February Flashes! |
The UAW will be holding an informational meeting down the street from the GYYA station on Sunday, February 16th between the hours of 2 P.M. and 4 P.M. at the Quality Inn on Madison St. and Halsted St. (800 W. 0 N&S). If you have any questions you can call 1-800-2-GET-UAW. I encourage everyone to attend this meeting regardless of whether or not you’ve already signed on with the Teamsters. We need to be as well informed in our campaign to bring dignity and security back to our jobs as we can possibly get. Let’s face facts. The UAW has made monumental inroads into FedEx all over the country as well. Sooner or later, the AFL-CIO is going to have to intervene and decide which union will be given jurisdiction over FedEx employees. As it is, we are playing right into Fred’s hands by being torn in two different directions by two major unions. I make no judgement call as to who should represent us. That is for all of us to decide collectively. In the meantime, however, we should eagerly clamor to anyone who might offer us important information and who will be willing to help us in our organizing efforts.
The holidays are over. The fatted calf has been picked clean. Visions of sugar plum fairies have faded from our minds. It’s time to get back into the game and the UAW is providing us all with a common place to gather and rekindle the fires of Hillside ‘96! So let’s get off of our backsides and see what these men and women have to say! Be there!
A meeting has been scheduled for March 22nd by the Teamsters. It will be held at the same Holiday Inn in Hillside, IL and will begin at 2 P.M. Early word is that attempts are being made to secure prominent guest speakers and media coverage! I’ll give you further details as soon as I receive definite word about guest speakers. Again, leave your calendar open for that date! Last year we packed the place and were electrified by the huge show of support. Let’s make this year’s meeting an even bigger success and give management something to gnaw their fingernails about!
The Teamsters filed formal petitions to gain recognition as the collective bargaining representatives for employees at MDW, BDF, UGN, ORD, SQI and JOT after each station turned in union cards for more than 50% of the employees at each station! Teamster officials then visited management at those stations and requested that they be recognized as the legitimate representatives of the employees working out of those stations. Of course management refused to recognize them, but my sources tell me that management was shaken and agitated by the visiting union reps!
It came as no surprise that SQI would be among the stations that successfully got enough employees to sign union cards to file a petition. Some time ago, management matter-of-factly announced that they were dissolving the station and that the employees would have to follow their routes to other stations (for the routes that remained intact) and those whose routes had been dissolved and absorbed by existing routes at other stations would have to find positions elsewhere in the company. In some cases, this placed couriers in the unenviable position of finding that their commute to work for available full-time positions would be increased to ridiculous distances! This forced some of the full-time people from that station to take part-time positions that were within reasonable commutes from their homes. So while FedEx crows about its “no layoff” policy, arbitrary decisions to dissolve stations and routes while forcing senior employees to clamor for job scraps wherever they can find them leaves the policy with an awful hollow sounding ring to it! Reminds me of Madonna singing “Like A Virgin!”
A correspondent from San Diego has written me that people in his area are FED UP!!! The latest act of blatant exploitation of FedEx employees recently took place at the MYFA station one morning as employees reported to work at their scheduled start time of 0645. They were greeted at the time clock by a large sign proclaiming that the start time had been changed to 0720! No prior warning was issued to these employees. Just because the freight was going to be late arriving at their station that morning, the senior manager decided that was an adequate excuse to steal more than a half an hour’s pay from every employee on the sort that morning! That’s right, I said steal! To grossly misuse the “operational needs” provision we've all taken for granted was to be used only where the flow of freight was interrupted to such a degree where it would likely be undeliverable on the correct service commitment day, to commit what amounts to petty larceny on a grand scale, is indicative of the contempt management is capable of exhibiting towards hourly employees!!! When one brave soul confronted the senior manager about this ripoff, it was reported that she merely turned her back and walked away! Bet she’ll get a big bonus this year for showing ingenuity in saving the company a few bucks!
Okay, so everybody has a different opinion of where God’s country is on this planet. It just so happens that my idea as to the location of the “Garden of Eden” is New England! If you’ve read my bio page, you know that a fellow by the name of Dan helped me get through my time in Vietnam. Well Dan lives in a sleepy little town in north central Massachusetts known as Erving. Blink as you drive through it and you’ll miss it altogether, yet I can’t think of any place I’d rather retire to than that little piece of heaven nestled in the valleys of the lush green mountains of the Adirondacks! Anyway, a correspondent new to the web checked in from that state to tell me she and many of her coworkers out there are with us! I’m sure I’ll be hearing more from her in the not too distant future.
Attention all you Canucks out there in cyberspace! A correspondent from our Canadian neighbors wrote to tell me that things are no better at FedEx north of the border. He implored me to send out the word to his coworkers at FedEx in Canada to join ranks and let their voices be heard in unity! So that’s what I’m doing. If anyone from Canada is interested, I could arrange to get you hooked up via e-mail to kindred spirits among your ranks up there where the moose meander.
If you don’t know about USENET, you ought to! Usenet is the preeminent place for message exchange in cyberspace. It is one of the few newsgroup networks to survive the transition to the Internet era. For those of you unfamiliar with newsgroups, they are basically forums where people post messages that others can easily reply to so that running dialogues develop and information is openly exchanged. Unlike web sites where space is limited and what gets publicly posted is controlled by the webmaster, newsgroups give everyone the freedom to air their opinions and ask questions publicly for all to see and respond to.
A visitor to this site has begun a campaign to get an “alt.fedex.unite” category created on Usenet. He will be posting this proposal in alt.config on Usenet but has told me that due to the heavy message traffic on Usenet, his messages scroll off the newsgroup after 3 days. If anyone is interested in supporting the creation of our own open forum in cyberspace on Usenet, please click on the words alt.config and you’ll be taken to the Usenet via Deja News to search for his message and post your message of support for his idea.