MEMO: Marc Duvoisin is The Inquirer's labor reporter.
TEXT: AL FERRIER IS AT THE dining room table, still in his black courier's uniform with Federal Express in orange letters on the breast pocket. Molly the golden retriever and Shadow the mutt are barricaded in the kitchen. Gunfire and screeching tires are heard from the living room, where 10-year-old Zachary is watching a video. Ferrier, fresh off a Saturday shift hauling packages around Delaware County, listens intently as Dan Weaks explains how he managed to get himself fired a month before Christmas.
Weaks, 43, had words with a supervisor during the morning "sort" at the Federal Express station in Bristol. Packages were tumbling off the conveyor belt. The boss kept calling him over, saying he wanted to talk. Weaks was too busy to leave the belt and said so. Then there was physical contact. The company says the supervisor brushed Weaks accidentally. Weaks says the man grabbed him by the arm. Either way, he lost his cool and shoved back. And was fired. Gone after 12 years.
Ferrier nods and scribbles notes on a pad. He's businesslike, clinical, as emotionless as an insurance adjuster. But then, he's heard a hundred stories like this one. Ferrier is a kind of 911 for Federal Express workers, the man they call when management lowers the boom. And they call at all hours, from all kinds of places. San Francisco, Detroit, Fort Worth, South Bend. Ferrier listens, comforts, consoles. Then he tries to get them their jobs back. He coaches them for hearings. He peppers FedEx officials with letters that meld indignation, emotional appeals, cold logic, and sly hints at litigation. He does all this while driving a delivery route of his own every day.
It all started as a way to advance the United Auto Workers organizing drive, to show his fellow employees why a union was in their best interest, to give them a taste of what a contract - with a grievance procedure, with rights and guarantees spelled out in black and white - could do for them. That's how it started. Then it took on a life of its own, became a cause, a crusade, a second job.
Now that he's heard the story, Ferrier asks Weaks to get up and act it out, show him exactly how it happened. Ferrier plays Weaks. Weaks plays the boss. They move stiffly around the tiny dining room, arms entangled, like weary prizefighters in a clinch. The strapping Weaks demonstrates how the boss grabbed his arm, how he pushed him away.
"Did you go after him again?" Ferrier asks.
"I walked up on him, but I didn't touch him," Weaks replies.
"He initiated the contact?"
"Yeah."
Ferrier lights another Marlboro and starts thinking aloud. They'll need statements from people who saw the incident, who saw it the way Weaks remembers it. "Maybe we can get a petition going, put on some pressure." They'll probably have to fight it all the way to corporate headquarters in Memphis. But this looks like a case they can win, he says, a case they should win. Ferrier glances at the termination papers and shakes his head. A 12-year man. A performance rating of 6 - on a scale of 7. Two kids at home, Christmas around the corner.
"This is bull-," he says. "This is freakin' bull-."
ORGANIZING A UNION these days is like breeding pandas in captivity. If everything goes right, if the stars are aligned, if luck, preparation and hard work converge seamlessly, it can be done.Miracles do happen. But it's so difficult, so risky, so fraught with frustration and disappointment that fewer and fewer people are willing to try. Four years ago, a group of Federal Express employees in the Philadelphia area decided to try.
They didn't succeed. At least not in the formal, legal sense. The organizing campaign got tangled up in an arcane legal dispute over which of two federal labor laws applies to FedEx. An election to determine whether a majority of the employees in this region wanted to unionize was put on hold indefinitely. The case bounced around the federal bureaucracy like a lost parcel, from hearing to hearing and agency to agency. It still hasn't been resolved and might not be for years. But as time went by, as the lawyers waged war by brief and interrogatory, something wondrous happened. A core group of employees simply . . . became a union. With moral and financial support from the UAW, they started a newsletter, set up a grievance committee, started acting in unison. Started looking out for each other. If they couldn't be a union, strictly speaking, they would act like one and dare the company to do something about it.
The most amazing things happened. Joe Coleman, an 18-year employee, was fired, then reinstated after the union - er, the organizing committee - made his case a national cause celebre.Joe Carney, a tractor-trailer driver, read up on Federal Express, every bulletin and quarterly report he could find, and started challenging supervisors - right out in the open - when they said something he believed not to be so. Al Ferrier learned his way around the company's 400-page personnel manual and began advising people how to contest firings, demotions and disciplinary action. He got results - helped people get their jobs back, get suspensions rescinded, get warning letters purged.
With ingenuity and pluck, the employees wrested a degree of control over their work lives. Bit by bit, they established an independent source of authority - precarious, but palpable. The hoped-for union, the would-be union, the maybe union became . . . a virtual union.
"It's hard to put into words. It's just a feeling in the air," says Bob Gardner, a courier in Delaware County who has supported the UAW drive from the beginning. "Before, you were at their mercy.Now you negotiate a little bit more. They'll meet you halfway. You feel you have job security."
Federal Express might seem an unlikely place for this story to unfold. It's a fixture on those lists of the best companies to work for. It has a no-layoff policy, a profit-sharing plan, a generous array of benefits. Employees with grievances can appeal all the way to Fred Smith, the Memphis entrepreneur who founded the company at age 26 and built it into the world's largest overnight delivery service. Federal considers itself not merely nonunion, but post-union. Its "People First" philosophy is supposed to make "third parties" unnecessary, superfluous.
This pesky outbreak of unionism in FedEx's Liberty District - covering Southeastern Pennsylvania, South Jersey and Delaware - shows how a fast-changing, high-tech economy can make people fear for their jobs even when their employer is prosperous and progressive, a model corporate citizen. In an intensely competitive market, Federal has relied on ever-fancier technology, from dashboard computers to hand-held electronic scanners, to cut costs and improve service. Employees are asked to do more, work smarter and keep smiling. Increasingly, their pay is tied to output - output that can be measured with unnerving precision. Some people find this exhilarating. Others find it frightening.
FedEx executives insist that the vast majority of employees want no part of a union and that some of those who signed statements of support for the UAW were deceived or pressured into doing so.Mary Alice Taylor, senior vice president for the Americas and the Caribbean, says there was a place for unions "40, 50, 60 years ago," before Congress passed laws on occupational safety, working hours, the minimum wage. But not now.
Still, the company isn't taking any chances. Managers have been trained in "union avoidance" strategies and urged to call an 800 number to report signs of UAW activity. One memo (headed "Managing the Challenge") told supervisors they were "on the front lines of what may well become a full-scale battle for your employees."
The stakes are huge. Federal Express has been described as the holy grail of organized labor. Of 90,000 employees in this country, only 2,400 pilots belong to a union. If a union election is ever held in Philadelphia, and the UAW wins, the idea could catch on elsewhere. That is not a comforting thought to the people who run FedEx. The company's success has been built on flexibility - on the ability to make adjustments on the fly, to introduce sophisticated technology, to shift people, machinery and schedules to suit the flow of packages, the needs of customers. A union contract could cramp that flexibility. A union could strike, something that has never happened at Federal Express.In a heavily unionized industry, the company has a big advantage over its competitors, an advantage Fred Smith will not give up without a fight.
For the employee-organizers, the movement has become a mission, an obsession. FedEx instilled in them a creed of excellence, a drive to perform. Now they're bringing that same intensity to the task of building a union. "It's like working two full-time jobs," says Joe Carney, chairman of the organizing committee. "You get home at night and the phone rings. And it rings and rings and rings. You've got to pull yourself off the phone to kiss the baby goodnight."
Al Ferrier kept carrying the banner even after he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a potentially fatal cancer of the lymph system. He was out of work six months, had chemotherapy every three weeks. His hair fell out. But there was an upside, he says. He had plenty of time to proselytize for the UAW, "when I wasn't throwing up." Then his cancer went into remission. He went back to work, to his van and his delivery route. But he went back a changed man. His nights, his weekends, his lunch breaks, his loyalty belonged to the union.
"In retrospect," Ferrier says, "they probably should have fired us all the first time they heard about it, and dealt with the consequences later." He lets the thought hang in the air for a few seconds. "But it's too late for that."
YOU SEE THEM ON PAY stubs and ID badges. Employees use them to log onto the company computer system, to identify themselves when calling Memphis to check on their pensions or profit-sharing. Fred Smith's employee number is 1. People hired today get numbers in six figures. Joe Coleman's was 654. People's jaws dropped when they heard it. Three digits. Serious status.
Coleman started way back in 1973, the year Federal Express began flying packages around the country in converted Falcon corporate jets. He had a five-year gold ring, a 10-year pen-and-pencil set. He could remember when a boyish Smith would tour the sorting facility at Philadelphia International Airport in a leather flight jacket, spouting inspirational rhetoric. To people in the Liberty District, many of whom he trained, Coleman was Federal Express.
And then one day in June 1991, he was gone, just like that. The company said he had doctored a delivery order to make it look as if the customer had authorized him to drop off a package without getting a signature. Coleman insisted he had done nothing of the kind. A slight, wrinkled chain-smoker in his late 50s, he was humiliated and despondent. "A beaten man," he says now. He had a wife to support, a retarded son in his 20s to look after. "Just the word fired. I couldn't comprehend that word. It was like the world just collapsed on me. I could not believe that they would do such a thing. People kept saying, 'Hey, get a lawyer. They did you an injustice.' I just couldn't see myself going up against Federal Express."
Ferrier convinced him he could. He drove to Coleman's house in Secane, Delaware County, as soon as he heard the news. "He kind of picked me up off my feet. He said, 'You're down now, Joe, but you can come back. You've just got to get your confidence back and prepare to tell your story.' " Ferrier fired off a round of letters, emphasizing Coleman's spotless record, his three-digit employee number, his Korean War medals. One was addressed to Smith, another to James Barksdale, then Federal's chief operating officer. The letters bore Coleman's signature, but the words were Ferrier's. And they were eloquent.
"Jim, I can recall several times in the early days, our sitting around at the Philadelphia ramp after the Falcons had left, and you, me . . . and Fred Smith discussing the course and future of Federal Express. I brought my children's crayons in to mark up packages. My kitchen chairs were part of the office furniture at the PHL ramp. . . . My manager said he felt - not observed, not knew, not had witness of - that I had signed an airbill to make it appear as though it was a Code 2. . . . An eighteen-year career should not be destroyed based on an assumption."
The firing was a propaganda windfall for the organizing drive. Even people who were leery of unions could identify with Coleman. He hadn't stolen a package or slugged a customer. He hadn't driven a van into a tree. The package in question had gotten safely into the addressee's hands. The UAW produced a cassette tape on the case and sent copies to FedEx employees around the country. The message was unmistakable: This could happen to you.
With coaching from Ferrier, Coleman invoked his rights under the Guaranteed Fair Treatment policy, Federal's widely praised grievance process. GFT is a source of great pride to company officials - the ultimate proof, they say, that FedEx looks out for its people as well as any union could. Appeals are heard by local managers, then by a senior vice president. The final step is a five-member Appeals Board, chaired by Smith, that meets every Tuesday morning in Memphis. Employees are "represented" by FedEx personnel officials. Lawyers and other "third parties" are barred.
Coleman's appeal was denied at the first two levels. Then the kitchen phone rang one day. Jim Barksdale was on the line from Memphis. The company had decided to let him present his case to a special hearing panel. Coleman would pick three members, management the remaining two. Coleman chose Joe Carney, Bob Gardner and Billy Costello, all staunch union men. Ferrier spent hours prepping him for the hearing. He drummed into the diffident Coleman that he would have to be his own lawyer, would have to cross-examine his former bosses, challenge their veracity, get in their faces. The review board met Oct. 22, 1991, at the Embassy Suites Hotel near the airport. Coleman had been out of work four months, living on unemployment checks, with no health insurance.
"If I could have taken Al in there, I would have," he says, "but I had to go in cold. What I took in there was everything Al told me about what to say and how to defend myself. I was speaking the words, but they were coming from Al." And they were persuasive. During a lunch break, Coleman says, a senior manager from Cincinnati who was on the panel muttered: "This is a disgrace. With your record, we shouldn't even be here." The board unanimously overturned the firing.
Coleman went back to work and was assigned a route in West Philadelphia, one more demanding, and more dangerous, than the suburban territory he'd had before. Tired of fighting, he quit after three days to take a technician's job at a General Electric plant. But he'd gotten his dignity back. And the union drive had gotten a big psychological lift.
More important, Ferrier had discovered in GFT a powerful union-building tool. For years, Federal Express workers who ran afoul of management were on their own. Now they had someone to stand up for them, someone who would fight their fight as if his own job depended on it. It could be hard to get through to him. His teenage daughter often had the phone glued to her ear. But it was worth persisting. If you could get Al Ferrier on your side, you had a shot.
THE STRANGE THING IS, they love the company.
All these people who've spent the last four years trying to unionize Federal Express, ignoring their families, wrecking their weekends, running up their phone bills - they like the place. Not one talks about leaving. Not one would rather be working for the competition. Tom Sharkey, a courier in Bristol, Bucks County, once blew up at a travel agent who had the gall to send him some airline tickets by United Parcel Service. On a performance evaluation, next to the phrase "delivers packages with a sense of urgency," one of Sharkey's supervisors once wrote: "Very!" "I bleed purple," one of the company colors, he says. "I'll skip lunch to take a package." Billy Costello walked away from a management career in the food-service business to drive a van for FedEx. And has never regretted it. "I love Federal Express," he says. "I still get a kick out of putting on that uniform every day."
Federal Express is a certified business miracle, a success story to rival anything in the history of free enterprise. It sprang from Fred Smith's mind fully formed, the notion of a package airline that would carry blueprints, computer parts, divorce papers, gourmet coffee, L.L. Bean hiking boots, and whatever else had to get somewhere in the United States fast. Smith was born in Mississippi and reared in Memphis, heir to a bus company fortune. He got his pilot's license at 15 and cofounded a record company while still in the 10th grade. At Yale, he wrote a paper on his imagined air-freight service for an economics course, and got a C. He went to Vietnam with the Marines, won a chestful of medals and came home fixated on that same vision.
He poured $90 million of his and other people's money (mostly other people's) into the fledgling enterprise. It was the largest venture-capital deal in American history, and for the longest time it looked like a loser. When the service kicked off in March 1973, Smith's fleet of Falcons carried a grand total of six packages. One was a birthday gift from Smith to a friend. The company lost $1 million a month in the early going. Smith sometimes had his planes circle the Memphis airport to prevent creditors from seizing them. Rebellious investors demanded his head, and he nearly lost control of the company several times. Federal finally turned a profit in 1976. When Congress deregulated the air-cargo industry a year later (due in large part to a lobbying blitz by none other than Fred Smith), FedEx was free to use wide-body jets, and its business exploded.
With 110,000 employees around the world and revenues of $9 billion a year, the company is still very much Smith's baby. Subordinates mouth the chief executive's sayings so reverently that they seem eerily like extensions of the great man himself. Bill Josem, a UAW lawyer, says it surprised him to discover how much sentiment the Liberty District employees - even gung-ho union partisans - had for Smith. "It was kind of strange to me," he says. "They looked up to him like he was God."
Smith's management philosophy is expressed in the motto "People, Service, Profit" - PSP for short. The guiding principle is that FedEx can prosper only if it treats its employees well. If it does, Smith says, they will go the extra mile for customers, who will reward the company with robust profits. Job openings are posted widely and filled from within whenever possible, enabling line workers to rise into management. Under an "Open Door" policy, workers can submit written questions to anyone in management - and get a "quality response" within two weeks. When Smith pulled the plug on a fax-delivery venture called ZapMail in 1986, all 1,300 employees were offered jobs elsewhere in the company.
In the late '80s, financial pressures wore holes in the PSP credo. UPS and other rivals bought jet fleets of their own and went after Federal's overnight-delivery franchise. A price war depressed profits. In 1991, the company reported its first quarterly loss since it went public in 1978. Smith jettisoned 6,000 European employees to stanch heavy losses overseas. (The no-layoff policy does not apply "under extreme emergency conditions.") At home, Federal trimmed health benefits and abruptly reduced its contributions to employee retirement accounts. Raises, which had averaged 6 to 8 percent a year in good times, shrank drastically. All the while, there was relentless pressure to boost productivity, to handle more packages faster, to master new high-tech tools.
Al Ferrier was used to pressure. He liked to think he thrived on it. But now he began to feel something different. Fear. When his onboard computer monitor lit up with the message "Call your manager immediately," he'd get a queasy feeling in his stomach. He'd wonder whether he'd screwed up somehow, whether he was about to lose his route. Or his job. And that, he says, is what got him thinking union. "I got sick and tired of being scared. I didn't want to be scared anymore."
It was Joe Carney who brought the UAW into the picture. He was venting to his father one night, complaining that he was stressed out over work, that his job didn't feel secure anymore. Bob Carney, 67, a retired machinist for Boeing Co., had belonged to the UAW for years. "Sounds like you need a union," he told his son.
A few weeks later, in January 1991, Joe invited a dozen coworkers to meet with two UAW organizers at his home in Ridley Park, Delaware County. The employees were so jumpy, so afraid of being found out, that some parked their cars a few blocks from the house. Several went in the back door. Whenever someone opened a window to vent the cigarette smoke, Carney's wife, Michelle, a FedEx courier, quickly closed it, as though someone might be eavesdropping.
The organizers, Jim Moore and Dave Mann, sat in the center of the living room and answered questions. Gradually, they gained the employees' trust. They told them their right to organize was protected by law. If the company retaliated against anyone, the UAW would come to his or her defense, file charges with the National Labor Relations Board - and pay the legal bills. They convinced them that the benefits of unionizing were worth the risks. When the meeting was over, a courier named Bobby McLaughlin, who had slipped in the back door, went out the front, shouting a two-syllable word at the top of his lungs.
"Union!"
JOHN PUGLISI JR. IS A small, nervous man with thinning black hair. He wears jeans and black work boots, and as he sits in Al Ferrier's living room in Glenolden, discussing his troubles, he looks down at the floor a lot. A cargo handler in Mount Laurel, Puglisi was fired for cursing his boss. He says he muttered the offending words under his breath and never meant for her to hear. The boss has told a different story - that he stormed into her office and shouted obscenities. Puglisi is 38 and lives alone. He had worked at Federal Express for 13 years.
Ferrier is on the living room couch, horizontal, nursing a bum knee. It's a Tuesday night in January, another evening given over to GFT, to the care and mending of broken careers. Puglisi lost at the first two steps of the Guaranteed Fair Treatment process. His case is now before the Appeals Board in Memphis. He's expecting a call any day from a personnel officer gathering information for the board. It will be his last chance to tell his side of the story. Ferrier is helping him prepare. He's scrunched up under a maroon quilt, Puglisi's paperwork in front of him. An ashtray within easy reach is already filled with spent Marlboros.
Puglisi's defense is that his outburst was caused by chronic depression. He had the condition for years but didn't realize it until now. Since the incident, he's been taking medication under a doctor's care and feeling much better. Puglisi has two employee-of-the-month certificates, four years of perfect attendance. But his record also includes a string of accidents in company vehicles, a demotion from courier to cargo handler.
"This is your last shot. Don't leave anything out," says Ferrier. "You can't hang up that phone and say, 'Damn, I wish I'd said this.' " Ferrier tells him to emphasize the positives - that he's better now and eager to prove it. And to show remorse. "A little bit of ass-kissing goes a long way," he says.
Ferrier, 43, is a leprechaun with pale blue eyes, a ski-jump nose, and a puckish sense of humor. He lives in a rambling clapboard house with his wife, Deb, their three children, and two dogs. He started working for Federal in the late '70s, washing vans at night to supplement his schoolteacher salary. When a full-time job opened up, he quit teaching to become a courier. Smartest move he ever made, he says. "It's a good service, a tremendous service, a blow-your-mind service. You go in to some little old lady's house, and she says, 'It has to be in Minnesota by 10:30 in the morning.' You say, 'Don't worry, ma'am. You called the varsity.' "
Ferrier runs his one-man, nationwide grievance operation from the dining room table. He takes calls well into the wee hours, guiding people through GFT. He writes the letters they sign and submit to management, laying out how they were done wrong and why the company should reverse itself. He provides a sympathetic ear, a source of emotional support in a time of crisis. He won't tolerate distractions when the Eagles or Sixers are on the tube. The rest of his waking hours are fair game. His wife works nights managing a West Coast Video store. They pass like ships in the dark, exchanging cash, car keys, and tips on leftovers. When they all sat down for dinner together a while back - Mom, Dad and the kids - daughter Rachael, 14, exclaimed: "Just like a normal family!"
Joe Coleman's was the first GFT case Ferrier handled. Before long, FedEx employees were calling from all over. The UAW bought him a word processor and started paying his phone bills, which were as high as $1,300 some months. "There's been days where I've had 10 going at one time," he says. "I feel like a doctor in a MASH unit. I just go from one patient to the next." He estimates that he's written more than 200 letters. It's a family effort. Deb does the typing, occasionally cleaning up the grammar and spelling. When she's too busy, Rachael, a 40-word-a-minute typist, takes over.
GFT is supposed to be between the employee and the company, but Ferrier makes no effort to hide his role. He doesn't put his name on the letters, but he employs a set of signature phrases so management will know he's involved, that the case could wind up in the union newsletter. He says the threat of publicity is his most valuable weapon.
The people who call him are often panicky, afraid of losing their jobs, their homes, their savings. He lets them know they're not alone. Perry Montague, a former FedEx courier in Memphis, was fired for allegedly falsifying a delivery document. He'd worked at the company nearly 10 years. His wife had just given birth to their third child. Ferrier, then battling lymphoma, coached him through his appeals by phone. "He said, 'Listen, if you need some money, I'll get you some money. We'll take up a collection.' Any kind of moral support that you'd ever want," says Montague, now a salesman for a printing company. "It just made us feel like there was someone on our side. I've never met him, but he's like a best friend."
Then there was Richard Sorenson, a tractor-trailer driver whose rig jackknifed in the snow on a highway ramp near the
Delaware border. The company said he'd been speeding and transferred him to a lower-paying job as a cargo handler. Ferrier
and Carney helped him fight back, and management rescinded the demotion. "If it hadn't been for them, I don't know what
would have happened," says Sorenson. "I wouldn't have been able to write the letter that I needed to write, properly. People who
didn't even know me, they did that for me."