Search Results for: The Carriage Horses March On An Amazon Warehouse

“Heartless Amazon! LEAVE TOWN!

Greedy Amazon! LEAVE TOWN!

Heartless Managers! LEAVE TOWN!

People Abusers! LEAVE TOWN!”

– Chant by the people rights activist carriage horses of  “Lots Of Gas: Getting Political For People,” in New York.

The New York Carriage Horses snarled commuter traffic yesterday by leading a march across the George Washington Bridge to New Jersey to protest human working conditions in an Amazon Warehouse the size of a dozen football fields.

“Humans do not belong in Amazon warehouses,” said King and Chester, co-chairs of the human rights group “Lots Of Gas: Getting Political For People.”  The group said it was demanding that human workers be granted the same working conditions and rights that have been given to the carriage horses of New York City.

The mayor, who was invited to join the march of chanting equine  human rights activists, refused, he said he would be marching in the Vegan-People-Of-Various-Hues parade, which was heading towards Penn Station to demand that the bomb sniffing Labrador Retrievers of Amtrak be banned and retired to loving adoption homes in the country, where they could eat disgusting things in the wild and eliminate there freely and continuously.

City Council President Marguerite Alvarez-Rubinstein-Brzinski-Florello said she would not meet with any representatives of the carriage horse protest, as she said some were believed to be animals belonging to Irish people, some of whom have long owned working horses and many of whom are believed to openly march in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade.

“Arb!,” as she is known by people who can’t remember her names, said she doesn’t know any Amazon workers or working people like that, but she quickly added that she does have a “rescue parakeet” named  “Angel,” which she brought back from the Caribbean after a vacation, and named in honor of a pigeon stomped by a carriage horse during an altercation over oats in front of the Plaza Hotel. The horse was charged with avian abuse, but was rushed by his owners to a Pennsylvania farm where he remains in hiding.

“I had a rescue cat once too,” said Arb, “so I know a lot about animals, “but I don’t know anything about Amazon workers, I thought my packages came from this nice space in San Francisco.”

“It’s okay,” said King, leading a caravan of more than 200 carriage horses clip-clopping across the busy bridge as shocked commuters looked on. “We are willing to go it alone, one day we will gather the money to buy us a mayor too, that will be a great day for people. Then we will get something done for people, end these brutal and abusive practices.”

King told reporters that Amazon working conditions are intolerable. He said warehouses are no place for people. They have a short live span there, they have no room to lie down.

Workers there, he said,  are forced to work as long as eleven hours, to walk miles on concrete, fired as they get tired or older, collapse in unbearable heat,  freeze in the cold, ruin their legs walking on concrete for hours, and are treated as robots. Man are expected to walk as many as ll miles a day and find a product for shipment every 33 seconds. He cited investigative reports by the BBC, Business Insider, and Salon Magazine, all reporting numerous incidents of abuse, mistreatment, overwork, exhaustion and intimidation of workers in Amazon’s warehouses. Amazon workers are hired part-time, given no benefits, forced to work with satellite tracking systems attached to their bodies, given only 30 minutes for lunch even thought they have to walk huge distances to their break rooms. Most say they rarely get time to rest or even eat.

King said he did a lengthy Google Search (try it yourself) and found more than 20,000 stories reporting accusations of abuse of New York Carriage Horses (one arrest for neglect and no convictions) and only a dozen on the treatment of Amazon workers all across the country and in the Northeast, including nearby Allentown, Pa. and New Jersey.

Workers have collapsed of heat stroke, said the local newspaper, been locked in the freezing cold for hours during searches for thieves. The people are underfed, work in unsafe conditions, discarded when they get old. One worker in his fifties worked ten hours a day, walked thirteen to fifteen miles daily, was told he had to pick 1,200 items in a ten-hour shift, or 1 item every 30 seconds, he had to get down on his knees 250 to 300 times a day, when his knees got sore he was written up for not working fast enough and fired with no severance or benefits. When he was dismissed,  only three of the one hundred temps hired with him were still employed. His GPS tracker had monitored his choice of restrooms, he was reprimanded for not using the closet one.

Since only one person in 150 years has been accused of abusing the carriage horses, the horses were puzzled as to why people were trying to ban them while Amazon workers were dropping like flies just a few miles away and half of animal rights happy New York was happily getting their Prime books and videos and kitchen gadgets delivered overnight.  King and Chester thought they ought to march to an Amazon warehouse to call attention to the horrible conditions under which so many human beings work, they assumed the mayor, the New York media and the City Council President must not know of these conditions, since they had never once been mentioned in political campaigns or inaugural speeches. Amazon has millions of customers in New York City and would pay close to attention to concerns about their work practices there – if there had ever been any.

The horses have had enough, say King and Chester, it is time for the warehouses to change or go. They are circulating a petition demanding that the human workers in Amazon (and elsewhere) get to work under the same conditions as the carriage horses in New York:

– Five weeks vacation away from New York City. (Most Amazon warehouse workers are temporary workers and get none, the few full time workers get one or two weeks after a certain time.)

– Temperature restrictions: Carriage horses are prohibited from working when the temperature is below 18 degrees Fahrenheit or above 90 degrees. There are no temperature restrictions for Amazon workers.

– Carriage horses cannot work more than nine hours a day. This includes a 15 minute rest period for every two hours worked. Amazon warehouse workers get two 15 minute rest periods every 10-12 hours, 30 minutes to eat.

– Carriage horses must be blanketed during winter months. Amazon workers are on their own.

– Adverse weather:  Horses are prohibited from working in “adverse weather”, which can mean wind, heavy snow or rain, or anything a police officer says is adverse. Amazon employees get no time off for snow, storms or hurricanes.

– Carriage horses are prohibited from working if they are lame or ill. Amazon warehouse workers report illness from overwork, muscle strain, heat and cold, are given no sick time off and are not prohibited from working while sick.

In addition, the horses are required by law to be fed regularly, watered continuously, have their hooves trimmed and checked,  and are given free health care and regular examinations by police veterinarians. Their stalls are cleaned every three hours, they eat an average of two fresh bales of hay a day.

King and Chester say they and the other people rights activists will protest the working conditions at the Amazon warehouses until the workers there are provided the same protections and given the same benefits as the carriage horses of New York City. They said their website, “Lots Of Gas: Getting Political For People!” would soon begin posting photos of Amazon workers who drop of exhaustion, are fired because they are older, are freezing in poorly-heated warehouses, whose feet are blistered and sore from walking on many miles of concrete floors. “People don’t belong in those warehouses,” said King, “they work in freezing or overheated spaces, they are suffering inhumanely, we need to get them out of there and into the loving hands of people on rescue farms, where they will not have to work again.”

The horses say they will go to the Amazon warehouse in New Jersey every Sunday to yell insults and sing chants to the supervisors as they leave work. They began chanting on the bridge, their chants could be heard all across the huge span and even on the barges and boats on the water.

Chants To the Amazon workers:

 “For the workers, it’s no fun!

 They are dropping, one by one!

Workers baking in the sun,

They are dropping one by one!”

Then, as the group made it’s way to the Jersey side of the bridge, a second chant:

 “1-2-3-4

Open up the warehouse doors!

5-6-7-8,

Smash the trackers and liberate!

9-10-11-12

Amazon bosses, go to Hell!”

Sometimes I think I should give up writing about the New York Carriage Horses and turn it over to the White Rabbit From Alice In Wonderland. Perhaps he could make sense out of it: “Is it yellow? Is it blue. Is it really something true?”

The carriage horse controversy is filled with moral inversions, double-standards, fantasies, selective morality and illusion. Perhaps that is what makes it so fascinating and wrenching at the same time. It is a mad thing, to make sense out of it, you have to understand that it makes no sense at all.

Nothing illustrates this more than the parable of the carriage horses and the pedicabs, both of whom compete for beautiful and precious space in Central Park and for the flowing dollars of tourists, carriage horse lovers and romantics.

The pedicab business began in New York in the 80’s and 90’s when creative but starving actors and artists put carts on their bikes to deliver things and offer rides to people on crowded Manhattan streets under-served by taxis. There were a handful of them, they charged little. They were an inexpensive,  novel alternative to the yellow cabs, a quiet way to get through clogged streets. I remember my first pedicab ride, it was in the rain, the driver was funny and appealing, he charged me $5 dollars to get through jammed up streets for a lunch meeting.

A great way, I thought, to get around.

Today, the artists and actors are gone,  replaced mostly by poor immigrant teenagers and their aggressive intrapaneur owners, and the pedicab business has become a profitable industry. It is no longer a great way to get around.

There are more than 800 pedicab licenses and 1,000 drivers. Pedicabs have become a widely acknowledged nightmare in and around Central Park. They crowd paths and sidewalks, harass pedestrians and visitors, and the city has been flooded with complaints by tourists and visitors who have been charged hundreds of dollars for 10-minute rides in the park.

The cabs are ugly, they are often filthy – I checked out a half-dozen recently –  and anyone who comes within two blocks of the park is beset by aggressive hawkers and pamphleteers who follow tourists, interrupt conversations.

When the actors were pedaling around mid-town, it seemed a charming and eco-friendly way to get around. There were no complaints of scams and over-charging.

Although the city is struggling to regulate their fees, so far they have failed – one Japanese family recently returned to Tokyo to find $400 charged to their credit card for a 10-minute pedicab ride. A family from Kansas was charge $160, for a four-minute ride through the park (that would cost $50 on a horse carriage and last three times as long.)

The rates are confusing, often a scam. I saw five different prices on five different pedicabs, the most common being $3 a minute.  Many of the drivers “add on” a fee for person at the end of the ride, for one Texas family the “add-on” fee was $400.

The pedicab rides are much more expensive than a horse carriage ride. I took a short ride on my last trip to New York, and the best word I can use to describe it unpleasant. The ride is jarring and bumpy, the pedicab feels every crack in the road, just like a bicycle, which it is. It is low to the ground, about level with taxi and car fumes and sounds. The drivers seem to know nothing about the park, if they speak English at all. It is not clear how much the ride costs or where the pedicab is going. The pedicab lurches back and forth as the driver pedals and because it is so low to the ground, there is little real perspective on the beautiful vistas and landscaping of the park.

Mostly, you get a view of the sides of cabs and cars.

It is difficult to imagine why the city would permit these cabs to flood the entrances to the park and the roadways inside of it. I don’t think these would pass muster in Shanghai, where they are common. Or why anyone might prefer them to a ride in a horse-drawn carriage.  On my last trip, three pedicab hawkers came up to me and showed me a pamphlet that suggested they were offering carriage horse rides, there were photos of horses on the pamphlets.  “Why are you showing a photo of a horse?,” I asked. “This isn’t a carriage ride.”

“Oh,” said the driver, a young man with a Caribbean accent, “we drive right by the horses all the time. You can see them.”

One hawker followed Maria and I for a block-and-a-half and wouldn’t stop until I stopped and told him he needed to back off or we would seek help. Consumer advocates recommend that visitors avoid pedicabs altogether, there are just too many scams, they are too difficult to regulate and the city doesn’t spent too much time trying. Perhaps they are too busy making sure the carriage horses get their five weeks of vacation.

The carriage drivers believes the pedicabs are another front opened up to take business away from them and drive them out of the park. One carriage trade official said the pedicabs siphon as much as $2 million away from the carriage trade each year. The pedicab/horse carriage juxtaposition would make a wonderful study for urban planners in how to break something that isn’t broken, and undercut something that doesn’t need fixing.

Frederick Law Olmstead would bust a blood vessel if he could see what they have done to his park. You can argue about the carriage horses all you want, but does anybody really need a bicycle ride through the park for $3 a minute? Will any kid remember it, or any couple want a ride after getting married?

The city has, in a great measure despoiled the park in much the same way the carriage horses enhance it and fit into it so gracefully. The pedicabs crowd the roads and the walkways and make the entrances to the park an obstacle course, forcing people to dodge shouting hawkers, aggressive drivers and the scores of cabs themselves.

For me, this is yet another example of what I call “moral inversion.”

All this focus on the horses, does anyone notice what is happening to the people?

Why, I wonder, is it okay for young men, mostly from other countries, to haul several hundred pounds of human beings on bicycles in extreme weather – hot and cold, but not okay for huge draft horses bred for centuries to pull proportionately much lighter loads?

It is much easier for a nearly 2,000 pound draft horse to pull a carriage with rubber wheels on flat ground than for a human being – often visibly sweating and straining – to pull a couple of people through Central Park. I talked to several of these young men in the park, and I was not as surprised as I ought to have been to learn that the horses are treated much better than they are. One of the drivers told me – I paid him and his buddies for their time to talk to me – that his brother threw out his back driving a pedicab, and was let go. He had no insurance to help with his medical bills and is unable to find another job. It is quite common, said the young men, for some of them to pass out in the heat.

“They scream at us all the time to make money, make money, or we get fired,” said Christophe. “We don’t get no breaks.”

If carriage horses were treated in this way, the city would be in an uproar, and properly so, but I do not know of any instance in memory when a carriage horse collapsed due to heat while working in New York City.

The pedicab drivers do not get five weeks of vacation, mandated health care, breaks every two hours, places to rest and be fed and sheltered. They do not get to retire on a farm when they are older, they are not fed snacks all day and led to water fountains. They pedicab drivers make no benefits at all, most of them live in poverty,  and it is not surprising to me some resort to scamming to earn a living. The pedicab drivers work brutal hours and are pressured into the kind of aggressive peddling that the carriage drivers do not do, and do not need to do.

I remember a column I wrote some months ago, in which the horses led a protest march on an Amazon Warehouse in New Jersey to protest the working conditions of people there. Maybe they should begin the march with the pedicab drivers.

The pedicabs are as unnatural to Central Park as the horses are natural – in great measure, the park was designed for horse carriages. I wonder that all of the demonstrators in New York who worry so much about the welfare of the horses don’t seem to notice the exploitation of these young men or their working conditions – they really do seem to be abused –  and the abuse the system inflicts on the park and on the tourists and visitors who use it. These working conditions do not yet seem to have caught the eye of the city’s assertively progressive mayor, who believes it is not “humane” for horses to even be in New York City, let alone work there.

When I think of the pedicab drivers hustling tourists, puffing their way through the crowded and overwhelmed park, of the dirty cabs and confusing rates, and then I think of the carriage horse controversy, my head sometimes spins. The poor people in the carriage trade, swept up in such a mad whirlwind.

How can one assert so much concern for animals while not even seeing the suffering of human beings or notice how well treated the horses are in comparison?  I do think of Alice following the White Rabbit down the hole in Wonderland.

“Your Majesty, members of the jury, loyal subjects,” he says, “the prisoner at the bar stands accused of enticing Her Majesty, the Queen Of Hearts, into a game of croquet, thereby and with malice of forethought, molesting, tormenting, and otherwise annoying our beloved…thereby causing the Queen to lose her temper…”

Out of darkness, light.

By now, many of you know the term “Army Of Good,” I use it to describe the thousands of people who read my blog and share my idea of doing good rather than living in hatred and argument. They are people who have generously support embattled farmers, endangered carriage horses, refugee children and immigrants, sick animals and the elderly.  They have put their money where their mouths are.

The Army Of Good idea began as a premise, and has become something much larger.

I have to be honest and give credit for the idea where it belongs. I am not a Christian, but I am an admirer and faithful student of Jesus Christ, who urged his followers to be in the world, but not of the world.

Simply, he meant that being in the world was necessary if we are to do good and be a light in the spiritual darkness that surrounds us. But we are not of it, we do not have to embrace the values we do not share, or reject. We are free to take our joy in good rather than evil.

This idea became the template for my own choice about how to live in so unsettling and divided a time. I was not going to be drawn into the whirlwind forming around me, I would steady myself by this idea of doing good, as often as I could, and with whatever help I could. I wanted to be in the world, but not of that world.

How to do it?

I could not have imagined how many people embraced this message and idea, and have enlisted. We are a might army now, we are undefeated and getting stronger by the day. The number of vulnerable people who you have helped grows by the day.

The elections of November, 2016, changed the world around me, and it changed my world.  Yours also, I suspect.

All around me, people were arguing, lamenting, raging. And were getting frightened.

The rise of information technology meant there was no escaping this whirlwind, it was in the air, in our pockets, in our ears, in front of us all of the time.  Nerves were fraying and still are, it all seemed so endless and destructive.

For me, that was nothing but a barren desert, I do not belong on the left or the right, there was nothing for me in that hellish land of argument and justification and paranoia and fear that has overtaken the capital.

Suddenly, our civic operating system, which had worked to varying degrees for more than 200 years, seems broken. Social media have become a transmitter of rage and falsehoods on all sides.  Much of what I have always believed is under relentless assault.

How was I to live in this new world, and stay grounded and creative? I am not interested in arguing about Donald Trump or denigrating his followers. I have no desire to post angry messages on Facebook or Twitter.

I choose to promote connection and community, not resented and fury. Politics holds nothing for me, yet it shapes so much of my life and well-being.

The idea of an Army of Good – the perfect vehicle for being in the world, not of the world –  hit me sometime in January.

This idea came to me one morning as I was writing on the blog:  why not just do good, and not argue about what is good? This sentence struck a deep nerve among my readers.

This was alien territory for me, my blog had been dedicated for a decade to the story of my farm, my life with animals and my own efforts to evolve as a human being. In recent years, it has also become the story of my love for and life with Maria. I have no wish to drop those elements of my writing life.

But I can’t just sit still and pretend the world is not changing or that people are not worried, even frightened.

I decided to focus on causes I was drawn to, and wished to explore. The refugees and immigrants came to mind.

So did the residents of an assisted care facility in my town where Red and I had begun to do some therapy work. I had come to know and love these people and saw how ignored and marginalized they were.  What if the wider world reached into their lives and reminded them that there are good people in the world, and that they were loved, and that we could help them obtain the small and inexpensive things that made such a big difference in their lives on the edge of life?

I had already experimented with the growing power of my blog, which I have also seen as a potential force for good. We had raised money for our farrier, who underwent double knee surgery; for a farmer named Joshua Rockwood, who had been unjustly persecuted by police and animal rights activists, and for the Round House Cafe, which seemed to stay in our town and preserve an embattled sense of community here.

The blog raised nearly $200,000 for these different causes, and I was beginning to see that one of my dreams was coming true – the blog was not just making noise, it was already doing good. And without argument or hatred. It was the right time for good people to emerge and be felt and heard.

I also supported several crowd sourcing programs to raise money for troubled farmers for sick horses and animals. People wanted to help, they thank me every day for inviting them to help.

In addition, I stepped beyond my own boundaries, a healthy thing for a writer.

I wrote for several years recently about  the fight of the New York Carriage Horses to remain in New York, and I believe the stories I wrote and the people who read my blog helped to shape the debate about the horses that ended with the horses remaining in New York.

Along with many others,  I waged a war for facts and truth, and truth won. Truth matters. Good matters. In the Army, our hearts have not turned to stone.

Earlier this year, I contacted an immigrant support group in Albany, New York,  and was asked to help newly arriving immigrants buy fans and blankets and soccer balls and strollers and school supplies and curtains and pots and pans and silver. We did. Through an Amazon gift page we raised tens of thousands of dollars and filled up the group’s warehouse with things the new immigrants badly needed.

In March, I raised the idea of helping the residents in the Mansion, a Medicaid assisted care facility in my town. Red and I had visited many assisted care and dementia facilities, but I wondered what might happened if we visited one several times a week and really got to know the residents and their needs, and also take their pictures. I wanted to bring them to life, they are so forgotten.

I also mentioned that the residents of the Mansion Assisted Care Facility would probably love to get mail, and was astonished when thousands of letters came pouring in from all over the country, from every state in the country, sending messages of all kinds, along with flowers, candy, puzzles, books and CD’s, gift baskets for holidays. I wrote in March it seemed were forming an Army Of Good. The Mansion bulletin boards and bedside tables are filled with letters and postcards and collages and drawings.

Connie, a knitter and fiber artist, has made scores of caps, mittens, sweaters and blankets for sick children and Mansion residents with the yarn the Army has sent her. She just got an air conditioner from the Army so she will have enough oxygen to breathe when the temperatures rise.

The AOG is an odd  kind of army, we don’t know one another or speak to one another, and we are all kinds of people, with all kinds of political views. I have never met or even communicated with most of you, I have only the vaguest idea who you are and where  you are. Yet we seem so in sync if feels like family.

We share a common passion for doing good rather than arguing. We have transformed the Mansion, buying them a new van, air conditioners, computer printers, art supplies, a boombox, paintings for the walls, cookies and cake for their holidays, cakes and cookies, yarn and puzzles.

In addition, and after four months of searching, I have found a refugee and support called RISSE, it is in Albany, and met a remarkable young teacher named Ahmad Abdulla Mohammed (a/k/a) Ali. He has welcomed me into the world of the immigrants and refugees, now under siege across America. And he guides me as to who needs help and what for.

The Army Of Good was ready to march again. We bought 90 art and creativity kits for the refugee students, a trip to the Great Escape Adventure Park in July; soccer shirts for the soccer team, we are sponsoring birthday parties and Saturday summer outings for the refugee children.  Soon, we will be helping the poorest students pay for their day care and hopefully, help RISSE maintain its desperately needed programs for refugees and immigrants..

For me, the idea for the refugees is the same as the idea for the Mansion residents: to give people faces and identities, rather than simply make them political slogans and positions to be exploited. I want to show who they really are.

I am careful and thoughtful about what I support, and so far, the Army has come through every time.

I believe idea has helped me stay grounded and peaceful during this difficult time. I believe it helps the members of the army as well to do the same. I think Christ had a good idea, among other good ideas. We must live in the world, there is no running from.

The light of conscience shows us the laws of life.

You have already done a tremendous amount of good, and I wanted  you to know that.

Being in the Army of Good does not make me or you a saint, nor does it even mean that I am good. But I know I can do good, we can do good. We already are.  As the world sometimes darkens, we bring light.

I believe it is the path to a better way to live and be. It will help me live in this world without surrendering to it.