There are some poor managers who believe that from the day they are hired, Teamsters start trying to figure out how to cheat and steal from the company. Both of your perspectives are incorrect.
I would prefer to not participate in the process too, but its one created by UPS and the Teamsters. The process of progressive discipline requires documentation. I wish I were omniscient and knew for sure that an incident would never occur again. Then the documentation would be unnessary.
Or, if I could not document at all, and then accelerate discipline on second or third offences. Of course, I would need perfect memory for that.
If we owned our own company, we would not need to document... We could discilipline those that we felt not doing their best. We would not need to use a consistent standard for each employee. Of course, the process we both created does not allow for that.
So, I must document. The process demands it. I do think it stupid to document a random, one time situation. It wastes time and effort and I do not think the process demands that.
UPS does not start the process to begin planning your termination. The company is not looking to terminate employees (at least not the majority of them). Its just the necessary evil from the process we created.
I 100% agree with everything you just said.
That does not change the fact that it is never in the best interests of the employee to sign any sort of documentation that could be used in a disciplinary process against him.
Too often, what I see as a steward is that the company is less interested in
solving the underlying problem than it is in simply
assigning blame for it.
Consider the issue of misloads by a preloader. Is the preloader really failing to follow the proper methods? Or is he/she simply being pressured into maintaining a workpace that makes following those methods impossible?
My car is loaded from an outdoor MDU that the company jury-rigged together due to our building being horribly overcrowded. There are no stack tables in this MDU, the lighting is poor, and the belt that feeds it frequently jams up due to it being too small for the number and flow rate of packages that are sent out there. Irregs are hauled over from the sort aisle in carts and left to sit outside in the rain before being manhandled up the stairs and thru a door at the end, where they must then be pushed
against the direction of the belt.
A preloader working under these conditions cannot
possibly be expected to work as efficiently as one who has been given a proper job setup, yet the expectations placed upon him/her are
not adjusted to account for the conditions. So the result is chronically poor load qualty and a high misload rate.
The underlying problems are obvious to anyone with a brain. But the company has no intention of
ever solving them, because doing so would require taking responsibility for the situation and spending money to fix it. So instead, the preloaders are "written up" and threatened with the same disciplinary action as those who have been given a proper setup. As long as blame can be assigned and someone's job threatened, there is no need to ever actually
fix the problem.