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How old were you when you realized that a dollar bought more candy than a nickel? Do you remember what grade you were in during your grammar school years when you learned that 5% was a lot less than 100%? In both cases, you were just a mere child with lots left to learn about math. Yet FedEx, with Managers, Directors and VPs with cumulative ages and years of formal education in excess of thousands of years is seemingly incapable of grasping even this most simple mathematical truth. Sound incredible? Not if you're at all familiar with FedEx's new Job Knowledge Test policy. With this policy, FedEx is clearly telling it's employees that the Job Knowledge Test, while only counting as 5% of an employee's performance review score, is important enough to cost that employee 100% of his or her propay if they flunk the test on the first try! Sounds unfair, doesn't it? That's simply because it is unfair.
As if that wasn't unfair enough, FedEx also further defies simple mathematical truth by stating in it's new Job Knowledge Test policy that the same 5% they allocate to the value of the test in the performance review equals 100% of an employee's customer contact capability. That's right. Flunk the test three times, and although you've been a courier for 5 - 10 - 15 or even 20 years, you are suddenly incapable of doing that same job by virtue of nothing more than the results of a timed test of your skill in finding the right page in a book or your ability to figure out the shipping cost of a package!
In the past 10 years, FedEx employees have received 2 wage increases totaling about 6%. During that same period of time, the cost of living in America has risen approximately 30%. In real life terms, this essentially means that every FedEx hourly worker has endured an involuntary, non-negotiated, but perhaps most importantly, an unspoken about 24% cut in their pay! FedEx hourly employees have all felt the crunch of this stealthy erosion of their standards of living. Many of us are taking fewer vacations away from home, hanging on to that old car a few years longer or finding other ways to pare down our budgets. Not long ago, an American President won a landslide election by simply asking voters if they were better off than they were 4 years earlier when they elected his opponent to the office of President. It's time we all asked ourselves if we are better off today than we were 8 years ago. If you can't answer yes to that question, then isn't it time we held an election of our own? Only this time, it won't be a political candidate we'll be voting for. It will be a vote to unite and raise our collective voices in a chorus of "ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!" It will be a vote to UNIONIZE!
Technology is something most of us welcome into our lives as a tool which saves us time and labor while enriching our life's experience. That's because most of us use rather than abuse technology. Those of us that remember the days before the Supertracker recall all too well how time consuming it was to peel stickers and write out airbill numbers during the course of our work day. The advent of the Supertracker was, for couriers, liberation from one of the more mundane aspects of our job and, performance wise, akin to taking the ankle weights off of a track and field runner. For our customers, it was an almost unbelievable tool that offered them the peace of mind in knowing exactly where their important shipments were at any time in transit. Unfortunately, in FedEx management's hands, it has become a high-tech weapon that anyone who has ever read George Orwell's science fiction masterpiece, "1984," will immediately liken to the omnipresent and oppressive presence Orwell called "Big Brother!"
Instead of being used as a tool with which to track and control package movement for the convenience of our customers, the Supertracker has become a weapon which management wields with an ever- increasing and menacing manner. It is now used to track a courier's every movement throughout his or her entire day. This data is then fed into a computer where engineers, most of whom would drop dead of sheer exhaustion if they ever did an honest day's work by the sweat of their brow, analyze the faceless numbers. The engineers then issue instructions to front line managers as to how to tweak and fine tune the human beings in their charge as if we were made of the same stuff as the machines they crunch their numbers on!
In some stations, management is making the grim fantasy of Orwell's "1984" even more of a reality by installing surveillance cameras that monitor a courier's every move while in the station. The question that looms in all of our futures is not if, but when management will incorporate even newer technologies to further intimidate FedEx employees into machine-like performance and perfection? Yet, are these machines that are increasingly gaining control of our employment destinies, as perfect as FedEx gives them credit for being? Anybody who has ever worked with computers knows the answer to that question is a resounding NO! There are literally hundreds of ways which data can be lost or corrupted by a computer system that works with millions of minute electronic impulses virtually in seconds or even fractions of seconds! Ask yourself why electronic components must be manufactured in surgically clean "white rooms?" Isn't it because even the most minute of microscopic contamination of the components and storage media used in computers can wreak havoc with data processed by the computer? Now consider that these manufacturing safeguards only protect the hardware from contamination. When the data used by these computers is transmitted across the airwaves and bounced off of satellites, it can be corrupted by things as ordinary as radio station transmissions and sunspots! As if that wasn't bad enough, it is also helpful to remember that even industry giants like Microsoft routinely find flaws in both their hardware and software that they refer to as "bugs" which cause data corruption to be part and parcel of any computer user's experience.
How many of us have come in off the road and pulled up our V41 van scan and POD compliance records only to see airbill numbers like "1(23!45)67" printed out as packages we supposedly had on board to deliver? How about airbill numbers that wind up in reject ques with transposed number sequences or bogus numbers that replaced one or more of the actual airbill numbers? And let's not forget the admission, at least in the Metro Chicago area, that van scans are sometimes "lost" when transmitted via the DADS terminals. If van scans can be lost in the ether, what is to prevent PODs from suffering the same fate? Yet we are firmly judged on our performance reviews when our V41s reflect any discrepancies with the numbers the system says we should have!
To put it all succinctly in perspective, our job security is being threatened by engineers who have never run a route or sorted a single package and we are being judged by machines which continue to provide evidence that perfection is something as alien to their domain as it is to that of the human beings that created them. The plug needs to be pulled on "Big Brother!"
Consider this! FedEx employees make over $3.00 less per hour at top pay than our peers at UPS and Airborne do! How do you feel about that? Does it make you mad? It should! Considering that we charge our customers the top-dollar in the overnight delivery industry, why should we settle for bottom-dollar wages? A popular misconception willingly circulated by some of our own fellow employees is that UPS hourly employees make more money because they work harder. People will point at the large number of boxes they see on UPS trucks as evidence of how hard they have to work. As a former UPS employee, I'm here to tell you that drawing such inferences is pure hogwash! Think about how many different UPS drivers you see in the course of doing your route each day. Their routes are much smaller and their package volume is extremely concentrated in these smaller areas. Furthermore, UPS embeds dedicated 10:30 commitment drivers within their routes so that the full-time bulk route drivers only deliver those 10:30 packages that they can easily piggyback with their early bulk stops. The folks you see in brown are no different than you. They are no more dedicated nor are they more inclined to be harder workers than you are. The only real difference is that they are far better compensated for their efforts than you are!
Okay, so someone else has probably also told you that it isn't fair to expect FedEx to pay us as well as UPS because we're a much smaller company that hasn't been around since 1907 like UPS has. What they fail to mention though, is that try as hard as they can, UPS has never been able to capture the share of the overnight delivery market that FedEx has! Why? Because FedEx pioneered the overnight delivery industry! While others laughed at Fred Smith's idea, we grabbed the ball and ran with it! Ask the average person on the street to sum up fast, reliable overnight delivery in one word and most always you'll get the same answer. FedEx! Why do you think we officially changed our name from Federal Express to FedEx? Primarily because "FedEx" has literally become a verb in the English language! Even when someone uses one of our company's competitors, they still use the term "FedEx" to indicate to one another that they want the package the next day! And who is responsible for this phenomenal name recognition? Fred may have come up with the idea, but it's us front-line employees who gave real meaning to the idea! We deserve better for what we've done and continue to do!
For the sake of argument though, let's take UPS out of the picture for a moment. Then ask yourself how it is that Airborne, a smaller and unionized company, is able to pay it's employees $3.00 an hour more than us and still manage to stay in business? Smell something fishy? If you don't, you'd better get those sinuses checked fast!
By now, most every FedEx employee has seen the anti-union video tape FedEx has produced and circulated throughout the company. One of the main points the video makes is that unionization is a crap shoot where employees might gain, lose or remain static insofar as wages and benefits are concerned. If this were indeed true, then why is it so important to management that unions be kept out? Why did FedEx management expend the time and money to produce the video and then expend furthertime and money to distribute the tape and payemployees while they are forced to watch it? Isn't the answer pretty obvious? The company fears the prospect of a united workforce because they know unionization will benefit hourly employees! They know a unionized workforce would never tolerate the kind of wage stagnation we've experienced. They know a unionized workforce would never tolerate the increasing abuse of employees at the hands of misused technology. Most importantly, FedEx management knows that it will be virtually impossible to further tighten the screws on a unionized workforce. Yet, without a union we know things will certainly get worse for us all!
One of the dirty little secrets about FedEx is that the company has spent millions of dollars fending off the threat of unionization by funneling money to lobbyists in Washington to keep FedEx under the jurisdiction of the Railway Act rather than under the National Labor Relations Board as our unionized competitors are. What's so important about keeping us under the Railway Act jurisdiction? The answer is simple. So long as we remain under the Railway Act's jurisdiction, FedEx stations cannot be individually unionized! Instead, the only way we can become unionized is if we do so nationwide. Remember a few years back when the United Auto Workers (UAW) were passing out literature at FedEx stations all across the country? The reason they launched such a massive simultaneous effort was because they knew unionizing FedEx was an all or nothing proposition. Unfortunately for the UAW, they launched their campaign before things became as bad as they have for hourly employees at FedEx. Furthermore, their literature was poorly conceived and primarily reflected the local problems of a single FedEx station in the eastern part of the country rather than national issues that affect us all.
Once FedEx gets wind of any effort to unionize, it will be quick to implement damage control measures to fend off the threat! Don't be suckered by relaxed attitudes about performance, generous doling out of hours, announcements of policy revisions that are more employee-friendly and even announcements of a raise in wages or station market upgrades!!! You can bet your last dollar that as the threat of unionization becomes more real to FedEx management, they will take whatever measures they deem necessary to temporarily mollify us until the threat has passed! Understand that unions do not have bottomless pockets with which to fund major unionization drives of a scale that will be required to unionize FedEx. If we do not seize this opportunity to unionize, it will certainly be many more years before we might again have such an opportunity! Indeed, with the hostile political atmosphere that currently seems to be the trend in this country, this could very well be our last chance to unionize! If you think things are bad at FedEx now, imagine what will happen if management realizes that they have us totally at their mercy for at least the next several years should we fail to unite now?!
It's also important to understand that unless and until we become unionized, those of us who choose to discuss unionization with our peers are treading upon dangerous ground. When we were organizing our meetings at GYY, one of the organizers was written up for what management euphemistically called "solicitation!" This is the policy which states that employees cannot solicit support for non- corporate sanctioned causes such as bake sales, candy drives or charitable donations while on company property or during company time. So if you do talk to others about unionization, use common sense and discretion. Talk only to trusted and sympathetic peers and do so out of earshot of those who might be hostile to the union cause. Don't try to shove your beliefs down other's throats! If someone seems uninterested or unsympathetic, don't press the issue. Furthermore, don't alienate your peers by referring to those who do not support unionization in disparaging ways. Remain friendly and professional with all your coworkers regardless of where they stand on the subject of unionization. You will influence more people by positive behavior and will only serve to drive possibly sympathetic folks away if you attempt to browbeat or intimidate people into seeing your point of view.