Re: Mangement Says Yes
when did you ever care enough about this web site to start posting here.
Management has a handshake agreement with your union representatives. They have always encouraged you to participate in voting and always told you why they felt they made a good offer. You on the other hand find this offensive but think nothing of using this web site to post your anti company / anti contract message when you apparently had no interest or concern for this web site prior to this contract offer.
Yes, some managers care about their employee's wellbeing. Then I worked at UPS.
Within my ten month 15-20hr a week tenure, I was suspended without cause (later rescinded with pay) because I didn't have a doctor's note. I came close to that again when I was sick on a thursday and friday, and I was automatically assumed to be _____. Another time while en route to work, I saw a stray dog in the middle of the street. I took him in, went to the Animal Hospital, and called my supervisor to say that I will be 5-15 mins late, who hung up on me. I showed up and my sup bitched about where I was.
Then there was the time the supervisor hammered out volume causing me to throw boxes and he just sat there until I was done, came up to me while I was in a sweat, and bitched at me for throwing boxes.
Then there are the times supervisors will never touch volume, unless they're trying to hit their numbers. You ask them politely to stop and the responses varied from sheer hostility to arrogant statements like "I'm not going to put my thumb up my ass and just sit here" to just pretending like they never heard you. Oh, and then there was the new 19 year old supervisor who attempted to make fun of me for demanding unionized employees to do unionized work. Then watching him get into his mom's Mercedes Benz really made my night every day. Come to think of it, I don't think he ever worked in a unionized environment before, and I doubt supervisors get any sort of training on labour relations. Further, I don't think he even knew it was illegal for him to touch volume, and I doubt any of the supervisors even read the collective agreement. Hell, for car park, I didn't get a reflective vest until I showed them that the contract specifically says that I am entitled to basic safety equipment. At my current company, managers/sups have to take a 10 hour labour relations course and they have to pass a test, assesing their ability to understand the contract. So you're attempting to tell us that UPS has some of the best labour relations in the industry?
And then they hammer out volume. My trailer would get one box every three seconds. Because I can't throw boxes, I made a point of being sure to hand-to-surface and scan every single box that came down, causing me to miss half my volume. The manager would bitch. Then I would stop the belt and managers would restart it. I would then throw boxes and managers would bitch. Then the rest of employees, young kids in their late teens who know nothing about their rights, would allow supervisors to hammer out volume to the point of where we would get 15 ft high mounds of boxes funnelling out of trailers. Supervisors would WATCH employees climb these mounds after telling the underlings to stack that trailer. I would immediately object, saying "there's no friend'n way you can say that is safe", and you know what this supervisor's reply was? "If he is climbing it, then obviously it is safe." "Well, if I think it's safe to shoot humans with a gun, then it's safe, right?" Her reply: "Go stack the Coastal hub trailer". I don't get it, supervisors bitch when we throw boxes, but when we step on them and crush them so we can get into a trailer, it's ok. The moral flexibility of these guys make serial rapists look like model citizens.
UPS had to be the most dysfunctional company I ever worked for. The company is run like a warehouse, not a transportation company, let alone a Fortune 500 transportation company. Managers were backstabbing other managers in front of unionized employees, no manager bothered to learn what I (or anyone else, for that matter) was doing in school, they turned their back when one of my sheep colleagues at work threatened me after I walked off and refused OT, and they definitely didn't do enough to keep me with the company, even with a pay (including tuition reimbursement) equivalent to $23/hr with just 3-5 hrs a night.
Considering their track record of employee harassment (remember the NM settlement for a center manager who called his pt sup a "stupid immigrant"?), not to mention my own experiences in my (relatively) short time with brown, I have a lot more of a jaded view of management's intent than you do. I found managers to be improvised opportunists. Nothing else. If a manager recommended a contract to me, I would re-read that contract and get a 8th opinion.
As a conservative, I was always anti union. Some of the lifers on this forum remember my earlier posts. Then I worked for UPS and saw how a union works to protect the employee from gross violations in the law, my rights, and a binding contract in which I would otherwise have no recourse. I can credit UPS for paying my tuition, bills, and opening my eyes to the relevance of unions.
