Same Place, Different World

Rosa Griffin: "Amazon pays me $8 an hour. That's less than Fruit of the Loom paid, but I can adjust. The attitude here is completely different than at Fruit of the Loom. Here they treat you as if you are human. If you went to the bosses at Fruit of the Loom with a problem, they shooed you away, they treated you like a naughty child. At Amazon, they make me feel like I'm someone. Here, someone says 'Thank you' to me every single day."

Bertha Marr: "I started October 20. I scan books and wrap them for shipping. I've learned a lot. I've already done six or seven jobs. It's amazing, the kind of equipment they have. I did make more money at Fruit of the Loom, but this has good health insurance. And the supervisors are all nice to me. There is a lot I've still got to learn. I'll stay here 30 years, unless they put me out too."

What's So New About the New Economy?

Who imagines, when getting dressed, that a pair of underwear that you pull on, or a T-shirt that you pop your head through, has been sewn -- by a person no less? Bertha Marr did step number two in making Fruit of the Loom briefs -- sewing the front panel onto the fly -- 18 million times. Eighteen-million pairs of newly sewn men's underwear passed through her hands, enough to give every man and boy in Kentucky nine pair. It was work as overlooked, as anonymous, as wrapping books for Amazon is.

So, in one way, not much has changed. The work at Amazon's distribution center is moderate physical labor. It is more varied than sewing, but not so different. The days at Amazon are long, and people often work on their days off. There are orders to get out, and Amazon pushes hard to get them out, just like Fruit of the Loom did.

The women who work as debt collectors for Frost-Arnett -- such as Karen Brockman or Jennifer Pyles -- dress nicely for work and have their own desks. They get to talk to people all day long. Jennifer recently had a puzzling customer who finally confessed to having had a sex-change operation. Hence the confusion in the customer's bills. But the computer and phone headset is a modern equivalent of piecework. Associates are paid hourly, but each employee's computer reports continuously how much money she's collected and how she stands against the company's monthly goal.

Rosenbluth provides its travel agents with enviable benefits -- free airplane tickets, reimbursement for educational expenses. But rows of identical computers, on desks just wide enough for a terminal and a phone, echo the rows of sewing machines so recently dismantled. The kind of work that Rosenbluth staffs in Campbellsville -- making car, plane, or hotel reservations for business travelers -- is done more and more on the Internet, without the need for people.

The wages at all three companies are less than the wages were at Fruit of the Loom. Of course, no one has 10 years of experience at Amazon, let alone 30 years. But one reason why companies come to Campbellsville is the lower cost of doing business -- a 30% unemployment rate definitely puts downward pressure on wages. Over time, though, the standard of living in Campbellsville could suffer. In the short term, people find it discouraging to start over, earning $7.50 an hour at 40 or 50 years old. That hardly feels like progress.

The new economy is very new in Campbellsville -- the earliest local Amazon employees have been on the job just 10 months. But in some important ways, the austere pay scale points up the significance of a larger change: The only reason to work at Fruit of the Loom was money.

Certainly, there was pride at the Factory. According to Darlene Netherland, who went from being a manager at the Fruit distribution center to being a manager at the Amazon distribution center, "In textiles, we were the Cadillacs of manufacturing and distribution. We thought." But the pride wasn't a source of satisfaction -- it was a source of consolation. You only have to stand in a room and watch practiced women sew briefs to see it -- hands shoving cloth to the needle, foot pumping the pneumatic pedal in perfect syncopation, over and over again, five times a minute, eight hours a day. The longer you watch, the harder it is to distinguish woman from machine.

A hallmark of the best new-economy companies is that they appreciate the distinction between labor and talent, between muscle and mind, between present value and potential. There is a difference between being part of a machine and being part of an enterprise -- and, at least for the moment, that is the difference between Fruit of the Loom and Amazon, between the former Campbellsville and Campbellsville aborning.

Details of the work notwithstanding, Amazon, Frost-Arnett, and Rosenbluth all treat the people who work for them as if they matter, as if they have something to contribute besides an immediate task at hand. For Fruit veterans, that change is as noticeable as the change in wages -- and at least as significant.