lehigh Valley, Jaime had also experienced a coworker collapsing in the middle of a shift. My sibling was expected to continue sorting and packing orders while EMTs showed up and carried the employee away on stretchers. At Amazon, nothing was more important than staying on task.

As Jaime explained, whether you stopped for a bathroom break, a cigarette, a meal, or to rest an aching back, every minute that passed outside of the physical act of work was frowned upon. On time sheets, it was simply labeled “time off task.”

Organize Amazon Workers contingent in the Peoplehood Parade Philadelphia, PA. Photo by Joe Piette

It’s difficult for me to look at mainstream news coverage of any union election, and the Amazon stories of the last few years has been no exception. Scrolling through an article on CNN or Forbes, I’d read walls of text about the threat to the economy, or the inconvenience to customers, or the consequences for shareholders. Corporate statements written by Amazon lawyers were published uncritically, while stories from individual workers never seemed to get the same good-faith treatment.

Watching big-time TV anchors discuss Amazon became a coin toss for me: I either felt emotional or absolutely insane. I couldn’t believe I was witnessing a narrative come together in which people like Jaime did not exist. Living, breathing human beings on the shop floor were not part of the Amazon story. There was no space in media discussions for workers who were hospitalized with heat stroke, or who retired in their seventies without a pension to help care for their crumbling bodies.

I got the same crazy-making feeling from the recent news that Joe Biden, a self-proclaimed pro-union president, shut down an impending rail workers’ strike by forcing union members into a contract they had democratically voted down. I kept waiting to hear Biden talk about the human beings who just wanted to take sick days from their jobs, but between buzzwords about the supply chain and the economy, they didn’t seem to matter.

When I started working on the Amazon rug, I thought about those working-class perspectives that were so willfully overlooked by corporate media and wealthy elites. I wondered; if I portrayed a worker’s view of a place like Amazon, would my artwork be able to carry that story out into the world?

My rugs wouldn’t be the first fiber art pieces that depict an alternative view of history. As long as there has been textile art, makers of marginalized gender, race, and class have used the medium to document their own perspectives. In this case, the historical dismissal of textiles as gendered or low-brow crafts may be a hidden advantage: the objects slip past powerful eyes, binding the stories of their makers into historical record.

When women in Chile saw their president, Salvador Allende, overthrown in a CIA-backed coup, they got to work making arpilleras. In these striking embroideries and appliqués on burlap, textile artists documented scenes of life in Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship. The artworks transcended language, escaping Chile’s borders to show the world what was happening to its people. Arpilleras circulated within resistance communities as objects of solidarity, affirming Chileans’ shared suffering and presenting hope for a better future.

The Coup, 1986, Embroidered textile, 15 x 19 ¾ inches, Courtesy of Francisco Letelier and Isabel Morel Letelier

Beginning with the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1970s, Baluchi women replaced traditional motifs in their woven rugs with symbolic images of warfare and destruction. Slowly and steadily, they returned to their looms to document scenes from the violent regime and eventual defeat of the Soviets. The war rug tradition has continued to influence weavers throughout the Middle East, who now produce rugs in every style that depict everything from drone strikes to the 9/11 attack.

Collection Till Passow Battle for Bagram in 2001, Afghan war carpet from western Afghanistan, 90 x 150 cm

In a way, I see my rugs as historical records. I want to continue the tradition of fiber art as a form of storytelling that transcends language, speaking to people in a direct and emotional way. This way, the rugs can visually communicate with viewers in the future; demonstrating the hierarchy of the capitalist workplace, the road to building union power, and the magnificent struggle of the labor movement today.

I also want working-class people, now and forever, to recognize themselves in the archetypal figures of laborers. I want them to find community in taking long bathroom breaks on the clock, whispering about working conditions, and standing on the picket line. “Time Off Task” is a story about workers at a specific company struggling against one particular oligarch, but it’s also about everyone who experiences this relationship to capital. 

I can’t control how corporate media in the US chooses to frame its narrative of the labor movement. But in my rugs, the workers are heroes. They are on a righteous path over the arc of history; fighting for one small chapter in a story that started long before my time. I hope that people in the next chapter can find our history and recognize themselves in our struggle.