Island
Well-Known Member
This thread, I hope, will serve as a sounding board for a few of our issues here in North Texas.
As some of you may remember, here on Browncafe and a few other similar websites, there was quite a stink about the election scandal a few years ago. Frankly the incumbent slate faked the election, based on what facts I have heard from multiple sources. I sat that one and a few people were angry with me for not voting - but, alas, if I had it would not have mattered, because the local would have submitted a reballot request and then sent in the second ballot in my name with a vote for them written on it. And then they wouldn't have counted it anyway, having trashed a lot of ballots and written down fake numbers in the end.
We've also had quite a stink about our 22.3s. They are treated so poorly. And locally there seems to be a war on fulltimers in general. The company has been cutting down the fulltime positions and claiming that new ones are being created elsewhere, without giving any proof. The BAs all agree that those jobs are not being created anywhere nearby, but this is yet another battle the 767 has waved the white flag for.
The drivers get a lot of forced overtime. The feeder drivers are basically on their own when it comes to enforcing their DOT, and I have personally seen a hub employee get called to put in an immediate feeder shift when he wasn't even clocked out of his hub job yet.
The company uses cars with trashed transmissions to do their driving tests when they don't want to hire a specific person to drive. Having talked to a lot of people who went through tests, the data I put together suggests strongly that the company was auto-failing anyone who didn't fit their EOE numbers. Meaning if you weren't the right minority, you were given the car that won't shift.
In the hubs... well. Mesquite made national news with how badly that went. And, if you don't know about the part that didn't fit quite so well in the headlines, a manager in that hub walked into his division manager's office, intending to kill him and himself. The division manager wasn't there and the fellow was so distraught that he killed himself anyway. The company was blaming the entire incident on him and probably going to fire him. That issue has a lot of debate surrounding it, and Mesquite management members have very unofficially said that their jobs are all in danger because their superiors who failed to plan for peak are blaming the hub for the entire region's failings.
My hub was pretty trashed this peak. The company knew it was coming, had spoken to us extensively about how it was planning for and excited about the coming Amazon volume. Little did we know that Amazon volume was going to double and triple our daily numbers. Part-timers saw 70 mandatory hours weekly. The ones who were friends with management got out of some of them, management bullied most others. I personally saw two weeks of 65 and 75 during peak. One notable 22.3 saw over 100 hours - of course management stole some of his time and after he fought them for days about it, he finally got it corrected. I'm not sure why management likes to bully that guy about his time, he happens to be the one guy in the whole hub who will call the department of labor at the drop of a hat.
Personally, I stopped going to the local meetings. A few times our treasurer was saying numbers made me a little confused because each month his stated numbers were completely different. When they want to get the idea across that they don't want to pay for things like the christmas party or local barbecues, they say the union is losing a lot of money. Other times when they want to sound like they're doing a good job they say they have millions in the local's account and are always gaining more. I'm sure someone else is better suited to quote the stated numbers, I'm no accountant, but I have noticed the discrepancies.
The local has dropped the ball for me personally on multiple occasions where everyone with extensive time with the company has said I have a slam dunk case, my issue will be solved in 5 minutes, and naturally even when a center manager curses at me and threatens me and flat out tells me that they are going to punish me with XYZ because I dared to file a grievance when a supervisor pushed me and proceeded to do my work in front of me, with my center manager present at the time - well, obviously the local completely abandoned that slam dunk grievance or this wouldn't be contributing to my list of problems.
One of our local stewards is kind of a joke. I learned fairly recently that his constant failure is increasingly famous outside our area.
I've personally met supervisors who are blatantly racist, even going as far as to use racist language among groups of workers, in anger. Funnily enough it was the black victim in question who was basically carrying our department on his back, and he was being called out for being "another one of those lazy darkies." I can't tell you how many of us went to management above this person and to HR and that person not only kept their job but stayed in our department for quite some time and continued to behave in that manner. on one occasion I spoke to our center manager about it and I got a very unconvincing claim from them that they had no idea what was going on and it was a big surprise and they would take care of it. I'm also somewhat convinced that center manager was extremely racist and homophobic and I hadn't really counted on getting any good commitment to action out of them.
Some of our good stewards were booted because they supported one of the challenging slates in the last election. That is another famous event here in internetland, the huge wipeout of all the solid unioneers. With them unable to do anything, having been blackballed, there's no one to prop up everyone else. The local's obviously not interested in doing what we pay them for.
My BA makes 150 grand. I can't think of a single reason why I would pay him 1/3 of that if I were in charge of the local's payroll.
For the darker stuff in line with the manager suicide, I work with a FT sup who rode his drivers so hard (when he used to be a driver manager) that two died on the same day on route. He was drunk when the company division came and escorted him to his demotion, or so the stories go. And now he curses at people all day, despite all the complaints to the union and the company about him, and he will never stop. That man will die cursing at an employee, probably of his last great heart attack.
Our safety teams are sort of a joke. A few are trying to get things going right but the company is stonewalling every effort and the union gives no support at all. The local put through this memo a few years back saying that because safety team members were being used as management, all CHSP activities were to be shut down immediately. Well that never happened. In fact a few of us have brought it up at local meetings and the union doesn't seem to do anything but make promises. Again, they've done nothing to help the process, to actually stop the nonsense, nor to start up the real contractual CHSP. Two of our shifts have makeshift CHSPs running and trying to do things right but they aren't having a lot of success for obvious reasons.
Some time ago I realized that if you took the union leadership as a whole, from the international offices down to our local, and completely transplanted those people with their equivalents at the company - the CEO on down to our supervisors - things would run exactly the same. Each person would discover, ahh, my job is exactly the same. I spend part of my time faking paperwork and making promises I can't keep, and the rest of my time either finding reasons to not do my job or making excuses and assigning blame. And then at each quarterly revenue meeting we will toast another record. But no, we can't afford pens this year.
Atleast, that's how it feels to me. I have no respect at all for the International after our recent contract debacle. I can't tell you how much the VP lied to us in his campaigning for the contract. And then there's all the stories about the polling bullying! By the union and the company, both! Anyway, this is about the local, but my point is that all this corruption seems widespread and I am still in awe of those of you who claim to have solid locals.
We have a lot of very defeated union members here in 767. They are jaded. They have given up trying to get the union to help them with anything whatsoever.
If you're not 767, refrain from saying that our problems are not problems or that they are easy to solve, I've heard all that a hundred times.
If you are 767, this would be a good place to concentrate your elevated negativity.
As some of you may remember, here on Browncafe and a few other similar websites, there was quite a stink about the election scandal a few years ago. Frankly the incumbent slate faked the election, based on what facts I have heard from multiple sources. I sat that one and a few people were angry with me for not voting - but, alas, if I had it would not have mattered, because the local would have submitted a reballot request and then sent in the second ballot in my name with a vote for them written on it. And then they wouldn't have counted it anyway, having trashed a lot of ballots and written down fake numbers in the end.
We've also had quite a stink about our 22.3s. They are treated so poorly. And locally there seems to be a war on fulltimers in general. The company has been cutting down the fulltime positions and claiming that new ones are being created elsewhere, without giving any proof. The BAs all agree that those jobs are not being created anywhere nearby, but this is yet another battle the 767 has waved the white flag for.
The drivers get a lot of forced overtime. The feeder drivers are basically on their own when it comes to enforcing their DOT, and I have personally seen a hub employee get called to put in an immediate feeder shift when he wasn't even clocked out of his hub job yet.
The company uses cars with trashed transmissions to do their driving tests when they don't want to hire a specific person to drive. Having talked to a lot of people who went through tests, the data I put together suggests strongly that the company was auto-failing anyone who didn't fit their EOE numbers. Meaning if you weren't the right minority, you were given the car that won't shift.
In the hubs... well. Mesquite made national news with how badly that went. And, if you don't know about the part that didn't fit quite so well in the headlines, a manager in that hub walked into his division manager's office, intending to kill him and himself. The division manager wasn't there and the fellow was so distraught that he killed himself anyway. The company was blaming the entire incident on him and probably going to fire him. That issue has a lot of debate surrounding it, and Mesquite management members have very unofficially said that their jobs are all in danger because their superiors who failed to plan for peak are blaming the hub for the entire region's failings.
My hub was pretty trashed this peak. The company knew it was coming, had spoken to us extensively about how it was planning for and excited about the coming Amazon volume. Little did we know that Amazon volume was going to double and triple our daily numbers. Part-timers saw 70 mandatory hours weekly. The ones who were friends with management got out of some of them, management bullied most others. I personally saw two weeks of 65 and 75 during peak. One notable 22.3 saw over 100 hours - of course management stole some of his time and after he fought them for days about it, he finally got it corrected. I'm not sure why management likes to bully that guy about his time, he happens to be the one guy in the whole hub who will call the department of labor at the drop of a hat.
Personally, I stopped going to the local meetings. A few times our treasurer was saying numbers made me a little confused because each month his stated numbers were completely different. When they want to get the idea across that they don't want to pay for things like the christmas party or local barbecues, they say the union is losing a lot of money. Other times when they want to sound like they're doing a good job they say they have millions in the local's account and are always gaining more. I'm sure someone else is better suited to quote the stated numbers, I'm no accountant, but I have noticed the discrepancies.
The local has dropped the ball for me personally on multiple occasions where everyone with extensive time with the company has said I have a slam dunk case, my issue will be solved in 5 minutes, and naturally even when a center manager curses at me and threatens me and flat out tells me that they are going to punish me with XYZ because I dared to file a grievance when a supervisor pushed me and proceeded to do my work in front of me, with my center manager present at the time - well, obviously the local completely abandoned that slam dunk grievance or this wouldn't be contributing to my list of problems.
One of our local stewards is kind of a joke. I learned fairly recently that his constant failure is increasingly famous outside our area.
I've personally met supervisors who are blatantly racist, even going as far as to use racist language among groups of workers, in anger. Funnily enough it was the black victim in question who was basically carrying our department on his back, and he was being called out for being "another one of those lazy darkies." I can't tell you how many of us went to management above this person and to HR and that person not only kept their job but stayed in our department for quite some time and continued to behave in that manner. on one occasion I spoke to our center manager about it and I got a very unconvincing claim from them that they had no idea what was going on and it was a big surprise and they would take care of it. I'm also somewhat convinced that center manager was extremely racist and homophobic and I hadn't really counted on getting any good commitment to action out of them.
Some of our good stewards were booted because they supported one of the challenging slates in the last election. That is another famous event here in internetland, the huge wipeout of all the solid unioneers. With them unable to do anything, having been blackballed, there's no one to prop up everyone else. The local's obviously not interested in doing what we pay them for.
My BA makes 150 grand. I can't think of a single reason why I would pay him 1/3 of that if I were in charge of the local's payroll.
For the darker stuff in line with the manager suicide, I work with a FT sup who rode his drivers so hard (when he used to be a driver manager) that two died on the same day on route. He was drunk when the company division came and escorted him to his demotion, or so the stories go. And now he curses at people all day, despite all the complaints to the union and the company about him, and he will never stop. That man will die cursing at an employee, probably of his last great heart attack.
Our safety teams are sort of a joke. A few are trying to get things going right but the company is stonewalling every effort and the union gives no support at all. The local put through this memo a few years back saying that because safety team members were being used as management, all CHSP activities were to be shut down immediately. Well that never happened. In fact a few of us have brought it up at local meetings and the union doesn't seem to do anything but make promises. Again, they've done nothing to help the process, to actually stop the nonsense, nor to start up the real contractual CHSP. Two of our shifts have makeshift CHSPs running and trying to do things right but they aren't having a lot of success for obvious reasons.
Some time ago I realized that if you took the union leadership as a whole, from the international offices down to our local, and completely transplanted those people with their equivalents at the company - the CEO on down to our supervisors - things would run exactly the same. Each person would discover, ahh, my job is exactly the same. I spend part of my time faking paperwork and making promises I can't keep, and the rest of my time either finding reasons to not do my job or making excuses and assigning blame. And then at each quarterly revenue meeting we will toast another record. But no, we can't afford pens this year.
Atleast, that's how it feels to me. I have no respect at all for the International after our recent contract debacle. I can't tell you how much the VP lied to us in his campaigning for the contract. And then there's all the stories about the polling bullying! By the union and the company, both! Anyway, this is about the local, but my point is that all this corruption seems widespread and I am still in awe of those of you who claim to have solid locals.
We have a lot of very defeated union members here in 767. They are jaded. They have given up trying to get the union to help them with anything whatsoever.
If you're not 767, refrain from saying that our problems are not problems or that they are easy to solve, I've heard all that a hundred times.
If you are 767, this would be a good place to concentrate your elevated negativity.
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