Guilty Until Proven Innocent! |
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A couple of months ago, rumors began circulating around my station that when we finally moved into the new GYY station, we'd all be issued transparent lockers with master keys to them that management would have control of. At the time, I confess that I didn't give the rumors much thought because I hadn't heard anything from management about such a change in locker arrangements and also because we were still a month away from moving into a station which had undergone delay after delay in construction for better than three years so it was hard for me to see the rumors as presenting an immediate threat. However, as soon as we moved into the new station, I was reminded of the rumors because there were a set of lockers already installed in the rest rooms of the same type we had always had which people immediately claimed by putting their locks on them. That same day, we all got a broadcast on our DADS terminals telling us that those lockers were not to be used and that the locks on them would have to be immediately removed or they would be cut off! This seemed to point to the fact that indeed management had something in store for us which, as usual, was never discussed with us.
That same day, I asked my manager if the rumors about the lockers were true. He replied that he didn't know about the "transparent" part of the rumors about the new lockers, but he did confirm that management would indeed have a master key for all the lockers. Confronted by yet another unbelievable breach of the so-called "Putting People First" philosophy, I began doing a slow boil! After 11 years of being trusted to have a locker with my own lock on it, I was now confronted with the reality that by this policy change, FedEx was painting me with the same broad brush and tossing me in amongst the dregs of society in their human filing system! I was no better than a convicted felon! I was not to be trusted anymore! Worst of all, in the face of concrete evidence that management no longer trusted me, I was assumed to be stupid enough to accept a locker management could access without my knowledge or presence!
Think about the implications of management having a key to your locker! For a guy like me whose union sympathies are universally known, the notion of management being able to access my locker without my knowledge is unthinkable! While I have a great deal of trust in most managers I've worked for at FedEx, there have been a few whom I had my doubts about. At my station, for example, a fellow by the name of Mark Wilson was terminated for suspicion of theft because, as I understand it, a package was found in his truck by his manager without a van scan on it. The way in which his manager "discovered" this package was suspicious enough, but when one talks to people who knew Mark well, every one of them agrees that Mark simply wasn't the kind of person who either needed to, nor would stoop to theft. Add to this the fact that the package in question was not discovered opened, nor was its contents discovered on Mark's person, nor had he left the facility with the package or its contents, and it all begins to have the stench of being a set-up to it! Top it off with the fact that people intimately familiar with Mark and the particulars of the incident all also agree that Mark and his manager did not get along well at all, and the stench of conspiracy becomes even more pungent!
It just so happens that the manager who terminated Mark was also the manager who had the brilliant idea of pulling me out of the Merchandise Mart after five years and who subsequently wound up replacing me with two people who still split that route to this very day and you can understand why I don't consider him as one of the brighter or more ethical managers I've worked for. That he was ultimately fired not long after he was appointed a senior manager in Hawaii also lends itself to lessen his credibility...
Talk to anyone whose been around at FedEx for any length of time, and most will tell you that there has been a manager or two that they regarded as less-than-ethical. We've all witnessed management play fast and loose with numbers and time-card codes to make themselves look better to their own superiors. We know that management will tell us outright lies, especially where unions are the subject at hand. And now, like a thief in the night, FedEx management is quietly about to implement this slimy locker policy at our new station and wouldn't have even mentioned a word about it to us until the lockers were already installed! Given all of this, can anyone give me even one logical reason why we should trust management with control over the contents of our lockers when we're not present? It's clear that management doesn't trust us, so the question that begs asking is why we should trust them?
I have no problem with the understanding that FedEx has the right to search its own property at any time it desires to do so. Even though I find it annoying, whenever one of our loss prevention people decides to pop into my truck to look around, I never give it much thought aside from the fact that they're again engaging in their mind games of making their presence known. After all, I don't pull my own truck, so even if they do find a package that doesn't belong in it, it's either a mispulled package that the belt puller put in there by mistake or it's a lame Mark Wilson type set-up. If they attempt to pull one of those kinds of tricks on me, I'd almost rejoice over it because unless you are found with stolen merchandise on your person or in your home, I'd have to believe that FedEx terminating you for theft leaves them incredibly vulnerable to a wrongful termination lawsuit coupled with a defamation of character lawsuit and perhaps even a little stress-related illness lawsuit sprinkled in to make matters more interesting.
Likewise, I also don't have a problem with FedEx demanding to search my locker at any given time. I'd gladly open it for them to scrutinize in my presence. However, in my opinion, accepting responsibility for the contents of a locker that management has access to while you are not around is an open invitation to devious activity on the part of those less-than-ethical managers we've all known during our employment at FedEx... The only way I would ever accept the assignment of such a locker is if I had a statement on paper from FedEx management that recognized my lack of control over the contents of the locker!
Let's face it! If a not-too-bright manager decides that he or she wants to be rid of a particular employee for any reason, setting such an employee up for a fall, regardless of the legal implications involved, could be seen as an attractive option. After all, once an employee is terminated, any ramifications resulting from that termination will have to be dealt with by FedEx's legal department, not the manager who did the firing. All he or she knows is that they are rid of the employee they wanted to be rid of. Even if the terminated employee decides to pursue a personal lawsuit against the particular manager that fired him or her, the corporation will likely provide all the legal representation for the manager and pay any court ordered compensation either directly to the plaintiff or indirectly through reimbursing the manager. So, in effect, a manager is pretty much free to act with impunity if he or she really wants to entrap an employee.
Okay, so some of you are probably asking yourselves why I'm making such a big deal out of this locker situation if it's already possible for unscrupulous management to set people up ala Mark Wilson? The answer is that it's a lot easier to defend one's self against a set-up like Mark's where upper levels of FedEx management are concerned than it would be if a package or its contents were planted in your locker. While you may have some sort of personal conflict with your manager, the layers of management above him or her in the an investigation or GFT process will likely know little, if anything about you until they are made familiar with your case. It would be easier to convince a loss prevention person or district manager that you had no knowledge of a package planted in your truck than it would be to convince them that a manager planted a package in your locker... An argument could be made that a package in your truck could have wound up there several different ways either by accident or design. However, when it comes to a package found in your locker, it becomes strictly a matter of your word against that of the manager or managers who control the master key! I doubt if anyone has ever had an investigation called off or had a termination overturned where the case hinged upon the word of an employee versus the word of a manager....
While I'm no lawyer, it only seems like a matter of common sense that it would be more difficult to convince a judge or jury that something found in one's locker was planted as opposed to a case involving a package found in one's truck. Where just about anyone could toss a package into your truck when you're not looking, including perhaps a coworker who has a personal grudge against you, a package found in your locker condenses the possibilities down to just those of either you being a thief or the manager(s) having a key to your locker being unscrupulous. If your manager happens to be a good actor and you choke up on the witness stand, the outcome of your case could become a crap shoot with enormous stakes that you could lose just based upon circumstances rather than substance. That's one helluva a gamble, isn't it?
I hate the fact that we live in a world where a tiny percentage of thugs, miscreants, and other members of the dregs of our society cause all of to suffer voluntary or involuntary intrusions of our dignity! Every time I go through a metal detector at an airport or see a security camera trained upon me, I feel guilt even though I have no reason to experience that emotion. In a way, though, I feel that such erosions of our dignity as human beings also have a boomerang effect upon our society as well. If one is treated with distrust long enough and under constantly incremented stages of intensity, there exists a real danger that one will begin to more closely identify with the societal dregs such measures are designed to control. I've heard a piece of street jargon used many times which sums up what I mean nicely. It goes something like; "If I'm gonna be the name, I'm gonna play the game!" I've always subscribed to the notion that anyone who would steal from their employer would steal from me as well. Because I've always felt that way, I've always believed that were I to witness such a theft, I'd have no hesitation whatsoever in revealing the thief to management. To some that makes me a "rat," although I've never understood why anyone would view the protection of thieves and other criminals as somehow being an honorable measure of character. However, as I pointed out to my manager at our last work group meeting where I brought up the subject of the new locker policy, I now cannot honestly say whether or not I would be as likely to turn in a thief as I always felt I would be before...
Theft in the work place is a problem. I'm not denying that, nor am I trying to trivialize the problem. However, there are ways to deal with thieves without making all of us feel less worthy of trust, respect and dignity. Intimidation by blanket surveillance and scrutiny might get some feeble results but when one wields a broad brush, one places stain upon all instead of upon those who really deserve the taint of guilt. We have loss prevention people who are supposed to ferret out those among us who are dishonest. If they can't do an adequate job without "big brother" type scrutiny and blanket distrust of the rank and file then perhaps it is time they either hired more staff to help them do their jobs or tender their resignations and admit to their failure. And while accusing our loss prevention department of possible incompetence might sound like I'm just targeting yet another part of the corporate establishment, let me point out some facts that bear evidence that there's indeed substance to my indictment.
In the 11 years I've been with FedEx, the one and only time theft was ever preemptively discussed by management was when I was hired! Only once, since my new-hire orientation, has any manager ever uttered a solitary word on the matter, and that only happened when a large shipment of computers somehow went right out of our barn under everyone's noses! The couple of other times I've heard about incidents of theft, the information reached me not through management, but via other hourly employees! Nobody has reminded me to be vigilant. Nobody has reiterated the scope of the problem and its impact on us all. Nobody has held any discussions of the matter whatsoever that I've been privy to! Yet, when you have a problem within a corporate, or for that matter, a societal setting, one of the major keys to dealing with the problem is getting people educated and involved. If theft is such a problem that FedEx feels it has to resort to turning our stations into maximum security installations replete with surveillance cameras and master-keyed lockers, wouldn't you think that long before the problem escalated to this plateau that our loss prevention people would have made some real efforts to educate us and get us involved?
Another avenue open to FedEx management that they fail to make use of is the education of our customers. Last winter during peak season, GYY's resident loss prevention sleuth approached me as I was scanning the unload belt and asked me if I had noticed any open boxes from a particular customer coming down the belt as I was scanning. It turned out that those boxes contained jewelry and that they had become frequent targets of thieves. Now if it were my business to prevent such thefts, it wouldn't take much thought on my part to contact the customer in question and tell them to change their packaging and/or labeling so that it would be impossible for any FedEx employee to know that their packages contained jewelry. In fact, it should be a matter of routine, at least in my opinion, that any customer shipping packages containing items of unusual value should be told to use misleading or nondescript labels on their packages that don't reveal the nature of the shipment and to change their labeling at the first sign that their new labeling scheme has been discovered by thieves. Yet, I cannot help but feel that FedEx wouldn't want to take such measures for fear that it might create the notion among our customers that theft is a problem for us and possibly cause the customer to lose faith in our service. However, if such precautionary measures were presented properly by competent customer service reps, the customer could come away with even more confidence in our service because we would be demonstrating a proactive approach to a possible problem rather than engaging in damage control after the fact.
Of course, the most dramatic and effective action FedEx management could take to prevent theft is so obvious and yet it is the last thing they, or for that matter, most of the rest of corporate America would ever consider doing. Obviously, the action I'm talking about is abandoning the widespread practice of making part-time employees wait for the better part of a decade to attain full-time employment and top-of-scale wages! Stringing people along year after year at cargo handler or bottom level courier wages is an invitation to theft! What kind of loyalty can one expect from such an employee? How hard would it be for such an employee to reason that as long as FedEx displays no conscience about exploiting him or her they might as well put their conscience on hold and exploit FedEx in any way they can? Even our penal system understands the inherent dangers of people in hopeless circumstances. That's why prisoners with death sentences and prisoners with life sentences and no possibility for parole are segregated from the general prison population. People with no hope are especially dangerous because they understand that they have nothing to lose by their actions. Is it that hard to understand that employees with no tangible expectations of a meaningful future in a company might pose a lesser but similarly motivated threat to a corporation's integrity?
Utilizing true management skills like communicating, educating and motivating while providing employees with a reasonable and attainable full-time living wage that's not so far over over their horizons as to be hidden from view are the only real solutions to FedEx's theft problem. Unfortunately, as in so many other areas, our management has chosen to forego these common sense approaches to dealing with the problem of theft and has instead opted for the easy solutions of technological gadgetry and intimidation that have regrettably become the norm for FedEx. A coarse, broad brush might do the job more quickly and easily, but it seldom produces the same quality results as a finer and narrower brush would have. In this case, however, we do have a simple method by which we can refuse to be painted by management's broad brush. I, for one, will refuse to accept a locker assignment when the new insulting lockers are finally installed at GYY. At our last work group meeting when I brought up the matter, most of my infuriated coworkers, who were hearing about the lockers for the first time from me rather than our management, also assured my manager that they too would refuse locker assignments and as word has spread through GYY, more and more people are joining our rejection of this insult to our integrity!