Ricochet, in reading your post it occurred to me that the company could be grooming couriers to become contractors. They seem to want to move more and more responsibility to the courier. And if the day comes when couriers as a whole come to the beliefs put forth the ideas that MrFedex often expresses, the company offer couriers a contractor model showing gross income of somewhere in the $110-120,000 range. Some might jump at it. Especially the young for whom health and retirement are not the top priorities. In time when a certain percentage is handled by contractors, "operational need" would require all of express to be covered by contractors. Fred gets the best of both worlds. Contractors working in close proximity with company trained drivers.
Express can't go to a contractor model, the structure of FAA requirements for background checks and direct control of drivers would preclude that situation from occurring.
Express isn't giving more and more responsibility to its Couriers, it is merely placing more and more control over its Couriers. Case in point, the past weekend.
All Couriers were required to compile detailed closure lists for companies which were to be closed the Friday after Thanksgiving. Each Courier had to get exacting detail on which companies were to be open, which were to be closed and which were to be open but not accepting shipments. Fine enough.
On Friday, Couriers then had to write up a "report" that compared the number of stops made to closed businesses. If they made too many stops at businesses which were closed - and they didn't get those businesses on their "closure lists", they were subject to disciplinary action for not following a mandated instruction from management. Friday AM was a mess in the stations, separating out packages to closed businesses while ensuring that no packages to open business remained behind. The time saved on the road Friday was probably eaten up by the extra time compiling the closure lists over the 10 days preceeding Thanksgiving and the extra time it took to separate out the stuff going to businesses that were closed Friday from everything else.
I'm convinced that the rationale behind the whole mess was to enable the closure lists to be entered into a database so that in the future the ROADS labeling system would be able to automatically indicate that a particular address is closed on a given day and the package pulled before it is even sent down to the trucks. From an operational stand point it makes sense, but this wasn't the reason given in the station. The reason given was that Express wanted to cut back on unnecessary stops on Friday. The average Courier spent 30-45 minutes on creating the lists (their stops per hour suffering in the process) and in extra load time on Friday, to save less than 30-45 minutes of actual on road time Friday. Some routes in some locations did save time by not taking out packages, but these were no great surprise. FedEx now has detailed lists for every route that specifies which business addresses are closed on the Friday after Thanksgiving.
FedEx does the ground model because its per package delivery cost is lower with the IC model. The owners are making decent money, the drivers are getting the shaft. If the average owner has 4 routes and the drivers are making half what their Express counter parts are making, there is room to shuffle off administrative overhead to the owners and still have a lower cost structure. One individual benefits (owner) and 4 are getting exploited (drivers) and FedEx pockets the difference.
Contractors could NEVER works side by side with Express Couriers. That would be a slam dunk case for violation of labor laws. Ground is skirting the intent of the law by carefully walking a fine line. Express is actually reducing the use of independent over the road semi-truck usage to enable costs to be contained within FedEx. Express will never go to an IC model, it wouldn't work. Express WILL begin to shuffle the delivery of its volume to either Ground contractors or may even start yet another FedEx company which handles what DGO does now within Express. Due to FAA security requirements, pick-up of volume that will be moved by aircraft will still have to be done by Express employees.
Express Couriers have neither the inclination or willingness to finance the outsourcing of their jobs even if it were possible. What would they gain? If you distributed your administrative overhead revenue to each of your drivers, they would STILL make less than a topped out Express Courier. This is by necessity, since otherwise the Ground IC model would end up costing more than the Express employee "model". Would I be stupid enough to pony up the cost for truck I drive, be responsible for its maintenance and not get any more compensation for the work I do?
The reason the IC model works is because there are a few that take the risk, and a lot more that do the work and are compensated at a fraction of what they'd get if they were classified as employees of Ground. If you were to take your "cut", divide that by the number of drivers you have, each driver would STILL make less than their Express counterpart - but they'd have the risk and headache of owning a truck and performing maintenance on it. Some Express Couriers aren't the brightest bulbs ever made, but NONE would ever fall for that.