<H1><CENTER> April Fools In November</CENTER></H1> Just when you hope that your worst estimates of how low FedEx will stoop to fend off unionization will be proved to be wrong, along comes Fred to announce a raise just as the unions predicted. Fred went the union predictions one better though! He threw in a pre-Christmas profit sharing check distribution to put a rosy holiday glow on all our cheeks as well!

No doubt that his ploy will have some detrimental effect on our organizing efforts. There will invariably be some numbskulls within the rank and file who will slobber gratefully over these scraps from the holiday table of corporate FedEx. They will be the folks who will look at these slim pickings as some real improvement in their lot in life without seeing the harsh reality of this insulting ploy. Fortunately, at least this web site will shine the light of truth upon this latest anti-union tactic and reveal the fact that the source of that rosy glow on our cheeks was really just another slap in the face meted out by our beloved leaders.

First of all, make no mistake about it. FedEx is running scared! Why else would Fred announce a raise in November that won't take effect until April? If you can't see that the company is so desperate to derail the union drive momentum that has been gathering speed these past few months, that it was forced to come up with some kind of good news quickly to soothe employees, then you either need glasses or a new prescription! You have to understand that FedEx never planned to give us the announced April raise. That's why the raise won't become effective until April. Think about it!

A company as large as FedEx has an extremely complicated economic structure with diversified asset allocations. In order for the company to grant a raise, it has to have time to figure out just exactly where the funds for the raise will come from. Since fixed portions of each profit dollar are carefully allocated to a large array of departmental budgets and investments, it has to be determined where those fixed allocations need to be modified to accommodate a raise. In corporate America, this type of cash reallocation takes time because the corporate leadership has to call for detailed impact studies from its various department heads and investment managers. Once those impact studies are completed, the corporate leadership has to study them and then hash out amongst each other, the most desirable places in the budget the funds for the raise can be extracted from. Several different proposals are formulated from their brainstorming sessions and finally, the proposals are presented to the board of directors for a vote. While this may not be exactly how the process works at FedEx, it's a safe bet that a process very similar in nature takes place within the company.

Needless to say, the aforementioned procedures are time consuming. That's why it's easy to understand that this raise announcement was a hastily concocted strategy designed solely to combat our unionization efforts! That's probably also why we heard rumors of this raise 3 weeks before it was announced. The company couldn't wait to get the word of this raise out as quickly as possible because they were banking on it having an impact on our cause. The rumor was "leaked" with all the subtlety of a pianist playing Mozart with a sledge hammer! Nobody I've talked to can ever remember a raise being announced months in advance of its effective date in the entire history of FedEx! This is important folks! Just ask yourself to try and come up with any reasonable explanation for announcing a raise this prematurely besides FedEx wanting to take the wind out of the sails of our union movement?? If you can offer any plausible explanation other than what I've presented here, please let me know, because you're obviously smarter than I am and I'm always eager to learn from my intellectual superiors!

Okay, so now that we've demystified the premature raise announcement, let's take a look at the raise itself. In the Chicago market, the raise will amount to about $0.48 an hour which will propel those of us at top scale to a dizzying height of $16.51/hr. Of course, this won't happen until April, so let's see how much ground we'll be gaining on our peers at Airborne and UPS when we get this windfall.

TOP SCALE WAGES
TODAY APRIL
UPS $19.86 $19.86 (contract up in Aug.)
Airborne $19.13 $19.64
Airborne Svc. Agents $17.57 $18.08
FedEx $16.03 $16.51

PAY GAP
TODAY APRIL
UPS $ 3.83 $ 3.35 (until Aug)
Airborne $ 3.10 $ 3.13
Airborne Svc. Agents $ 1.54 $ 1.57


Wait a minute! This can't be right! But it IS! Even with our April raise, we will LOSE ground to both Airborne couriers and Airborne Service Agents! The gap between their top scales and ours will widen by an additional $.03/hr! Some "raise" huh? Of course, we all know that once UPS negotiates its new contract in August, the pay gap between their package car drivers and our couriers is sure to widen by even more!

At this point, you might be asking yourself if there's any good news associated with the raise? Unfortunately, it gets even worse! You see, there's a real good reason why the raise was limited to top-of-scale employees. We're the biggest headache the company has where union activity is concerned! We've been around long enough to fully understand just how badly our status within the company has deteriorated. We're also the most savvy about unfair policies and procedures because we've all either been victimized by them already or know of someone who was shafted badly by the company. We're also the most influential employees in the station and employees with less seniority tend to listen to us with receptive ears and trust us more than they do management. Just about everyone I know who is involved heavily in union organizing both in my district and in Philadelphia and Indianapolis are employees with 10 or more years with the company. We, therefore, are FedEx's primary target for pacification or elimination....

Now let's focus our attention on the pre-Christmas profit sharing check/bone the corporate honchos have deigned to toss at us. Of course, everyone will realize that this represents no real sacrifice on the part of the company since it is money that would have been deposited in our retirement accounts anyway. Unfortunately, there will still be some employees who will see this as some sort of expression of corporate good will and will slobber gratefully over this bone as well. While this will probably make it harder to convince rookie employees to join our cause, with a little patience and clear explanation of the emptiness of this gesture, it should be relatively easy for us to negate the effects of this corporate strategy.

We were not surprised by these pacifiers being hastily offered to silence our cries for humane and equitable employment, nor were many of us fooled by them. The only real surprise, as I said earlier, was that our worst expectations of management so easily and quickly became realities.....