The following post assumes that what's happening at my location is happening at others. Apparently, our location is over it's goal for P&D OT and the SCM was told to do something about it. Recently, we were called to a special meeting and informed that the P&D start times were being temporarily backed up by 1/2 hour in order to pay less OT. We were told the reason is because our freight is getting back too late and that it is a "systemic" problem. As you can imagine, this caused a considerable amount of anger from the drivers. So I want to share my thoughts on this with the corporate data gazers, most of whom wouldn't even know how to release the brakes of big truck, let alone operate in a busy city environment. Here are a few points for the top brass to consider.
1. The men are going to realize that the company doesn't respect their loyalty, I mean we all started off at the bottom, being on call and having late start times in hopes that after a few years, we would climb the ladder and be able to bid on start times that were more suited to our lives away from work. Forcing SCMs to push forward our start times sends us the message that you don't really respect the time we've put in, not good for you.
2. Pushing ahead start times can cause disruptions at home. Us working class folks, we are told when to come to work, we don't get to set our own hours therefore we have to schedule our lives around our start times. Perhaps corporate doesn't care about disrupting the lives of it's employees, it would seem so. Messing with an employee's personal life, not good for you.
3. Getting us on the street later because no one can seem to fix this so called "systemic" problem with linehaul and FAC's holding drivers over late might be caused by the fact that we don't have enough help and moreover, that we can't seem to hire more help no matter how much we sweeten the offer. One thing I've noticed about this company, even when it was still Con-Way is that we always seem to have a number of drivers who quit each year to work for the competition, but the competition doesn't seem to shed drivers that want to come work for us. Would any of your corporate types care to hazard a guess as to why that might be? I'm sure my fellow drivers would be happy to paint in the color on that picture for you.
There are other things I could mention, but I'm open those up to other drivers who care to opine and leave you with a prediction. If drivers are going to have their start times pushed forward and this practice continues, you will eventually find yourselves with even less seated drivers than you already have because some of us aren't going to stand for being leaned on in this way and will move on. You will then be in a situation where you have less drivers, paying them even more overtime to get the same work done. Getting yourself into a situation like this is really not where you want to go in a labor market as tight as this one.
I hope that some of you corporate types will read this post and pass it on to Mr. Jacobs since he's the guy who has the power to show us the love. Thank You.
