Layed off drivers being fired for mislaods

[Brown Rocket]

Yes indeedy folks.

Here in my little neck of the woods we recently were gifted a new bussiness manager from a closing center just north of us. He brought a long a FT Sup he was buddy with who he promptly put in charge of the pre-load operation.

This friend/T sup believes he is god's gift to UPS. He is on the fast track to CEO yet it's only in his head.

He says, "I am disciplining all misloads." Fair enough. They should be. But you can't discipline performance. So he come sup with a new plan. "I'll discipline misloads that result in service failures."

So here is the deal. The pre-loaders are doing fine. But you have the layed off drivers who are loading package cars who were not all loaders when they were part timers.

You have layed off drivers that are working split shifts till 9:30pm and starting again at 5:00am.

You have the layed off driver who doesn't care, gets 5 misloads a day, but gets lucky and has a good driver that runs them all.

He doesn't get any diiscipline.

Then you have the guy who cares, busts his ass, follows his methods, loads stop for stop, and gets one a misload a week. But his drivers are 20 plus-ers who could care less about anything but their dispatch being too heavy.

He is one misload away from being terminated.

Has been through verbal, and written warnings, a warning letter, and is about to be suspended. But what they haven't done is offer any advice on how to improve, they just keep telling him he is doing it wrong.

Every layed off driver has started stacking out so someone has to come help them catch up in order to not be accountable for misloads.

Am I wrong in thinking that the guys who will save this center during christmas peak might be allowed a little slack?

Am I wrong in thinking that the guy with 5 daily misloads should get in trouble before the guy who does it once a week?

 

[cachsux]

Did these guys go through the same training period/classes that they would have if they were new hires? If not I would grieve.

 

[over9five]

I would slow down and have no misloads.

The laid-off drivers can make the sups life a lot more miserable than he can make theirs.

 

[Billy]

Another thing to think about is rather anyone else had loaded any packages on that car. Is the service failure due to bad PAL labels. Was a split placed on their car. So many other variables could be the problem. I do believe the driver id trying his best and is simply overwhelmed with his new position. I'd advise him to slow down and work at his pace ( one that allows him to do the job like they want ) Until the RADAR is turned off of him.

 

[Brown Rocket]

The drivers that are loading mostly were thrown in and mgmnt assumed they knew how to load a car that the know how to deliver.

PS - Split shifts suck.

 

[Catatonic]

Yes indeedy folks.

Then you have the guy who cares, busts his ass, follows his methods, loads stop for stop, and gets one a misload a week. But his drivers are 20 plus-ers who could care less about anything but their dispatch being too heavy.

He is one misload away from being terminated.

I can't believe these 20-plus drivers would treat a fellow Brother this way. Doesn't say much for the Teamster's brotherhood!

 

[705red]

I can't believe these 20-plus drivers would treat a fellow Brother this way. Doesn't say much for the Teamster's brotherhood!

Actually it sounds more like piss poor management, not trying to get to the root cause of the problem, later start time, unsafe working conditions, employee not properly trained etc.

 

[tieguy]

Actually it sounds more like piss poor management, not trying to get to the root cause of the problem, later start time, unsafe working conditions, employee not properly trained etc.

I would agree that the drivers working preload should be trained.

but Hoaxsters point is correct. Those drivers working preload are being served up by other drivers who don't care about service or their brothers. It does reflect poorly on the brotherhood.

 

[705red]

I would agree that the drivers working preload should be trained.

but Hoaxsters point is correct. Those drivers working preload are being served up by other drivers who don't care about service or their brothers. It does reflect poorly on the brotherhood.

How do we know that it is the preloaders fault? Is the wrong pal covering the correct address?

Package car drivers are getting extreme overtime right now, and don't have extra time to run off wrong cars. Maybe put in the routes so a driver could run off these packages. Many of us are going to make more money this year then we have in any past year. So much for a recession year!

 

[Dustyroads]

It seems to me that this is a case of the supervisor not being bright enough to find a remedy for the problem, so they simply fire someone, and the problem just occurs with a different loader.

The situation reflects on the poor training being provided by management, and the poor remedial training done for workers that make errors.

Tie, what if I were to put you in a job you had never done, train you for two hours, and then fire you if you make two mistakes. You had your chance, you were trained, and I gave you a second chance and you blew it, you get out of here tie, I don't want to see you here again. Just curious as to whether you might see that as effective management.

 

[UnconTROLLed]

How do we know that it is the preloaders fault? Is the wrong pal covering the correct address?

Package car drivers are getting extreme overtime right now, and don't have extra time to run off wrong cars. Maybe put in the routes so a driver could run off these packages. Many of us are going to make more money this year then we have in any past year. So much for a recession year!

1/4 of the drivers in my center were not finished in under 10 paid hours yesterday. There were at least 5-6 out past 8:30pm, maybe more. (out of 60)

 

[JonFrum]

What is the MAR ("minimum acceptable rate") for preloading package cars?

Every repetative job at UPS has an accecptable error rate that management is "happy" with. If you sort packages from a slide to various belts, you are allowed one missort per several hundred packages sorted. If you load trailers, you are allowed one misload per several thousand packages.

There are also rates of speed that are acceptable in sorting, loading, scaning etc.

Can anyone from management state as many of these MARs as they know, so we can all know the benchmarks that we are being held to?

For example, the Carwash MAR might be four cars washed per . . . [hour, day, week, month, year, decade, millenium, geologic epoch]. Circle one.

 

[Catatonic]

What is the MAR ("minimum acceptable rate") for preloading package cars?

Every repetative job at UPS has an accecptable error rate that management is "happy" with. If you sort packages from a slide to various belts, you are allowed one missort per several hundred packages sorted. If you load trailers, you are allowed one misload per several thousand packages.

There are also rates of speed that are acceptable in sorting, loading, scaning etc.

Can anyone from management state as many of these MARs as they know, so we can all know the benchmarks that we are being held to?

For example, the Carwash MAR might be four cars washed per . . . [hour, day, week, month, year, decade, millenium, geologic epoch]. Circle one.

Two Enterprise Releases per year.

 

[cachsux]

Two Enterprise Releases per year.

Star Trek - TV intro (season 1) (1966)



Live long and prosper,.....or at least make the numbers.

 

[browndevil]

I can't believe these 20-plus drivers would treat a fellow Brother this way. Doesn't say much for the Teamster's brotherhood!

I'm a 20 plus, my motto is "it's not the customers fault we misloaded thier package" I deliver every package in my car. All we are selling at UPS is service

 

[Dragon]

Billy, a split, placed on the route does not automatically excuse the preloader from having a misload.

 

[westsideworma]

What is the MAR ("minimum acceptable rate") for preloading package cars?

Every repetative job at UPS has an accecptable error rate that management is "happy" with. If you sort packages from a slide to various belts, you are allowed one missort per several hundred packages sorted. If you load trailers, you are allowed one misload per several thousand packages.

There are also rates of speed that are acceptable in sorting, loading, scaning etc.

Can anyone from management state as many of these MARs as they know, so we can all know the benchmarks that we are being held to?

For example, the Carwash MAR might be four cars washed per . . . [hour, day, week, month, year, decade, millenium, geologic epoch]. Circle one.

Jon I believe different regions, districts and even different areas of a building have different numbers (at least in regards to PPH) but I'll tell you ours to at least start the comparisons.

The MAR for misloads its 1/1800 and PPH (boxline to car loading) is around 212PPH on average.

In my opinion going after someone having one as mentioned in this thread is pathetic. I think the real reason is he's a driver probably at top rate making $28+ an hour....

Obviously perfection is the goal, but 1 a week would put some of my loaders at about 1/5000+, a perfectly acceptable frequency. Thats 4 a month...not really that bad.

Some loaders avg. 2 a month, others 6, others much much more, but going after every one of them sends a message and for the most part not a good one. I understand what we're looking for but do I think documenting a guy that averages 2 a month is necessary when his frequency betters the goal 10 times over? absolutely not. We do though.

I would think to avoid service failures, preloaders whenever possible should be loading neighboring loops/routes (54A,B,C etc). I'm not saying that we should give up on misloads but this at least helps prevent some of them from not being delivered. Also we should not name them all 54/loop as some like 54E and friend start to look similar when you're moving as fast as preloaders need to with the time they're given. If some people don't think so, tell them to try it sometime (especially with the new magenta imprinter labels). We've used driver names and things got better.

 

[JonFrum]

In my building the package car lineups are changed a bit from day to day, so a preloader has to break the habits he has learned whenever his car order is different. It must be especially difficult when he has four cars to load, but two of them are switched with each other every other day or so. ( One day it's Car One then Car Two; the next day it's Car Two then Car One. And in a few days, the order is switched back again.) I know as a carwasher who lines-up the package cars, these changing lineups drive us crazy and cost us time.
- - - - -
Some years ago the acceptable missort rate for loading a trailer was 1 missort per every 2,500 packages loaded. The hard part was policing the area so someone else wouldn't misload several pieces of bulk into your trailer when you wern't looking, (or after you punched out,) and ruin your frequency for the whole week or month.

 

[Mike23]

I thought that's what the 'no such number' or 'no such street' was for? Since the number or street isn't on my route, yeah, it doesn't exist, on my route...until I'm told different, that's the way it is and never heard boo from anyone about it.

Just like 'not ready'...define who's 'not ready'...is it me or the customer? I was never given ANY definition on this during training or signed any papers for it.

 

[UnconTROLLed]

*This is a bit OT but not entirely*

I would just like to say that since service has been particularly bad in a part of our buildings outbounds, management has decided to stake out the discipline process for misloads. Warning letter, suspension, termination. What a joke; instaed of moving the employee to another area where he/she could succeed, they are doing anything to get RID of them.

I told my sup I could use a paid vacation. Little do they know I'm going on the road in a week.