A few days ago, my best friend sent me a copy of the C-SPAN coverage of the presentations made by Senator Kennedy and several FedEx employees on Capitol Hill regarding the rider FedEx has attached to the FAA Reauthorization Bill. On that same tape, was also the complete performance of Senator Hollings as he presented his arguments for inclusion and passage of the bill including the rider. As I watched his performance, I found myself shouting at the television screen and heaping profuse expressions of profanity-laden disdain and disbelief upon the Senator's image! There were so many holes in Senator Holling's arguments that were one to have to select an image to represent his arguments, that image would have to be one of Lorraine Swiss cheese. I picked the Lorraine variety because anyone knowing cheeses will immediately picture a slice of cheese that is so filled with holes that it looks like a lace doily!
For starters, the Senator referred to the percentages of packages which travel through the systems of UPS and FedEx and noted the great disparities between the percentage of those packages which travel by air as opposed to being transported by ground freight methods. He stated that 92% of the packages that are handled by UPS travel strictly by ground freight as opposed to 85% of all packages handled by FedEx being moved by aircraft. On the surface, this appears to be a very convincing argument that FedEx and UPS do business in very different ways and should therefore be regulated differently. However, before you read any further, just think about that argument for a moment and see if you can figure out why such a statement really has absolutely nothing to do with the rules and regulations we FedEx employees should be governed by..... Give up? Okay, read on and I'll have you slapping your forehead in a moment.
As long as I've been an American with a basic understanding of what it means to be an American, I've understood that our government was founded upon the principle that all human beings are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. Upon that foundation, all of the laws which are enacted by our leaders should center themselves around the human beings the government is charged to serve. Yet, one of the biggest reasons why people are so utterly fed up with government in this country lately is because those who govern us have seemingly lost sight of the fact that their actions often get so mired down with ambiguous and complex issues that they forget the human factor in the legislation they propose and enact. As a consequence, laws and regulations which sometimes have terrible consequences for many people, are foisted upon us in a seemingly arbitrary manner. The saying goes that the path to hell is paved with good intentions. Where our government is concerned, it is becoming easier and easier for the little guy to believe that this old piece of wisdom is engraved somewhere in granite in Washington and serves as the official credo of our leaders. Senator Hollings clearly demonstrated just how out of touch he is with the human beings at FedEx and how muddled his mind has become with ambiguities and complexities of the laws he tenaciously clings to. When pontificating on the floor of the Senate about the irrefutable differences between FedEx and our competitors at UPS and Airborne, all the Senator could see was packages! It was not the human beings who handled those packages the Senator was concerned with, it was simply the mode of transportation used to move packages that held the Senator's interest! While nowhere in the founding documents of this nation did our forefathers even imply that inanimate objects have rights, the modern day Senate of the United States of America has, defacto, imparted such importance to inanimate objects that it has relegated the rights of human beings to a subordinate position to packages! It matters not to the Senate that the human beings handling those packages do identical work to move them from shipper to recipient. The Senate, so far out of touch with its constituents, can only see percentages and outdated surveys. The people affected by their legislative actions have been rendered invisible by the details.
The average period of time a package is airborne within the FedEx system is probably somewhere around 3 or 4 hours. Conversely, the average time a package spends in the hands of employees performing identical jobs to those of their peers at Airborne or UPS is probably around 15 - 20 hours. As a 9 year veteran of UPS, I can speak with some authority on the types of labor involved in working for that company. During my 9 year stint at UPS, I was a loader, unloader, puller, sorter, personnel clerk, package car driver and supervisor. Aside from the supervisory and clerical positions, virtually everything I did at UPS had an exact equivalent in the labor hourly employees perform daily at FedEx! Human beings doing the exact same work, albeit for different companies, should be regulated by the same laws! The fate of any human being should never rest on the arbitrary characteristics legislators impart to inanimate objects!
As if hanging the fate of human beings upon the method in which an inanimate object travels from point A to point B wasn't bad enough, Senator Hollings made it further evident that there are other things more important to him than the thousands of people his actions impact upon. The good Senator, quoting Mark Twain on the importance of truth while rambling about personal honor, declared that he was honor bound to correct a clerical oversight on the part of Senatorial staff members who mistakenly dropped the "express carrier" language from the bill last year during a redrafting of the legislation. He said that his staff dropped the "express carrier" language from the bill because they thought (and rightly so) that it was "not necessary" to the bill. Senator Hollings affirmed his determination to right what he saw as an honest mistake made "on his watch" and thereby retain his own sense of personal "honor." No doubt the Senator is sleeping well these nights, content that his "honor" is restored to its previous untainted state. Unfortunately, while the Senator and his colleagues won this battle on the field of "honor," the consequences of his victory reach far beyond the perhaps wounded pride of the labor lawyers who were fighting him and reinforced the stranglehold FedEx has around the necks of its tens of thousands of tax-paying workers!
Then Senator Hollings said something remarkable. He claimed that he had watched a woman at the gathering of FedEx employees on Capitol Hill the day before state that FedEx employees hadn't been given a pay raise in 7 years. He then stated that he had personally called FedEx and had been told that FedEx employees had received an average of 6.5% per year in wage increases over the past 8 years totaling 50%! The Senator from North Carolina stated the aforementioned figures in a cocksure, self-righteous fashion and said he wanted his statements to be part of the Congressional record and that as soon as he got the figures from FedEx he would fax them. I assume he meant that he would have them faxed to the Senate floor where they could be included into the record.
The question any FedEx hourly employee would ask at this point is who was lying, the Senator or the FedEx representative he had gotten those figures from? My instinct is that however misguided the Senator is, I doubt that he'd be willing to stick his neck that far out regardless of how much lobbyist money had found its way into his pocket. That leaves FedEx itself as the likely teller of tall tales. In either case, we all know this was a bold-faced lie which clearly demonstrates how low some people are willing to stoop to keep FedEx employees from enjoying benefits and wages closer to parity with our industry peers at UPS and Airborne!
Finally, Senator Hollings trotted out a fistful of paper and a book citing FedEx's reputation as one of the best companies to work for as well as getting the blessings of Good Housekeeping magazine. Since the Senator didn't mention the dates of any of the surveys or the book, I think it fair to assume that at least a few were outdated and the remaining were very poorly researched. I know that at GYY, for example, my workgroup graded upper management and the company in general at a 23% approval rating during the last survey feedback and from what I understand, the grade was close to the overall grade the station as a whole gave FedEx. It's pretty obvious that the fix was in if any of those surveys were current polls.
Before I finish this article, let me state that my only allegiance in this struggle between FedEx and its hourly employees is to the truth. I'm not going to taint the truth just so I can stick to some script the unions might want me to follow any more than I would parrot FedEx's propaganda. Having said that, the Senator did tell the truth about a couple of things. First of all, the National Mediation Board did render its opinion that FedEx is governed by the Railway Act. He was also correct when he said that the NLRB has never rendered a decision that ran contrary to an NMB opinion. Last, but not least, he was quite correct that the unions tried a quarterback sneak in the hope that the missing "express carrier" phraseology would create a loophole large enough to jump through before FedEx had a chance to plug the legislative breach with its lobbying power.
While I don't blame the unions for trying the quarterback sneak, I do wonder just how long they plan to play around in the courts and file petitions before they come to realize that a national drive for organizing FedEx is going to be the only route to go? Even if, on the astronomically slim chance, the NLRB does decide to claim jurisdiction over FedEx employees, such a move would most certainly be appealed and the process drawn out for several more years. In the meantime, while the unions and labor boards play this incredibly sluggish and boring game of chess, we workers are left to languish in the murky waters of wage stagnation and oppressive policies.