Back in the late winter of this year, the employees at the largest station in the FedEx system, GYY in Chicago, were at the end of their collective ropes. They were facing an ever-escalating amount of antagonism from their Senior Manager. At his behest, and with his blessing, management was playing fast and loose with timecard codes, job posting and filling procedures and widespread abuse of part-time employees. This situation was further aggravated by the Senior Manager implementing hastily-concocted rules and procedures every time he was faced with a problem that was causing him to be pressured by district and corporate-level management. At the same time, he steadily upped the ante of threats and punishments to insure that the hourly employees fell into lock-step with his goals. Then FedEx rolled out their new testing and performance review policies. Employees at GYY, and probably throughout the entire FedEx system, groaned aloud at being thrown this meager bone, entangled as it is by trap doors and trip wires, when we were all expecting a raise in our wages! The idea that we could get a few bucks more every 6 months if we managed to live up to the arbitrary expectations set by our managers was, to say the least, less than exciting news!
This combination of circumstances created an atmosphere of sheer revolution at GYY! Talk about walk-outs and blue-flu tactics quickly surfaced and circulated. Pro-Union graffiti made brief appearances on the bathroom walls before being cleaned off by management. Finally, someone stepped forward and proposed that we all get together on our own time somewhere to talk about our grievances and perhaps arrive at some plan of concerted action. The idea of a mass meeting was immediately embraced and a hugely successful meeting was held at a local cafe on a Saturday morning. A second meeting was held the following Saturday when many folks complained to the newly formed steering committee that they hadn't heard about the first meeting and wanted to participate. The second meeting shocked everyone! Better than two-thirds of the available (obviously Saturday scheduled employees could not attend) station hourly employees attended it!!
The result of these two meetings were copious notes that were compiled by the steering committee into an 8 page letter of grievances which were then, according to the wishes of those who attended the meetings, forwarded to all levels of FedEx management from Fred Smith on down to the district level. It should be noted that management was invited to attend our second meeting and that our district manager sent his representative to observe the proceedings. There was no secrecy involved in what we were doing. In other words, this entire effort was an attempt to deal with FedEx openly and honestly. What was the result of all this effort?
That's right! Management left us hanging for a month-and-a-half without uttering a word of reply to the issues we had raised. Think about that for a moment. Corporate-level officers of a company that trumpets it's "people-first" philosophy is made aware of mass discontent at the largest station in the country, yet their response is a deafening silence! To be fair, it has to be mentioned that managers stopped yanking people off the road suddenly to take the Courier Job Knowledge Test. Managers also organized supplemental training sessions for the test off the clock! This was the only indication any of us had that anything we had written had received any consideration. A month-and- a-half later, we received word that our regional manager was going to meet with us. When he did show up, he made it clear that he would not address us as a group, but would only meet with individuals on a one-on-one basis to discuss individual grievances. In other words, after leaving us dangling long enough to allow demoralization to spread and dampen our spirit of solidarity, management was now adopting a divide-and-conquer tactic in addressing our concerns!
When several of us cornered the regional manager and expressed our outrage at being handled piecemeal when we had been led to believe by the district manager that we would have a group skip- level meeting upon his receiving a copy of our letter, he quickly agreed that he would have the district manager meet with us as soon as possible. The following week, a skip-level meeting was held on Saturday morning off the clock at a rented hall near the station. Needless to say, after leaving us all hanging for so long, few people were eager to meet with management on company time, never mind on their own time! It was just as well, because those of us who did show up to hear what management had to say were treated to the most amazing attempt at obfuscation we had ever witnessed! First of all, the district manager showed up with an overhead projector and proceededto wear us all down with over an hour-and-a-half of presentations of bar graphs and pie charts pertaining to cost-per-package, full-time equivalents and other riveting statistics. When this torture finally ended, we repeatedly attempted to get the district manager to focus on the issues we addressed in the letter we sent him. To our collective astonishment and exasperation, we were treated to repeated meandering replies that went off on tangents to the issues which, were they not so frustrating, would have seemed utterly amazing to a dispassionate observer!
This fiasco began to fall apart soon after a female employee, fighting back actual tears of frustration, stood up and screamed that she had enough, launched into a passionate barrage of indictments of the district manager having utterly wasted her time and culminated by her walking out on the meeting! Shortly after that, people began leaving until only a few of the more tenacious souls were left to continue vain attempts at getting something vaguely resembling a substantive answer out of the district manager.
Does this story get any worse? You betcha! You see, at the beginning of the meeting, several employees from the SQI station appeared and expressed their desire to join the meeting. The district manager flatly refused to let them enter the hall! Remember earlier when the company adopting divide- and-conquer tactics was mentioned? This was clear evidence that the last thing FedEx management wants is for FedEx employees to unify in any way in confronting problems we all have to contend with. To read the entire text of the letter the employees of GYY sent to Fred and Co., Click here or on the "We tried it their way!" tab.