I understand my building kept all the inside seasonal employees, or at least the ones who actually worked. Double shifting on the preload everyday and twi when needed. Running tours through the building. Labor shortage where I am at.
UPS got a big dose of reality on this. The first week of peak, our start time was around 3:30AM, when it had been around 4:20AM. Management intended to use an army of seasonal employees to pick-up the slack. On Monday, we had six people walk off the sort, then eight more on Tuesday. We haven't had that many people walk off in my entire career, let alone two days!! Finally they pushed the start time back to 12:30AM the rest of the week and cut back on staffing.
The problem is with the economy picking-up, there's more minimum-wage jobs available than labor, which is a reversal from previous years here in which you couldn't even find a job at McDonald's! Ultimately, people have demonstrated that they'd rather work a retail job for $7.50/hour than get up at odd hours & bust their nuts off at UPS for $8.50/hour. I wonder if the change to $10/hour will fix this 10 months from now...
