Boycott fedex

unionman

Well-Known Member
February 24, 2010: Dean Henderson’s career with FedEx ended abruptly when a reckless driver plowed into his company truck and mangled his leg. His doctor will decide this week if it needs to be amputated. No longer able to drive, stripped of value in our commodity culture, he was tossed aside by the company. He became human refuse. He spends most of his days, because of the swelling and the pain, with his leg raised on a recliner in the tiny apartment in Fairfax, Va., he shares with his stepsister. He struggles without an income and medical insurance, and he fears his future.
Henderson is not alone. Workers in our corporate state earn little when they work—Henderson made $18 an hour—and they are abandoned when they can no longer contribute to corporate profits. It is the ethic of the free market. It is the cost of unfettered capitalism. And it is plunging tens of millions of discarded workers into a collective misery and rage that is beginning to manifest itself in a dangerous right-wing backlash.
“This happened while I was wearing their uniform and driving one of their company vehicles,” Henderson, a 40-year-old military veteran, told me. “My foot is destroyed. I have a fused ankle. I have had over a dozen surgeries. It hurts to wear a sock. I was limping pretty badly, but in the spring of 2008 FedEx said I had to come back to work and sit in a chair. It saved them money on workers’ compensation payments. I worked a call center job and answered telephones. I did that for three months. I had my ankle fused in January 2009, and then FedEx fired me. I was discarded. They washed their hands of me and none of this was my fault.”
Our destitute working class is beginning to grasp that Barack Obama and other elected officials in Washington, who speak in a cloying feel-your-pain language, are liars. They are not attempting to prevent wages from sinking, unemployment from mounting, foreclosures from ripping apart communities, banks from looting the U.S. Treasury or jobs from being exported. The gap between our stark reality and the happy illusions peddled by smarmy television news personalities and fatuous academic and financial experts, as well as oily bureaucrats and politicians, is becoming too wide to ignore. Those cast aside are reaching out to anyone, no matter how buffoonish or ignorant, who promises that the parasites and courtiers who serve the corporate state will disappear. Right-wing rage is being fused with right-wing populism. And once this takes hold, a protofascism will sweep across our blighted landscape fueled by a mounting personal and economic despair. Take a look at Sinclair Lewis’ “It Can’t Happen Here.” It is a good window into what awaits us.
“One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out,” the philosopher Richard Rorty warns in his book “Achieving Our Country.” “Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words ‘:censored2:’ and ‘:censored2:’ will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.”
Whoever rides to power on the back of this rage will swiftly broker a deal with corporations and corporate overlords. But by then it will be too late. Dissent will become a form of treason. The security state will be quickly cemented in place. The bankrupt liberal class, which abandoned the working class and the fight for basic civil liberties, will be reviled, discredited and impotent. America will develop its own peculiar form of Christian fascism.
Obama, entranced with power and prestige, is more interested in courting the elite than saving the disenfranchised. The president, when asked to name a business executive he admires, cited Frederick Smith of FedEx, although Smith is a union-busting Republican. Smith, who was a member of Yale’s secret Skull & Bones Society along with George W. Bush, served as John McCain’s finance chair. I guess Obama is hoping for some cash. And Smith has a lot of it. He founded FedEx in 1971, and the company had more than $35 billion in revenue in the fiscal year that ended in May. Smith is rich and powerful, but there is no ethical system, religious or secular, that would hold him up as a man worthy of emulation. Those who make vast profits at the expense of workers and the common good are not moral. They are not worthy of adulation. They build fortunes and little monuments to themselves off the pain and suffering of people like Henderson. Jesus called them “vipers.”
“He’s an example of somebody who is thinking long term,” the president said of Smith in an interview with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, adding that he “really enjoyed talking” with him at a Feb. 4 White House luncheon.
Smith does think in the long term. His company lavished money on members of Congress in 1996 so they would vote for an ad hoc change in the law banning the Teamsters Union from organizing workers at Federal Express. A few stalwarts in the Senate, including Edward Kennedy (in a speech reprinted in the Congressional Record on Oct. 1, 1996) and his then-colleague Paul Simon, denounced the obvious. The company had bought its legislative exemption. Most members of Congress, then as now, had become corporate employees.
“I think we have to honestly ask ourselves, why is Federal Express being given preferential treatment in this body now?” Sen. Simon said at the time. “I think the honest answer is Federal Express has been very generous in their campaign contributions.”
Following the Senate vote, a company spokesman was quoted as saying, “We played political hardball, and we won.”
What happened to our historical memory? How did we forget that those who built our democracy and protected American workers were not men like Smith, who use power and money to further the parochial and selfish interests of the elite, but the legions of embattled strikers in the coal fields, on factory floors and in steel mills that gave us unions, decent wages and the 40-hour workweek. How was it possible in 1947 to pass the Taft-Hartley Labor Act, which, in one deft move, emasculated the labor movement? How is it possible that it remains in force? Union workers, who at times paid with their lives, halted the country’s enslavement to the rich and the greedy. And now that unions have been broken, rapacious corporations like FedEx and toadies in Congress and the White House are turning workers into serfs.
UPS is unionized. It is the largest employer of the Teamsters. Labor costs, because of the union, account for almost two-thirds of its operating expenses. But Smith spends only a third of his costs on labor. There is something very wrong with a country that leaves a worker like Henderson sitting most of the day in a tiny apartment in excruciating pain and fighting off depression while his billionaire former boss is feted as a man of vision and invited to lunch at the White House. A country that stops taking care of its own, that loses the capacity for empathy and compassion, that crumples up human beings and throws them away when it is done with them, feeds dark ideological monsters that inevitably rise to devour the body politic.
FedEx is busy making sure Congress keeps unions out of its shops. It has lavished $17 million, double its 2008 total, on Congress to fight off an effort by UPS and the Teamsters to revoke Smith’s tailor-made ban on unions. Smith, again thinking “long term,” plans to continue to hire thousands of full-time employees and list them as independent contractors. If his workers are listed as independent contractors he does not have to pay Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance taxes. And when they get sick or injured or old he can push them onto the street. Henderson says FedEx treats its equipment as shabbily as its employees. There’s no difference between trucks and people to corporations that view everything as a commodity. Corporations exploit human beings and equipment and natural resources until exhaustion or collapse. They are cannibals.
“The trucks are a liability,” Henderson said. “They are junk. The tires are bald. The engines cut out. There are a lot of mechanical problems. The roofs leak. They wobble and pull to one side or the other. The heating does not work. And the company pushes its employees in the same way. The first Christmas I was there I worked 13 hours without a break and without anything to eat. It is dangerous. I could have fallen asleep at the wheel and injured someone.”
If you have to send packages do not be a scab. Send it with UPS or the U.S. Postal Service. They have unions. Every step, however tiny, we take to thwart the corporate rape of the country and protect workers counts. We would have to do more, much more, but this would be a small start. Like Smith, our politicians have sold their souls. They will not help us. We must help ourselves. And the longer we stand by and permit the Democrats and the Republicans to strip American workers of their jobs and their dignity the less we will have to say when the day of angry retribution arrives.
By Chris Hedges for Truthdig.
 

MrFedEx

Engorged Member
The story about the employee getting thrown under the bus sounds legit....he needs some legal help. The rest of it sounds like a rant.
 

Washu234

Well-Known Member
Linking to the article is never a bad thing:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/boycott_fedex_20100222/

Bad things happen to good people. In this case a FedEx manager made a very bad call. Call one of the several 'been in an accident?' lawyers on TV and use the FedEx team of lawyers that my front-line butt pays for. I'm sure they'll settle.

Sigh - should have had long-term disability insurance.

To boycott FedEx? That's ludicrous. I actually want my packages to get there.
 

ex fed exer

Well-Known Member
The story about the employee getting thrown under the bus sounds legit....he needs some legal help. The rest of it sounds like a rant.


the reallity of it is, mr henderson will lose because he is an " at will-employee" period. when smith "so called created the company" he knew henderson was out there. in order to save himself the grief of employees who need to be thrown over board( see ben hur the move, the galley scene) smith adopted the "at will- employee" law.

as an employee of a non union, or any job in the usa for that fact, work place, one has no right to their job. he can quit at any time or be told to leave at any time. it's all legal.the pilgrams brought that over with them when they wanted to be free from the fat king in england.

jay walker was on disability with wife ruthie dieing from cancer whan fed ex fired him without telling him. he find out at the doctors office when he was denied medical treatment because he had no insurance.

san miguel broke her ankle and could no loner do the work required, gone after 25 years of service.

jan byles also broke and ankle that never healed right and could barely walk afterwards, gone 20 years of service, not my problem Fred S.


still people support Fred S, the republicans and everything else that gives the union a hard time.
 

MrFedEx

Engorged Member
Yeah,lets have the Dems run everything,oh wait,they're already doing a bang up job already.

Oh wait, aren't those obstructionist Republicans doing everything they can to protect the Smiths, the pharmaceutical companies, and the insurance companies. They're sure doing a bang-up job, arent they? And how about "Joe the Pilot", the first martyr of the Tea Bag Terrorists...what a hero!! You sound like a right wing tool.
 

FedEx2000

Well-Known Member
the reallity of it is, mr henderson will lose because he is an " at will-employee" period. when smith "so called created the company" he knew henderson was out there. in order to save himself the grief of employees who need to be thrown over board( see ben hur the move, the galley scene) smith adopted the "at will- employee" law.

as an employee of a non union, or any job in the usa for that fact, work place, one has no right to their job. he can quit at any time or be told to leave at any time. it's all legal.the pilgrams brought that over with them when they wanted to be free from the fat king in england.

jay walker was on disability with wife ruthie dieing from cancer whan fed ex fired him without telling him. he find out at the doctors office when he was denied medical treatment because he had no insurance.

san miguel broke her ankle and could no loner do the work required, gone after 25 years of service.

jan byles also broke and ankle that never healed right and could barely walk afterwards, gone 20 years of service, not my problem Fred S.


still people support Fred S, the republicans and everything else that gives the union a hard time.

The only way "Jay Walker" was "fired" without his knowledge is b/c he didn't show up for his scheduled days and would have been terminated due to no call/no show policy. Otherwise, he would most definitely have signed a few papers on his way out the door. Bunch of BS.
 

Cactus

Just telling it like it is
The only way "Jay Walker" was "fired" without his knowledge is b/c he didn't show up for his scheduled days and would have been terminated due to no call/no show policy. Otherwise, he would most definitely have signed a few papers on his way out the door. Bunch of BS.

And you know this for a fact?
 

ex fed exer

Well-Known Member
The only way "Jay Walker" was "fired" without his knowledge is b/c he didn't show up for his scheduled days and would have been terminated due to no call/no show policy. Otherwise, he would most definitely have signed a few papers on his way out the door. Bunch of BS.

jay walker was a pioneer in the station, one of the 1st people hired. as he got older and slower his heath began to fail. one trip to the doctor he was given a shot that lead to encephalitis. he soon became a long term disability employee aka a problem for Fred S because smith has a company to run.as he was sitting in the doctor's office the nurse informed him that he would not be treated due to his having no insurance. it was news to jay. he called the station and the ops mgr would not give him a straight answer. finally memphis told him he had been terminated due to the fact he had been off work longer than 180 days.jay obtainted a lawyer who at the end told him to drop any and all laws suits because he would be dead before he saw any of Fred S's money.his wife ruth who had cancer was fired from her job also due to her medical condition and soon died. jay lived a few more years and than died.the point is you are an imbecile who has the same mentality as all the rest. it didn't happen to me so i don't care. Fred S does not care about you or any one else. as the lawer once told me :censored2: how can any working man be against the union, you have all been brainwashed"all this is in the fed ex files. ask fred to show you. this is just one case . there are more.
 

MrFedEx

Engorged Member
The only way "Jay Walker" was "fired" without his knowledge is b/c he didn't show up for his scheduled days and would have been terminated due to no call/no show policy. Otherwise, he would most definitely have signed a few papers on his way out the door. Bunch of BS.

The BS is on your end. I've known plenty of people who have been "shown the door" by FedEx after years of loyal and outstanding service. Here's just 1 example,OK? Employee X is in the back of his CTV when another employee jumps-in and drives off. Employee X falls out the back and injures his leg seriously and is unable to return to his position by day 89. At 90 days, he becomes displaced, and FedEx forces Employee X to look for another non-driving position. Guess what? There aren't any available, so the termination game begins, and HR and Legal gang-up to try and force X out the door. Fortunately, Employee X is smart enough to lawyer-up, and termination proceedings get ended pending a settlement. Employee X wants to return to work, and probably can once his rehab is over, but FedEx sees him as a liablity, and wants him gone.

You're only valuable to FedEx as long as you can produce revenue. The minute you get injured, the corporation considers you a liability that is costing them money. The Borg needs to eliminate you, especially if you are over 40, topped-out, or have ever been hurt or seriously sick before. A new, younger, and less expensive unit will replace you and the Borg will be satisfied, unless that unit becomes "defective" too. You know the game..quit lying.
 

Cactus

Just telling it like it is
The only way "Jay Walker" was "fired" without his knowledge is b/c he didn't show up for his scheduled days and would have been terminated due to no call/no show policy. Otherwise, he would most definitely have signed a few papers on his way out the door. Bunch of BS.

Typical management explanation. All employees are guilty as charged before the trial commences.

Fred however insists on using a new rope when any employee hanged. How's that for a people company?
 

ex fed exer

Well-Known Member
Typical management explanation. All employees are guilty as charged before the trial commences.

Fred however insists on using a new rope when any employee hanged. How's that for a people company?

aall employees are guilty untill proven innocent. what is wrong with this statement? i've seen employees prove themself innocent by their own means(lawyers) and still lose their jobs, thanks to the" at-will employee" law. a very nice escape hatch for republican companies
 

MrFedEx

Engorged Member
aall employees are guilty untill proven innocent. what is wrong with this statement? i've seen employees prove themself innocent by their own means(lawyers) and still lose their jobs, thanks to the" at-will employee" law. a very nice escape hatch for republican companies

Exactly. The second you get sick or injured FedEx is looking to throw you under the bus. You could be a 20-year, "perfect" employee who has always done everything to work hard and promote an ultra-positive image for the company. Makes no difference. They want you GONE.
 

bbsam

Moderator
Staff member
Exactly. The second you get sick or injured FedEx is looking to throw you under the bus. You could be a 20-year, "perfect" employee who has always done everything to work hard and promote an ultra-positive image for the company. Makes no difference. They want you GONE.
89 days is hardly "the second you get sick or injured". But that we need health care reform done and working immediately I think we agree (though it is somewhat off topic).
 

MrFedEx

Engorged Member
89 days is hardly "the second you get sick or injured". But that we need health care reform done and working immediately I think we agree (though it is somewhat off topic).

OK. let's say you are Dean Henderson. The moment his vehicle was struck he turned from an asset into a liability as far as FedEx was concerned. Although I'm sure they said all the right things about "caring about the employee", behind-the-scenes the HR/Legal process was gearing-up to minimize the impact (no pun intended). It's far less costly for a self-insured company to eliminate a liability than to do the right thing, and at FedEx it's always about the money, not the employee.

This is why the arguments of the apologists always ring hollow. Chances are, none of them have had to deal with the dark side of FedEx during their careers. Drinking the Kool-Aid has the serious side effect of seeing the world through rose-colored glasses. The reality is much more harsh. FedEx has always been excellent at promoting an image that doesn't really exist, and that's one of a company that cares in an era where most don't. That's crap, because they don't care unless they're going to have to shell-out some big money in a lawsuit. If you get hurt, the strategy is to starve you out before you can get the matter to court and do everything possible to deflect responsibility away from FedEx. Just ask anyone who has gone through the process.
 

ex fed exer

Well-Known Member
This is why the arguments of the apologists always ring hollow. Chances are, none of them have had to deal with the dark side of FedEx during their careers. Drinking the Kool-Aid has the serious side effect of seeing the world through rose-colored glasses. The reality is much more harsh. FedEx has always been excellent at promoting an image that doesn't really exist, and that's one of a company that cares in an era where most don't. That's crap, because they don't care unless they're going to have to shell-out some big money in a lawsuit. If you get hurt, the strategy is to starve you out before you can get the matter to court and do everything possible to deflect responsibility away from FedEx. Just ask anyone who has gone through the process----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------never have truer words ever been spoken. these are the words smith does not want you to hear. he is the person standing behind the curtain of the great and powerfull oz.</p>
 
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