The vacation schedule is no excuse.
Vacations are scheduled in November and March for the following year and UPS management lets off only the minimum that they are contractually obligated to.
So "peak vacation time" is not a surprise occurance and is no excuse to violate the contract regarding 8 hour requests (or for any other reason for that matter).
UPS management has plenty of time to plan and hire seasonals per the contract.
Also, at least in my center (and you have to talk only about your own center because each one differs on the contractual language regarding such as 8 hour requests) there is absolutely no difference in how UPS handles 8 hour requests day in and day out.
UPS management gives the minimum that the contract requires them to and they give them grudgingly, always pushing the stop counts over what the drivers feel would be fair, "just in case" and forcing the drivers to call in and get "rescued" to have any chance of "making their 8".
This leads to a lot of drivers just skipping their lunch to not be bothered with having to argue with management and make "meets" with other drivers to dump the excess work, which is exactly what management is after in the first place.
This practice is twenty-four/seven, 365 days a year, regardless of whether management has people laid off and/or has sent drivers home in the morning because a true 8 hour load
always looks under dispatched on paper with the purposefully dishonest standards UPS has imposed since the "diad" correction (ok, many routes were way wrong prior to that correction as well
).
Local managers don't want to have to stand up to their bosses to defend sending out drivers out "under dispatched" (understandable) and so the practice survives regardless of season.
gadistrict, I'd say you tell it as it is and I wish more managers had your philosophy, apparent temperment and candidness.
Money is the bottom line, but treating workers as human beings with families and lives outside of UPS could benefit the bottom line by creating a more positive and cooperative workforce attitude.
In general, UPS upper management has never believed this is the case as the whip, threat and negative has always been the pronounced practice policies handed down even after they instigated the "four for one" or whatever policy and so they continue to promote the bad for business "them against us" attitude by their daily
actions.
Actions speak far more eloquently and truthfully than words or pretend policies.