Design-A-Contract |
One of Fred’s most repeated arguments against FedEx becoming a unionized company is that we would lose our competitive edge in the market. I refuse to cede that argument to Fred because I believe that FedEx workers would never be stupid enough to cut their own throats as Fred seems so willing to assume. I say this with confidence because FedEx workers, as I’ve said many times before, are, in my opinion, a cut above most other workers in the industry. Furthermore, many of us have come from the ranks of the competition and know first hand, the differences between our jobs and theirs. Such people will provide valuable input in formulating the demands that are eventually placed on the negotiating table. In short, our contract will be no clone of those negotiated with other companies!
To prove this, I have come up with an idea I hope will catch on and that everyone visiting the site will consider contributing to. What I propose is that we design our own contract! The unions have assured FedEx workers that we will control our own destinies in whatever negotiations that eventually take place. I believe them. Furthermore, I wouldn’t have it any other way! FedEx is not UPS in many respects. We have our own unique problems which require unique solutions. And while I firmly believe that FedEx workers, if treated with dignity, can continue to surpass any competitor in the quality of service we provide, the fact that FedEx does not have the resources that UPS has is something we all fully realize. Also, while Airborne has a contract that is almost identical to UPS’s, it is important for everyone to understand that many Airborne employees are non-union employees working for franchisees and aren’t even making half of what FedEx people are making in the same markets! Based upon these realities, we all need to honestly discuss exactly what it is that we expect from FedEx management.
This is perhaps the most exciting idea I’ve yet to come up with on this site! I have great optimism about it! I think it has the potential to take a lot of wind out of the sails of management’s anti-union rhetoric. I also think it can be a great method of assuaging the fears and suspicions of our coworkers who have expressed such feelings about the prospect of unionizing. In other words, I think it could win people over to our cause who are either uncertain or anti-union!
On the other hand, I do have my fears about writing this article as well. While I hope I’m wrong, there’s a chance that some union people will see it as a cop-out, as pandering to management or otherwise damaging to the cause. One thing is certain. Since unions base dues on the hourly wages of their members, some of my suggestions, if adopted, will reduce the size of the revenues of whatever union that winds up organizing us and that can’t be a pleasant idea to them. However, I hope that they will come to understand that my intent has always been to be as honest and fair on this site as I possibly can. This means that the truth, as I see it, sometimes cuts both ways, but that is often the price of honesty.
I also hope that those working at UPS and Airborne will understand that while some of the things I would like to see in a contract are less than what they have in theirs, they seem to have done pretty well in their past negotiations with their employers even with FedEx workers’ anemic wages and benefits being used as a lever against them. Therefore, even though we might not make the same demands on our employer as they do, any increases in our wages and benefits will put them in a better negotiating position than they currently are in!
I don’t profess to know nearly as much as will be necessary to put together an intelligent and fair comprehensive list of demands that we should include in a contract. I confess that my eyes begin to glaze over anytime someone begins to quote quarterly financial reports, operating budgets and the like. I hope, therefore, that those of you so inclined, will ferret out such information as is necessary to help us make educated financial demands upon FedEx. I don’t know if it is at all possible to find out exactly what proportion of Airborne’s employees are actually covered by their Teamsters contract so I think that we’d be best served by using UPS as our reference point unless and until accurate information about Airborne can be located and verified.
By the way, I’d also like to have your suggestions as to things we do not want included in a contract and your explanations as well! There are things I strongly feel shouldn’t be put in a contract with FedEx for any number of reasons. In some cases, putting something in a contract that’s beneficial to some might also have a detrimental effect on others. In other cases, something known to be in other contracts might actually make our jobs more difficult. Some things might even place an unnecessary and unjustified burden on the company. I have a tremendous amount of faith in my coworkers! I think were too smart to seek a contract that’s vengeful, greedy or obstructive. In other words, I think our contract will be far fairer to management than management has been to us! Then again, that wouldn’t take much effort on our part, would it.....?
To start the ball rolling, I’ll offer what I believe we should all want to see in a contract but please remember that these ideas are all tentative and could change as others offer their ideas and information to the mix. I’m certainly not setting myself up as some sort of ultimate arbiter here so let your voice be heard as well! What I do ask, however, is that every idea you submit be accompanied by an explanation as to why the demand is necessary.
The most obvious demand, in my opinion, that needs to be made is that we be held to a far more humane standard of discipline than we are presently subjected to! The idea that disciplinary letters are held in our files forever is absolutely outrageous! Everyone deserves the opportunity to start with a clean slate if they have demonstrated over a reasonable period of time that they have mended their ways. Personally, I know there are some people that might want to flay me alive for saying this, but I think that a year is a reasonable period of time for a letter to remain in your file. After that, it gets flushed out of existence! Furthermore, it should take three letters of the same type of infraction within that one year span to get a person terminated. And while this might not make sense to some of you, I see absenteeism and tardiness as separate issues! The reason I say this is because anyone can have a spate of car troubles or unexpected traffic situations that can result in being late for work, yet that in no way indicates a person’s predisposition towards playing hookey from work altogether.
An employee’s personnel files should be open to his/her inspection at all times. We should all have access to every bit of information the company has pertaining to us.
Until the necessary financial data is somehow obtained and one of you math wizards out there compiles it into an intelligent guideline we can use, anything I propose as to a wage figure has to be understood as my strictly shooting from the hip. Having said that, though I don’t think we are entitled to expect FedEx to pay us the same wages UPS workers make, I do think that there should never be a $4 an hour difference between their top-of-scale package car drivers and our top-of-scale couriers! I’d ballpark a reasonable goal as being $2 an hour behind UPS.
Market level wages should be retained. The union people might want to string me up for saying this, but living costs do vary in different parts of the country and we can’t all move to the sun belt! Market level wages are completely fair. Moreover, they give a company a financial edge over their competitors and, unless you’re extremely short-sighted, you should want to give the company you work for every fair financial advantage you can give it. After all, we are talking about all our futures here!
Unless the company can provide us and the union with positive proof of dire financial hardship, annual cost of living increases should be automatic and indexed for individual market levels. Unless we are facing a Chrysler-like bankruptcy situation, nobody should have to take financial steps backwards because everyone else is raising their prices! This has, for me, been one of the most disheartening aspects of working for FedEx! I see my grocery, housing and utility bills going up year after year and have had to adjust my lifestyle downward to stay afloat. This is personally demeaning to all of us and it has to stop!
Experience, expertise and enthusiasm should never be punished! Therefore, if an employee can do a route faster than his or her predecessor on a route where the package and stop volume has remained approximately static, that person should never be denied weekly minimum (guarantee pay) for doing so. Nor should such experience, expertise and enthusiasm be used by management to heap even more work on such an exuberant employee. The closest I have ever come to reaching across a desk and choking a manager is when some management quiz kid decides to suspend guarantee pay across the board for one reason or another! Please bear with me while I tell you a personal story that illustrates what I mean.
I don’t mean to blow my own horn here, so please don’t take it this way, but I need to tell you some facts about myself in order for this story to make sense to you. Believe it or not, I pretty much am a good manager’s dream employee! In my over 10 years of service at FedEx, I’ve never received less than a 6.4 on a review (including the new IPP review), and in fact, only got a score as low as 6.4 once. I’ve even been a 7 under the old review. I try to spend as little time on the clock as possible. My wife and I have no children and we both work, so 35 hours is all the pay we really need from my side of the earning table. Furthermore, I actually like working fast and I also like to work under self-imposed pressure. To me, it makes the day go by much faster. I cannot recall the last time I was ever late for work, and on the very rare occasions that I have called in sick, you can take it to the bank that one end or the other of my body was in close proximity to the toilet when I called in. My vehicle, if not the cleanest in the station, is one of the top five cleanest (in the largest station in the nation). I carry a broom, whisk broom, paper towels, Windex, SOS pads and 409 cleaner in my truck at all times. I even track down people who use my truck at night and slop it up to let them know I won’t share a truck with a pig! I could go on and on, but you get the picture. Hardly what some of you expected.... eh?
Having said this, it probably comes as no surprise to you that I haul ass on my route. The first thing I say to a new manager check-riding me is to “Stay the $%#! out of my way and we’ll have no problems!” I’ve been on my route long enough to know instinctively just how much product mixing I can get away with and I consistently make my last P-1 at 10:29 or 10:30! I can make adjustments on the fly if anything unpredictable happens and the only times I ever have lates is if we have late freight or on rare occasions when I accidentally mix a P-1 in with my P-2 during the fine sort in those dark-as-a-cave trucks we use where the cargo area dome light is covered by the overhead door (old 600 series)!
The last route I had prior to my present route was the Merchandise Mart here in Chicago. Though it was only one building, it was (and may very well still be) the largest commercial building in the world where square feet is concerned. The inside halls were 2 city blocks long and 1 city block wide! So, to walk around each floor was to walk 6 city blocks. The building is 18 stories high and has a huge indoor shopping mall on the ground level. When I first was assigned to the route, I did 9 floors of the P-1 and all of the P-2. Another courier did the other 9 floors of P-1. By the way, it is important to note that every floor in the Merchandise Mart has almost completely different suite numbering that is so bizarre that room 15-101 might be in the same place on another floor as room 1430! Some floors have smaller sub-hallways and one floor even has diagonal halls! You might guess that it takes a little time to get used to it.
Once I did get used to it though, I was finishing my P-1 every day earlier and earlier. My manager started asking me to do more floors in the P-1 cycle so he could use the other courier to take splits as needed. I had no problem with that. Soon, I was doing the entire building, P-1 and P-2 myself. I would even sometimes take some stops off of neighboring couriers that were on my way to the Mart. Bear in mind that the package and stop volume on this route remained consistent throughout all this time.
It wasn’t long before I started hitting guarantee pay. For a while, my managers were smart enough to know to leave well enough alone. But then, as is inevitable in all our careers, I got a blockhead for a manager! He saw that I was hitting guarantee pay and I know he thought to himself “If that fat old bastard can do that route that fast, I can probably put a young part timer on it who can do it too!” So, one day I was told that after five years on the route, I was being summarily transferred to another route in another work group! Of course I pitched a bitch, but hey! I work at FedEx, so what could I do?!
Well, the genius manager who traded me off fell flat on his face! His young gazelle of a part-timer was so lost in that building he didn’t have a ghost of a chance! There were literally hundreds of lates on that route even when he put another full-timer in there to help him out! It took them months to even get the manning in that building set up to where they no longer had lates and even then, and to this very day, they still have two people running it!
The best part of all this is that about a month after they took me off that route kicking and screaming, I was asked to come into my manager’s office where he and the blockhead who had traded me away asked me if I would like to go back to the Merchandise Mart route!!! I smiled the best sarcastic smile I could muster and said: “Sure, if you’ll give me a part-timer to split the P-1 like you have it set up now!” Of course, that’s not what they wanted to hear! They wanted the fat old man to go back to doing it all by myself. Unfortunately, for them, they had made one terrible mistake. They had freed me from my own ignorance! You see, I had gotten so used to that route that I never realized just how hard I had been working all those years! My legs used to ache and stiffen up at night from dragging a cart laden with hundreds of pounds of freight around 18 floors of carpeting! The new route they put me on was an outdoor route where half of it was vertical and the other half was stop-to-stop driving, so guess whose legs weren’t aching at night anymore?
Needless to say, I do my present route in 2 - 3 hours less time than my much younger predecessor on the route did it! So it is painfully apparent that I give FedEx far more than their money’s worth! Aside from the fact that my customers love me because I get their packages to them so much earlier in the day than my predecessor did, think of the wear and tear I save on my vehicle by having it off the road for 2 - 3 hours less time not to mention the fact that I also have reduced my vulnerability to vehicular accidents by the same amount of time each day! And before anybody mentions that mixing product cuts into our P-1 profit, let me assure you that if I see (and I carefully scrutinize my route for them) packages of different service levels from the same shipper to the same recipient, I never mix them and I go out of my way to make them the last stop I do that day!
Okay, so now that you’ve been bored into a stupor reading about what a wonderful courier I am, you have a right to ask; “What’s your point?” Well, my station just got a new senior manager with a gunslinger reputation, and you guessed it! Before he had his personal belongings even moved into his office, one of his first edicts was to suspend guarantee pay! So now, I, and a handful of other employees have a choice. We can either be blithering idiots and ask for more work to hit that 35 hour mark or we can stop mixing to our highest potential and go back to running the route like our predecessors did! That won’t make the customers happy, and it won’t make us happy, but the senior manager will probably get a bonus so at least he’ll be happy! And Fred thinks that unions will cause us to focus on “internal labor relations problems!” What a joke!
Guarantee pay at my station lets you take home around $415 a week! Deliver thousands of packages for FedEx, and they won’t even give you less than a wino sleeping in a refrigerator box under a viaduct would accept for delivering a package for you! I thought I had a right to be mad until another courier in the station came up to me to complain about the suspension of guarantee pay. I asked her how many packages she delivered on her route each day? She said: “Oh about 750 a day.” That means that management won’t even pay her a lousy 11 cents to deliver a package! Like I said, even a wino would be insulted!
Guarantee pay is a genuine incentive! Managers should be grateful to have it working for them. Instead, just for the sake of making themselves look good by squeezing every FTE they can out of a station, managers play games with guarantee pay, and in the process, screw over some of the best employees they have! Protection of guarantee pay, in my opinion, should be written into any contract we sign! That’s the only way it will ever be truly guaranteed!
By the way.... I just can't resist telling you that the blockhead manager who foolishly pulled me out of the Merchandise Mart route subsequently bid on, and got a senior manager position in another part of the country. He was terminated after only a few months at that position.... There is a God!
The method of disbursement of profit-sharing checks should never be the whim of management! Each of us should be able to decide whether to have the check deposited in our retirement account, credit union or have it issued to us as part of our regular pay just as was done last Christmas and a few years back when the UAW was leafleting FedEx stations nationwide!
It really bothers me that part-time employees at FedEx nowadays are strung along for 5, 6 and even 7 years before they are finally made full-time employees! I’d at least like to see a mandatory upgrade to full time for any employee two years from his or her date of hire. I say date of hire, and not permanent hire date because to put it otherwise would leave the door open for FedEx management to weasel around this demand by simply stringing casual employees along longer. As for casual workers, I think they should be made permanent employees after 90 calendar days from their date of hire.
The JKT should be completely stripped of it’s ability to cause people lose their jobs! I fully understand. and even support the company’s desire that we be adept at locating information for our customers in a timely fashion. Therefore, I wholeheartedly support the test! It is one of those things that keeps us ahead of the competition where the quality of our service is concerned! However, flunking the test should never be a disciplinary issue. Instead, if a courier flunks the test three times, he or she should be given the option of bidding into a cargo handler position, and if the person in question is full time, he or she should be given full-time cargo handler hours!
Now some of you might be saying that cargo handler jobs are, by necessity, part time jobs because of the short duration of sort times, but I maintain that there is more than enough work around most decent-sized stations presently being done by couriers and even managers after the sort goes down to keep a couple of people on the clock for full-time hours. Even if this isn’t the case at some stations, former full-time couriers could work a split shift arrangement and work both the unload and reload operations late nights and early mornings. Also, look at the number of couriers who are driving shuttles!
If a courier does flunk the test three times, I think he or she should be able to take the test again a year later, and if he or she passes it then, they should be able to bid on a courier position at that time.
One thing needs to be mentioned here even though it is neither a demand or an exclusion suggestion. It needs to be mentioned because of rumors I’ve heard about managers citing FedEx’s uniform program as some sort of unique benefit that we have which the competition doesn’t. Back when I worked for UPS in the ‘70s, the company provided its package car and tractor trailer drivers with every uniform element we get at FedEx except the uniform shirts. We had to buy the shirts ourselves. However, UPS also laundered everything for us (except for the shirts). I don’t know if UPS workers still have to buy their own shirts, but back when I worked fro the “Big Brown,” our shirts only cost $2 each at a uniform store right down the street so it wasn’t exactly a great financial hardship for us....
"A benefit package that is equal for everyone. Our station services a tri state area with only the employees living in the state that the station is located receiving any hmo choices even though the other states are less than 10 miles from said station. Many employess living out of state are already using doctors and hospitals located in the city where the station is located because it has the largest selection yet we have to suffer though fed ex basic health care. This is a finanical burden on some employees for the plans can be so different. The hmo's are willing to service these employees ( their criteria for coverage is either working or residing in their service area) but fed ex is denying us access."