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Welcome to Warehouse and Operations as a Career, I’m Marty and today I thought we’d talk a little about the Unloading or Lumper Position. We’ve been catching up on some questions and topic suggestions over the last 3 or 4 weeks, and we’ve seen a lot of sharing with’em so I thought we’d go over this one again. I saw a question about an open position in a parts warehouse and the young lady asked exactly what an unloader had to do and did it involve using a forklift. I started to refer her to Episode’s 6, 51, 61 or even 63, we mention the opportunities of Unloading or Lumping in each of them but, given our recent themes, I thought maybe it’d be nice to approach it in more of a job description way. It’s kind of funny this question came up this week, on the last episode I mentioned that the Driver Helper position ranked as number 1 or 2 regarding my all-time favorite get our foot in the door or getting started in the warehousing fields. In my humble opinion Unloading is the absolute short cut to a career in warehousing. For those of us that’s never had a warehouse position in a large distribution center it can be our entrance into a very successful career! Oh and that brings up a comment I received a couple of weeks back. A listener felt that I mentioned the words large centers and corporate companies quite a bit, did I feel that’s the direction she should be seeking employment. The corporate channels just worked out for me. I worked for 3 national companies and acquired all my experiences through them. I was fortunate to wrap up my last 25 working years with the same facility. Oh I was on several of their different teams, contingency team, move teams etc but I was housed with the same opco. But honestly, as far as gaining experience, say right out of high school or if your changing careers I think working with staffing agencies or independent, family owned facilities can give us all the Operational and equipment experiences, and maybe much more of that experience, much quicker than we’ll receive those promotions at the larger centers or corporate settings. I now work with both worlds, staffing and smaller organizations, and I see those career opportunities every day, that’s the reason I love doing what I do! So with all that being said let’s look at the position of Unloader or Lumper, maybe we should even think of them as different positions?
Ok, the Unloader position. With employees wearing so many different hats and having additional duties that come along with just about every task I’ve seen the responsibilities grow with the position.
As an unloader of course well arrive for work early, I’ve always like to get there at least 15 minutes early but 10 minutes will work. The important think with any job is to not be late. We’ll be punched in, have all our PPE’s on and be at our gathering point for our pre-shift or start-up meeting. Now as an unloader we’ll be unloading trailers and containers, maybe even rail cars. We’ll have some sort of schedule sheet that’ll tell us what loads, vendors and products will be coming in and how we’ll need to break them down, and how many pallets we’ll end up with. Reading those break down sheet’s is where a little responsibility comes in, it’ll be our job to make sure we have separated all the different items, colors or sizes, different products another words and we’ve sized the pallets correctly. Two weeks ago we talked about the Freight Receiver position, and how they would be verifying the unloaders work. As unloaders we have to identify, separate and prepare the pallets for storage and selection. We’ll stack the items using the information on our schedule or breakdown sheets with the correct ti/hi. Remember that ti/hi number represents how many cases are on a layer or the ti and how many layers we’ll put on the pallet or the hi. After we finish stacking a pallet it’s always a good idea to run a layer of tape around the top layer of product or maybe wrap the entire pallet with shrink wrap so it doesn’t come apart during transport to the slot or maybe lean or fall when it’s placed up in a reserve slot. As an unloader out last step may be to place the pallet in a staging area for the receiver to accept the load into our WMS, or warehouse management system, and it becomes part of our companies’ inventory. Let’s go back to all those hats employees are wearing these days. If we’re working in a lower volume warehouse it could be our responsibility to be that receiver, and we’ll need to add the p.o. to our inventory. We could even be the pallet runner and forkdriver too. I love facilities with these lower volumes, we’ll get so much more experience there. I like staffing companies for the very same reason. If we have a plan, see how I threw that in there again, if we have a plan we can lead our recruiter in the direction we want to go right? Grab a short term assignment as an unloader, then get them to place us somewhere that utilizes pallet runners that’ll train us on the equipment, put in a little time doing that and then get our bosses to teach us to use the forklift! In initiating such a plan though please remember our first order of safety, which is to never get on any kind of powered industrial equipment unless we’ve been trained on and certified to be on it! With a year’s worth of experience like that and we can then go apply with any company we’d like to work at and we’ll be seriously considered for the job!
I mentioned Lumping a while ago, Lumping is another term for unloader. Lumping is a term that use to be used when over the road drivers would hire someone from the street to unload or lump the cases off his or her trailer for them. There’s 3rd party companies that hire out for that task in today’s world. With much stricter OSHA regulations and Insurance demands drivers and companies can’t just pick up anyone off the streets and pay them to unload their loads anymore. Which brings us to another kind of unloading or lumping. I consider this just as skilled a position as we talked about earlier, it’s just we won’t have to do the receiving and putaway. Our task is just to unload the trailers and containers, properly stack the pallets, wrap them up tight and stage them in a specified location. Both types of unloaders have pretty much the same responsibilities all in all. These positions are still referred to by many as general labor positions but I consider them a skilled position. Although yes, there a great 1st position in warehousing, there’s a lot to learn and we’ll have the responsibility of reading the schedule sheets and breakdown reports, separating the product and stacking the products properly on good wood or pallets, wrapping them and getting them to the receivers as instructed or up in the racks safely right?
As for the pay rates for these type of positions. What I see at the lower volume facilities, you know where we may be the unloader, receiver and putaway person, it’s usually paid by the hour. Since we’re doing several tasks it’ll probably not be a productivity task so it’s hard to measure the individual components, there’s so many different tasks to be completed. Where we’re doing only the unloading or lumping task I find piece pay or pool pay programs to be the norm. And that’s really a plus for us as unloaders, the more freight we move individually the more we earn for ourselves. I’ll go ahead and admit, Unloading is my favorite get a foot into the industry position. It’s just easy to get a little self-education and learn about every other warehouse task around us. We’ll that’s the ends and outs of Unloading & Lumping. I hope I answered a couple of your questions, and If you’d like another answer or two please don’t hesitate to shoot us an email to host@warehouseandoperationsasacareer.com and I’ll find someone with an answer for us. And don’t forget that our listener groups are pretty helpful and quick with an answer over on our Facebook and Twitter feeds where WAOC can be found 24 hours a day and 7 days a week using @whseandops! We’d appreciate a quick like or a follow if you should be so inclined. I’m having a lot of fun over in the Facebook group Warehouse Equipment Operators Community and I’d love to run into you over there! Until next week, look around, what’s your next step in your plan. Go out there and achieve your goal & please remember to do it Safely!