Your Legacy?


      Let Me See, What Can I Think Of Next?  Your Legacy?…. You’ve had a good career. You’ve worked your heiny off for a union company. You raised your two kids on a union wage and benefits. You’ve retired from that company, and get to sit back and watch your children, and their families live in the world out there.
        Will the opportunity for a decent living, and a retirement, be there for your kids? Not with the way most Teamster members take it for granted. Your children are faced with a life of little or no healthcare. They are faced with a life of corporate giants, who will sell out their employee’s health and well being for their bottom line. These same corporate giants do not care if your granddaughter survives at birth. They don’t care that your sons or daughters cannot afford housing. They don’t care if your kids have a decent standard of living.
        It’s you, and your vote that has given your kids that lifestyle. It’s time for you as a union member to hang your head in shame. You did not pass on your legacy to your children. You have denied them the same opportunity that you had. They will work till they die. They will suffer under oppressive management because you either couldn’t be bothered to vote, or you felt you had some other agenda that was more important. Making that mistake is a legacy of suffering for the future.
              You are responsible for that legacy!
     The “you”, that is, the uninformed, inattentive, “only cares about themselves”, you.
     If “you” don’t need to wake up, wake up the guy or gal next to you.                    The future depends on it!


    

 


Letter to the Editor

   Let Me See, What Can I Think Of Next?

 


   I learned quickly that the company is constantly pushing. Constantly demanding. I also learned that they would take me out if I give them the opportunity. I started looking at what my life was like at UPS. I noticed that I was always one of the last trucks in every night. I was tired of only spending the weekend with my family, and even then I am so tired that I am no fun and kind of grouchy because I am worn out from the long week. My wife seems to be getting more distant and my kids seem to always have other stuff to do. I guess that’s because I’m never a part of their life. I decided Monday I would go to management and demand that they reduce my dispatch.
        Monday rolled around and I talked to my supervisor, telling him of my problems working so many hours, that it was affecting my family. He kind of chuckled, but he said he’d take a look at it and see where he could help me. I had an 11-hour day that day. I was optimistic that they were going to help so I again snuck in early on Tuesday, even though my steward had asked me not to. I had another eleven-hour day. Now I was getting pissed. No one seemed to want to help me.
        I threw a tantrum in front of the office with everyone around. The manager threatened to fire me if I didn’t knock it off. They told me that if I did the things I said about missing stuff, and going slow etc. that they would fire me again. The steward grabbed me by the arm and led me off into the corner. He told me I wasn’t helping myself by threatening management. All I was doing was opening the door for them to audit my every move through Telematics. He said it just doesn’t pay to make yourself a target, that there are other ways to achieve my goals.
        I confessed that I was having problems at home because of excessive hours, and that I was worn out from so many long days. He told me that if I listened to him, we would get the problem fixed. I said I’d try anything. The first thing we did was to go to the manager and apologize for my tantrum. I told the manager that I was struggling at home. We left it at that for the day. The steward told me to do a good job today, but to come see him first thing tomorrow. I worked my 11-hour day, and went home burned out again
         I was unsure what the steward was going to do as nothing had changed yet. I arrived the next morning and the steward met me before I could sort my car. He said the first thing I was to do was stay out of my car until my start time. I didn’t understand but agreed for the time being. We then went to my supervisor and informed him that I had been continually dispatched with over 9.5 hour days. The steward told him that I wanted my dispatch reduced, and that if they didn’t do it immediately he would file a grievance.
        The supervisor said OK and went to the pre-load manager and had him pull 25 stops. I was astounded. They had never pulled anything from me before. They always added to my day. The steward then instructed me that if I was still going over 9.5 hours, I was to notify the company by 2 o’clock that I needed help. The day went fine with the reduced dispatch and I returned to the building at six.
        I was home by six thirty. My kids met me at the door with a loud “Daaaaaaddy”. I had dinner with my family for the first time in months. It was great. My wife and I put the kids to bed and had a great evening together. We talked about what I’d been going through, but I told her I was on the right track, that I was going to be a member of the family again. She cried.
        The next day I asked the steward how he did all of this. He told me it was “tricks of the trade”. He said that if I had an hours problem again to bring it to his attention immediately. I suddenly began to see what the union meant to my family and me. They had control over my working conditions after all. All I had to do was ask for help.

                                Anonymous

You Seem Surprised

    You Are the Union! In the 30’s people died to bring the Power of the Unions into existence. Massive physical, and financial abuse by the Companies of the time, motivated people to rise up and demand they be represented by Unions.
     These workers were not interested in getting something for nothing. They simply wanted to be treated fairly in the workplace. They simply wanted to be compensated at a fair rate for the work that they did.
     The corporate abuses of the day were so bad that many workers banded together to create what have become today’s Unions. Unfortunately many of our own Union members have listened to the media lies about our Union’s motivations in the workplace. People have been led to believe that the Unions are simply there to protect the lazy worker. The Unions are there for workers to get “something for nothing”.
     With the gradual weakening of the Unions the Corporations are again rearing their ugly heads. Politically the Corporate “powers that be” continue to attack the existence of the NLRB, (National Labor Relations Board), and also attack worker protections such as Unemployment, Workers Compensation, and OSHA. The continued weakening of these organizations is systematically putting workers at greater risk in their jobs, and causing the wage levels in this country to decrease.
     To their defense, the Corporations, have convinced many of the average Union workers, that they are going to somehow improve the life of that worker when the regulatory agencies are gone. The Corporations didn’t do that before, and they are making it clear that they are not going to do that now.
     Look at your life within Big Brown. Are they treating you better today? Are they more concerned about your safety on the job? Do they act appreciative of your efforts to move, and improve the company?
     Keep in mind that you are all looking at it from within a solid Union company. Can you imagine what it looks like inside the non-union companies?
     The day is here for the working people of this country to step up. A solid workforce cannot be defeated, or ignored. How much abuse will you endure before you will say something. No one is going to do it for you.
     Our Unions have been so successful, that they have created a “lazy, complacent” membership. The facts of today are, our Unions will not survive if we don’t stand up along with them.
     Our next contract negotiation begins in 2013. Prior to that will be International Officer elections, and many Locals will elect their officers also. Many people do not even vote in those elections. They have the complacent attitude that their vote doesn’t mean anything. The fact is they simply are too lazy to educate themselves, and formulate an opinion. It takes a certain amount of effort to formulate an opinion, and many simply find it hard to do.
     Some of the things you can expect to see in the negotiations are listed below. These are the speculations I have come up with based on many different sites, and discussions.

1. Two Tiered wage scales for newly hired drivers. (What that means is that any new driver hired after a certain date will be payed at a lower wage level, and will have a lower maximum wage. What it can do is give the company the incentive to attack, and drive out the older drivers working under the old wage rate.)

2. Forcing drivers to pay all, or a portion of their benefit package. (What this does is effectively reduce the current benefit package, and put a financial hardship on the worker to keep his or her healthcare and pension paid. Many workers will simply opt out for financial reasons, and the costs to the workers still paying will increase. )

3. Wage reductions, and/or raise freezes. (The consequences are obvious. No keeping up with inflation. Increasing company profits at the expense of the worker. Reducing the future ability to stay with the costs of goods and services.)

4. Reduction in Contractual Language to reduce the power of the employee to work within a safe, non-harassing environment. (Basically the company will attempt to take away the workers ability to grieve an unsafe, or an intimidating situation. Basically the company wants a “Like it, or Lump it” contract.)

5. Attacks on seniority. (When all else fails, that is what you have. It is what keeps you on the route you like. It’s what keeps you working ahead of the junior guy. It’s what prevents you from being laid off, when the business drops off. Without seniority the choices are made at the whim of the company.)

6. Pension benefit reductions. (In this day and age, the company controls the pension. Without contractual agreement, the company will be able to do as they please up to and including dissolving the pension. The pension has remained the “light at the end of the tunnel” for so many. As the time passes, it becomes the only hope for life outside of the Company.)

            The obvious conclusion is that you, and your co-workers had better get involved. The Union functions because of you, not in spite of you. Today’ politics make it clear that you are under attack. If you don’t fight back, you will lose what you have.

UPS Workers Demand New Approach to Safety



Joe Korziuk has spent 23 years working for UPS washing trucks, delivering packages and driving tractor-trailers. Though he loves the job, it has a dark side. At age 45, he has had surgery on both knees and his shoulder, developed bulging disks in his back and suffered a concussion when boxes fell on him. His wrists, injured when a car plowed into his truck 15 years ago, still ache in cold weather.‬‪​


“It’s a direct result of the job,” said Korziuk. “They’re always harping on you and pushing you to go faster and faster.”‬‪​


Korziuk is among about 1,200 members of Teamsters Local 705 representing several Chicago-area hubs who last week began a campaign demanding that UPS reduce workloads and change what the union calls a “blame the worker” approach to health and safety.


Nationwide last Thursday Teamster workers wore stickers reading “Unfair Production Standards,” a play on the name UPS. Employees say they are pressured to increase productivity while at the same time they are called on to reduce injuries, a combination that workers claim leads many of them to avoid reporting injuries. ‬‪​


UPS officials say safety is a top priority, noting that their latest reported injury statistics are lower than national averages for the courier and messenger industry – 1.6 injuries per 200,000 work hours for employees at the Addison hub and 3.6 for UPS workers nationwide this January through March. That compares to an industry average of 4.7 injuries per 200,000 hours. Teamsters Local 705 attorney Anthony Prince said UPS does not report many injuries to the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which compiles these statistics.


‬‪​‬‪​UPS workers are required to memorize and frequently recite a list of more than 20 safety standards, and they can be fired if they fail the recitation multiple times, according to workers’ accounts and a disciplinary report reviewed by the Chicago News Cooperative. Supervisors regularly observe workers and document any safety lapses. After employees report injuries, they are required to meet with UPS health and safety specialists and get extra training. ‬‪​


Workers with multiple injuries are identified as “injury repeaters” according to workers and internal UPS documents. They are more frequently monitored by supervisors and required to complete extra training. ‬‪​‬‪​(Read more about workers’ compensation at UPS)


An internal management document from the Jefferson Street UPS hub in the South Loop advised supervisors to identify workers with more than one injury, enroll them in an “Adopt a Repeater” mentoring program, and examine their “risk behavior.” The document said nothing about analyzing other factors beyond the worker’s control that could contribute to injuries.


Some employees said it’s as though UPS safety programs are based on the premise that workers would not get hurt if they followed proper procedures. They said workers frequently do not report injuries to avoid angering supervisors or being subject to extra training and scrutiny — hence official numbers do not reflect the true incidence of injuries, workers said. ‬‪​


“When a truck breaks down you can get a new one, but I only have one body,” said a female 49-year-old package driver who is fighting for workers’ compensation benefits related to a shoulder injury that required surgery. The worker, who asked that her name not be used for fear of retaliation, said she also broke her hand in 2009 when it was caught in a closing truck door, and she has had surgery on her elbow and twice on her back.


“You get older but they still want you to be light and fast,” she said.‬‪​


UPS officials said additional monitoring and other procedures are important to make sure workers understand safety protocol.‬‪​


“If you have a strain, sprain or rupture to your knee, back or shoulder, no matter how minor it is, we’re going to do a few things with that person,” said Steve Vaughn, manager for the Addison facility’s corporate Comprehensive Health and Safety Process. “We have online assessments to re-educate them on safe work methods. If I strain my shoulder there will be occupational health education on how your shoulder works, on how to eliminate the risk from being injured again.”‬‪​


The Teamsters scheduled the work-safety campaign to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the founding of the OSHA, the federal agency that sets and enforces standards for workplace health and safety. Labor unions also have dubbed it Workers Memorial Day in reference to those sickened, hurt and killed on the job.‬‪​


UPS package delivery drivers usually pick up or deliver about 500 packages a day and make up to 20 stops an hour, workers said. They are supposed to handle packages, often several at a time, of up to 70 pounds without assistance. ‬‪​


Employees who drive tractor-trailers from one UPS facility to another are expected to take 36.57 minutes to perform a list of more than 100 tasks, including inspecting and testing brakes and lights and checking the connections between tractors and the trailers they haul. ‬‪​


“It’s not only doable, but it’s doable with ease,” said Vaughn.‬‪​


But many tractor-trailer drivers disagree. They said they find it nearly impossible to complete the checklist in the allotted time, and they add their bosses often look the other way as the safety checklists are ignored. ‬‪​


“Sometimes the supervisor just slaps your door closed and says go, you don’t even get to eyeball your load” to make sure the weight is distributed safely, said tractor-trailer driver Bernie Jayne, 57. “So you’re driving down the road with a mud flap dangling or a lug nut loose. They turn a blind eye until something happens.”‬‪​


Korziuk said that in March he was ordered to drive a tractor-trailer 20 miles from the suburban Willow Springs sorting facility to the Addison hub, even though the rig had a red tag on it that meant it was not to be driven. One of the untended problems was loose rollers on the rear sliding door.‬‪​


“With the rollers missing the back door was swinging and more rollers could have come flying off on the road,” he said. “It was dangerous.”‬‪​


Korziuk said a clerk took the red tag off as he left Willow Springs, “and then I had to re-tag it when I got to Addison. That’s against the policy, but I just worked as directed. If I didn’t, he would have given me a lot of grief.”‬‪​


Erin Elliott, health and safety manager of the UPS Illinois district, said it is the drivers’ responsibility to refuse to operate a truck with a red tag and to report a supervisor who pressured them to do so.‬‪​


Workers said they are afraid of being disciplined or fired if they disobey supervisors’ orders. Last spring, OSHA ordered UPS to pay more than $100,000 to a Missouri driver who had been fired for refusing orders to drive a vehicle without working lights.‬‪​


Tractor-trailer driver Kevin Sims said he received a written warning that he could be fired for disobeying the orders of a supervisor who was riding in the passenger seat, observing his work in the early morning hours of Feb. 17. As Sims pulled the 28-foot tractor-trailer onto Interstate 290 en route to a transfer facility in Indiana, he said he could tell the surface was becoming icy. The supervisor told him to go the posted speed limit of 55 miles per hour, Sims said, but he refused because he thought it would be unsafe. After arguing with the supervisor he relented and sped up to 54 miles per hour. A month later, the supervisor cited him for “failing to work as instructed” twice and then “finally complying when instructed a third time.”‬‪​


Workers inside UPS hubs said they also deal with hazards, including falling packages and dangerous machinery. In November 2009, OSHA cited the UPS Palatine facility for a number of safety violations including missing guardrails, unsafe ladders and the lack of emergency shut-off mechanisms for conveyor belts. A UPS spokesman said the company is negotiating with OSHA over those citations and has contested some of them.‬‪​


Many drivers say they enjoy relatively good wages and benefits, and do not want to risk being fired for disobeying orders, complaining about company procedures or getting injured.‬‪​


But Dan McMackin, a UPS spokesman who used to work as a package driver, said he finds it “ludicrous” that workers would fear retaliation for reporting injuries.


“Our whole system is set up to report injuries, we do it better than anyone,” he said. “That’s what the goal is, to get people to report injuries. And one of the main reasons is so it avoids injuries down the line.”‬‪​


UPS’s approach is an example of “behavior-based safety programs” that have become increasingly popular among employers since the 1980s. The chemical company DuPont was among the pioneers of the strategy, and has advised other companies on implementing it.‬‪​


“It’s the idea that danger does not exist structurally in the work itself, that danger is a choice generated by individual behavior,” said Robert Bruno, a University of Illinois at Chicago professor who spent time in the Willow Springs UPS hub while researching a 2003 book on the Teamsters. ‬‪​“It’s an attempt to persuade workers that regardless of how your body is physically distorted, how many times you bend over or unpack a truck, that none of that really has any kind of a detrimental effect on the body – it’s all in their mind and attitude. It’s like saying a coal mine is safe if you are just attentive to the risk.”‬‪​


McMackin defended the UPS policy, arguing that the company’s programs are intended to improve employees’ attitudes toward safety and used frequent observation to see if they are following safety rules.


“You make four positive comments for every negative critique,” he said. “You increase good behavior by giving positive feedback – like you do with your kids – instead of beating them over the head you say, ‘Hey you did a great job.’ ”‬‪​


Several workers at Chicago-area facilities said they found the safety programs humiliating and punitive, and that group rewards for low injury rates mean workers are under peer pressure not to report injuries. ‬‪​


“It’s fear and shame, it’s like third grade,” said Prince. “It’s like, ‘We would have had a pizza party but Tommy didn’t put his crayons away.’ ”‬‪​


Some workers at the Addison facility said that while assigned to lighter duty after an injury, they are ordered to write down the safety procedures numerous times. At one point, they said, managers at the Addison facility decorated a wall with miniature foam UPS trucks bearing each driver’s name, and made a show during employee meetings of removing the trucks of drivers who reported injuries. The practice was discontinued after the union complained, according to union trustee Kenny Emanuelson.‬‪​


UPS workers injured on the job are directed to visit clinics run by health care providers with whom the company works, according to UPS officials, though they have the right to visit any doctor they choose. ‬‪​


In the Chicago area workers are referred to clinics run by the Texas company Concentra Inc., which is a defendant in a class-action lawsuit filed last summer by about 7,000 Wal-Mart employees in Colorado. The lawsuit alleges that Wal-Mart managers had input into participated in Concentra doctors’ diagnoses and recommendations for workers injured on the job, in violation of labor law.


Gary Coveny, a retired UPS driver, said that In his 28 years with the company he had surgery on his shoulder, wrist and twice on his ankle.


“I was in trouble because I was always getting injured, I was a bad example for other people,” he said. “I was getting so torn up but I just kept hanging in there, I had so much invested. There are a lot of injuries because they push you so hard. If they gave you the right amount of time, people wouldn’t have to get hurt.”