Bits & Pieces

Hope everyone had a happy holiday season! Santa was especially good to us this year in that my wife got a 7% raise where she works! Thank God someone in corporate America believes in giving their non-management employees a piece of the pie beyond that of mere cost of living increases! Her company has consistently given her raises above the cost of living figures, but this year they really surprised us! Are you listening corporate America!? The Dow Jones averages are going through the roof and corporate America is enjoying windfall profits while most workers have to fight tooth-and-nail to keep up with even record low inflation! I feel sorry for other FedEx employees whose spouses don’t work for companies like my wife’s. At least we have had some hedge against rising costs where her income is concerned.....

Corrections and retractions.

Like I have stated elsewhere on this site, my goal is to tell it like it really is here. Despite what anyone believes, I have no other agenda. Some of the e-mail I’ve received due to this web page has clearly come from people who are convinced that I am some sort of pro-union Socialist who wants nothing more than to secure a cushy union job and enrich the coffers of the union by bringing FedEx employees into the fold. Regardless of what I do, I’ll never convince those few detractors (and I do mean few) that my intentions are otherwise. Be that as it may, if I should discover that something I’ve stated in this publication is erroneous or even misleading, I’ll correct it in a prominent manner (unlike the American media) so that all visitors to this site may be made aware of my mistakes. To that end, I now present the following corrections/retractions.

As I was researching the “People” manual in preparing the GFT for Darrell Anderson (he was the 18 year veteran whose termination was a primary impetus for my starting this web page), the way I interpreted the policy regarding the “active” term of disciplinary letters as they related to the recently extended 18 month period a manager can go back in your file to use letters in a termination action, seems to have been incorrect. After receiving an anonymous e-mail from a manager who seemed most sincere and non-confrontational and who only seemed to want to set the record straight, I decided I needed to do more homework. I talked to several managers, including my own, and their uniform opinion was that no letter that was over 18 months old could be used against an employee under any circumstances. The so-called “active” tag used in the “People” manual is apparently used to define only the period which a disciplinary letter can be used to deny an employee the option of bidding on other positions within the company. My peers and I mistakenly surmised that any letter that had held “active” status in an employee’s file within the range of the 18 month reach-back period could be used in an employee’s termination. If that were true, we concluded that a letter which was as much as two-and-one-half years old could be used to terminate us. The managers I’ve spoken to have assured me that this is not the case. Thus, I stand corrected, but would hasten to add that if the “People” manual were worded less ambiguously, this misinterpretation would not have happened.

I have also been corrected by a UPS employee who assured me that disciplinary letters in their files only have a shelf life of nine months as opposed to the twelve months I had stated earlier here. That makes more sense anyway, because I thought it was strange that Airborne employees would have a better deal in their contract in this regard than UPS had. This means that both Airborne and UPS employees have virtually identical disciplinary letter policies in that all warning letters remain in an employees file for nine months except for those regarding vehicular accidents, which remain in their files for a period of one year. So even though my take on the shelf life of our disciplinary letters was wrong, we are still held to a standard of discipline that is exactly twice as demanding as our peers at Airborne and UPS, and for far less pay to boot.....!

I have gone back through the web site and corrected the aforementioned mistakes in order to keep publications here as accurate as possible. If anyone else notices any such mistakes, please by all means, bring them to my attention! If you can’t trust the information on this site, this site does not merit existence!

More 10+ year FedEx employees bite the dust.

Well, the new year has started off with a bang here in Chicago! January isn’t even over yet and another 18 year veteran has been terminated! This time, the scene of the travesty of worker’s justice took place at our CGX station, and once again, three totally unrelated performance issues came into play as the justification for his termination. I won't mention his name... yet, as his GFT is pending. If the process goes sour for him, I’ll fill you in on all the details here as soon as the final results of his struggle to regain his livelihood are apparent.

Another pending termination, this time at my own station (GYY) left employees throughout the station in a state of disbelief! Just a week ago, the most beloved manager in our station was terminated. Again, we’re looking at a 16 year career about to be flushed down the toilet, and if rumors are correct, the basis for his termination was allegedly paperwork related! It certainly wasn’t anything to do with the performance of his workgroup because he had one of the best records in the station! Again, the jury is still out on this situation, and because this fellow was a manager, I may never know all the sordid details that were behind his undoing. However, if he indeed does wind up losing his GFT, you can bet that I will be doing my best to ferret out the truth!

Waking up the West Coast sleeping giant.

Kudos go out to the folks at SJCA for making initial strides towards bringing the truth to their peers on the west coast! It’s mind boggling that the employees in such a labor friendly state like California have been out of the loop for this long! Initial reports indicate that there’s a lot of untapped support for the cause of employee dignity out there, so those of you who have been standing back in the shadows for so long need to come forward and take the lead! It’s time to get in the game!

Shove those residential sales leads!

Speaking of SJCA, a correspondent from that area recently reported that Darrell Roberts, a senior account executive from FedEx’s sales division stated the following at a recent SJCA station meeting. "We don't want to see any sales leads from residential customers. We make no money off of this, so do don’t turn in any leads from resies. We do not want this business." Folks, this is IMPORTANT news!! Where does it leave my best friend, whose route out of FULA is entirely residential?! Furthermore, where does it leave folks like me whose routes are better that 50% residential. Even worse, in my case, I seldom get to even see the actual residents that are shipping or receiving packages because on my route, I deal mainly with high-rise residential mail room operators and doormen!! When I placed this query before my manager, while he was understanding of my dilemma, his hands were tied by FedEx’s carved in stone policy regarding sales lead generation as it applies to our performance reviews. I would have pressed the issue, but my review score was high enough that I figured it wasn’t worth the time to pursue it as well as the hassle it would cause my manager whom I get along well with and personally like.

IPP = Individual Payouts Plummet!

Speaking of performance reviews, initial reports from my coworkers at GYY seem to indicate that the new IPP reviews and payouts are nothing remotely near the fair process management touted them as when the program was first rolled out. A growing number of people have complained to me that while they were always in the 6.0 and above range under the old review process, many now find themselves below 5.0 under the new review rating criteria. I personally know of a courier out of MDW who was a ball of fire here at GYY before she transferred out and was prevented from even bidding on another position because under IPP she received a 5.2 where she had always been a 6.5 or better under the old review system! IPP was subsequently changed to allow 5.0 or better achievers to bid on other positions, but that was of little consequence to her since the damage was already done in her case. Bear in mind that this is a courier that could make the average person tired just watching her frenzied work pace! Another courier just told his manager to at GYY to “take this job and shove it” after receiving a 5.9 on his review, which, given that he had not yet achieved full pay seniority, precluded him receiving any IPP payout at all! Once again, we are talking about a courier, who, as a swing driver, consistently finished the routes in his workgroup better than an hour earlier than the regular couriers on those routes!!! Here was a fellow who would not let FedEx drag his dignity through the gutter! I admire his principles, but wish he had stuck around to help us fight instead of moving on to greener pastures. Want to bet that one figure we’ll never see on the annual shareholder’s report is the number of employees who have received no IPP payouts as opposed to those who received them under the old review system?!

Talk to me! Field correspondents wanted!

Being located in Chicago, my knowledge of what’s going on in all parts of the country is somewhat limited. I could go to the unions and ask them for their activity reports for various areas, but I’d rather get my information “from the horse’s mouth” as it were. I’m especially interested in news from Memphis and New York! There has been a deafening silence from those two key areas on the map! If you are located in those or other areas, send me some e-mail and let me know what’s going on in your neck of the woods.

I would also like to hear about any and all terminations and as much detail about the circumstances surrounding them as possible. Most importantly, I want to hear about employees with 10+ years on the job who have been sacked! Maybe it’s because seniority employees have more of a tendency to speak up or have higher visibility at their stations, but it seems to the casual observer that employees with more than 10 years of employment are falling like dominoes from within our ranks. If this has indeed become the trend it appears to have become, we need to know about it and chronicle it for all to see!

Hit me!

As you can see, I’ve just recently installed a web hit counter. Considering that it was just activated as of the 12th of January, the numbers have been pretty amazing! The traffic here is even more heartening considering that thus far I’ve only listed the site on a couple of the net’s search engines! Help spread the word about this site to your peers! Let’s show Memphis just how thirsty we are for honest information about the company!

New Supertracker. Waiting for the other shoe to drop!

Hope everyone enjoys the “Fred-X of Borg” character on the home page! I figured it was appropriate since we are now experiencing the roll out of the new Supertrackers. They’ve been touted as a boon to couriers because of their better scanning capabilities as well as the faster speeds at which they are supposed to process information. Management has already told us that it should make it “easier” to do our fine sort scanning. Do you see it coming.....???? Don’t be a bit surprised if you suddenly find your start times changed to later time slots with the justification being offered that since the trackers work better you shouldn’t need as much time to do your fine sort! Funny how technology at FedEx manages to make the data cruncher’s jobs easier, but only makes us grunts work faster for even smaller paychecks....