opie said:
One thing that should be looked into is part-time pay. Most places start at $8.50/hr. And I believe this rate has been the same for 20+ years? I remember when I started and had orientation, they had a guy who had been there 20+ years. And back then he said there would be lines of people wanting to be hired, and if you were lucky/qualified you would get hired. But today they hire anyone, and they hire every week. Because most people don't want to work for low wages loading/unloading trailers. That is why most of the people who stay at UPS & work P/T are here for the benefits and/or possibility of getting a good FT job down the road etc...
The bean counters at Glenlake think this $8 per hour thing is a golden egg but in time I believe it's a vastly more costly item than a higher starting wage. For ever new hire walking into the place going through the orientation process, last I heard the cost for the company per new hire was about $2k. Now if you have a high turnover rate and then if you look at all the extra monies being spent on gimicks to get people to come to work, work safely and in some cases to just do their job, it's quite a chunk of change being spent.
Think about this scenario.
Hi there Newhire, I'm Mr. UPS and have I got a deal for you today. We've got a great opportunity for you in that we want to give you the following job. Now from you, you'll have to work in very hot conditions in the summer and very cold in the winter because we really don't condition our air in our buildings. The cost is not effective to the bottomline you see. You'll also have to hand all types of packages up to 150 lbs. but you'll also have to remember lots of details like where the packages go coming into your load as it relates to the trailer you're loading. You'll also need to scan ever packages and remember the process for setting up your scanner correctly. In some cases we may require you to load multiple trailers which also requires you to know severla more functional steps with your scanner. We also do an extremely poor job of holding people accountable to come to work so we're almost always shorthanded so you'll be required to do the work of those who didn't show up. Just a little secret, but at $8 per hour it's hard to hold people accountable at that paylevel. I'll fully explain so you understand in a moment. To go along with what I've already covered, you also have to remember a bunch of safety stuff too. Now we've taken safety to a new level at UPS whereas most companies take a pretty common sense approach, we have lots of people working in our safety function who in order to justify showing they are doing something, come up with mindless ideas to comply with what they believe are the OSHA regulations. If you take the time to go to other industries with similar conditions, you find far less company nonsense and redtape but our people love justifying their jobs and their managers love it also because they now have more nonsense to use to justify another conference call. Conference calls and tree killing paper reports are upper managements means of justifying their time but back to you. You'll learn all that other stuff if you stay around for any length of time. I could go on and on but I'm sure you're itching to hear about the wonderful economic package we have. Now I can see you're a very healthy young person but we have a fantastic health and welfare program. I can see baring some tragic event that a doctor or dentist visit is not in your immeiate future at all and that's very good for the company because the less you go the better our bottomline. As to the pay? What a deal I have for you! Our starting wage is $8.50 and hour and once seniortiy is achieved you'll make $9 per hour so let me break it down for you. Our contract with the Teamsters requires a minimum 3.5 hour paid day and unless we can get away with it, you'll normally at least get that. The one exception gets back to our inability (you'll learn about this by experience too) to hold anyone accountable to come to work will work in your favor if you want more hours because many nights may actually be nearer 4 hours. So let's put this in dollars and cents. 4 hours times $9 is $36 per day so we're gonna require you to remember all kinds of useless nonsense that has little bearing to your job and at the same time require you to perform numerous functions beyond just moving the box. Now in moving the box you'll be horribly hot in the summer and very cold in the winter and in many cases you'll have inept supervisors who in fact really care less for the job than you do. You'll also have moments where the volume flow to your trailer will be 3 and 4 times what even UPS sez is max efficency for it's best loaders and the packages will pile up all over the floor around the trailer entrance. Now don't fret, someone will only come by and scream about picking up the pace and getting the floor clean because of safety egress issues but non one will offer any help because remember that inept supervisor doesn't maintain his Pittsburg forms so no one if held accountable to come to work so that you're always shorthanded. They don't even pull up the electronic copy from the time clock system unless the Sort management gets frustrated enough with being shorthanded all the time and demands it. Rarely happens however.
OK, so your getting $36 a day pay so here's how it breaks out. First off, right off the top you're gonna loose 7.5% to Social Security so that takes almost $3 off the top so now you're down to $33. From that you'll loose more for medicare, federal and state taxes so now you're down to the mid to upper $20's. Now gas is around $3 per gallon and with traffic and wear and tear on the vehicle, you might knock off another $5 plus bucks so I think we've finally got down to a net figure to work with.
OK, because of distance and traffic you've got to leave for work a good hour before your start time but luckily that time is about half on the return trip home. So you'll have to give up about 6 hours of your day but the return on investment is really good. For your 6 hours of time and toil we're gonna give you a net of about $20.
WOW! WHAT A DEAL!
Sign here and begin the good life today!
Now back to reality.
OK, on the one hand it's somewhat over the top and a bit humorous too but at the same time there's lots of truth in what I said as well. In a 4 hour sort span your gonna pay $20 to someone for the time and effort. They could hangout with the illegal immigrants doing day labor work for cash making 5 to 7 times as much money and in many cases the conditions wouldn't be as bad. If the Federal gov't does raise the minimum wage (hey even republicans aren't beyond using political ploys for votes so don't think they'll hold the line on this) to $6.75 as it's been debated, UPS will now come very close to competing with other minimum wages jobs out there so first off, where will the best people go? Of what's left over, where will they go if given a choice? If you were in their shoes, where would you go? Now, with what's left for us this is the bottomline. Where do our future drivers come from? Where do our Pt supervisors come from? Where do we boast our mangement comes from? Why is UPS more and more going outside the in house ranks to hire management trainees who have no clue what a UPS operation is all about?
Glenlake better talk to it's operational level management and learn what most of them have realized concerning the part timer pay scale as even FedEx pays it's pt time workforce more than UPS does. Go talk to them to find out if you don't believe me.
Ps. the amount I should have with CS is approx. 340,000 dollars from 1993 to present! You do a great job of making sense of what can be a complicated subject, keep up the good work!
