Once again, no, I am not against getting paid more. And once again, I am not against unions. Do I think anything will change without a union? I'd like to think so but the truth is I have no idea. I can be fairly confident that things will change with a union otherwise the union is going to have egg on its face for not doing something. So the question simply becomes what do I think a union will bring to the table and what will FedEx require in return? In addition, I am concerned that people are missing the fact that UPS enjoys a pseudo RLA protection with the NMA. There's no guarantee that FedEx will have an NMA and that could certainly mean that a few locations could hold the rest hostage. Yes, a nationwide strike is also possible but much less likely than several localized strikes.
That's a lot of unknowns and the promise of more money may not be worth the risk let alone how much harder I might have to work for not much more pay. While people such as you and I don't think we can work any harder, that won't stop FedEx from demanding more.
You don't think that FedEx isn't already trying to maximize production? OSS comes-in and adds stops, re-aligns boundaries, or consolidate routes almost at will. The company is always requiring more. What you don't seem to get is that UPS routes are generally far more dense, so more stops per hour is a given. This is especially true with pick-ups, where we have a much higher percentage of on-call stops as opposed to regulars (UPS house stops). As I said before, I have multiple UPS routes operating within my 1 FedEx route, and that's fairly typical. While it's true that they are in and out of the truck more often, I'm working just as hard as they are, plus I have to figure-in a bunch of on-calls that they don't.
We have plenty of people with knee and back injuries from repetitive motion too, especially all of those folks with the 150# pkgs they don't get any help delivering. Oh, right, that's against policy, but how often do "2-man lift" pkgs ever have 2 people doing the job. Almost never. Yet when you get hurt, you "should have asked for help". Right.
On the union deal, you cannot have separate locals holding others hostage under the RLA. If we're properly re-classified under the NLRA, then the scenario you describe is possible.
Who brought all of this on? FedEx did. If they had done right by us, NONE of this would even be on the table, but they didn't. It would have cost them a few bucks, but decent raises, reduced top-out times, and a host of other issues could have stopped any union movement dead in it's tracks. But Fred chose to maximize profits and forget the people that make those profits happen. That's why a union is probably on the way. FedEx created this...we did not.