Stewards Do the Math

I wrote this back when I was making $25 an hour. When you plug in your current wage rate, your argument becomes even stronger. Try it.

Have you ever gone into the office to represent a driver and had your manager whip out the calculator and start pounding in numbers. He’ll say this poor slob of a driver is not using the methods and he’s not keeping his nose to the grindstone and he’s costing the center money instead of making the center money. The manager will have a stack of reports to back up his claim: the WOR showing the driver is over allowed; Sparky, showing which stops the driver wastes time at; previous OJS rides showing demonstrated levels of performance and so on. But the ultimate hammer is the calculator. If the guy is 2 hours over and that’s at the OT rate of $38.02, then he’s literally stealing $76.04 from the company every day. That’s $380.20 per week. Or almost $2000 a year. If 50,000 drivers did this, that’s……oh my God, all the profit the company makes!! We can’t afford to have you around, you’re going to bring down the whole company! This justifies a 3 day ride and all future harassment…just look at these numbers!
But there is some math that managers never do. How about these numbers. Let’s say this poor slob of a driver comes in every day and spends just 15 minutes in his car before his start time looking for misloads and checking out his Next Day Air. That’s 15 minutes he doesn’t have on the end of his day where it would be paid at the OT rate. That’s one and a quarter hours per week at $38.02 or $47.53. Or almost $250 a year. If the guy works 25 years, he has given the company $6178 in free labor by looking over his load every morning for just 15 minutes.
Let’s say he also skips his lunch. That’s 5 hours a week at $38.02, or $190.10 a week. That’s $10,000 a year that the company gets in free labor. Let’s say 20,000 drivers are skipping their lunch everyday. That’s $200,000,000 a year in free labor that UPS is getting. Then there is the tax saving for them because they don’t have to pay Federal or State tax on that amount. The savings to UPS are huge.
But managers never do that math in the office. Stewards need to do that math and have it written in the back of their contract book so they can quote it. We can crunch numbers just as well as they can. Fight fire with fire.