Union house POV, I don't care, I enjoy not doing the ABC paperwork, for over seven years now I go in, they have a route for me, no matter how screwed up it is or how badly they say I screwed up, I go in the next day and there is more work for me. Praise the Lord.
The top performers got hurt by the new DIP, young guys, but the older guys, including myself were making somewhere around the new hourly rate on ABC anyway, so it didn't affect us so we don't care. We get a printout every night to show what the DIP was, some have suggested we should get those in the morning so we can decide if we want to work hard or not. I throw the printout away without looking at it, I save the weekly printout for amusement purposes and to make sure my hours are right. Believe it or not, I've made DIP several times, but it's usually only a few dollars difference. I've heard that some drivers have slowed down, which is good and should cut down on injuries, and they stop making me look bad, but I work the same as I always have, find the cases put them on the dolly and wheel them in.
no one here really understands any of it, including the supervisors
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We have two forms we can fill out, one is for delay time and such, the delay time would be added to the incentive pay, it doesn't help if you aren't making the incentive, so I don't fill it out and my life is much simpler. The other form is basically to request more time/money for a stop. When I asked, they've never given me more time for any stop when we were ABC, you think they're gonna give me more money for a stop? You make me laugh! There's some more paperwork that's a waste of time.
I like my route because most days half of my trailer comes off at the first stop. I may not know where I'm going in a 48' trailer for the rest of the day, but at least I'm at the bulkhead. And the first stop will let me reload what's left on my trailer if I don't like it. However the DIP is set at an impossible level for the first stop. I've never brought it up, I don't care, I'm hourly.
THEY have no incentive to route or load the trucks properly,
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How can this be fixed? Every solution they come up with is something to make it easier or more efficient for the warehouse, and it costs us in the field, in front of the customers, where we are supposed to be shining brightly. My first stop may be 12 cases, across four or five pallets, I may have to move 200 cases to find those 12, and they'll give me ten minutes to do it. Why does this happen? Please go back to your college textbook and refresh yourselves on the first two laws of thermodynamics, and then check out the thing on entropy. You can't get something for nothing, you cheat in the warehouse or routing, you will pay for it out there at the customer's back door.
I have had numerous conversations with the warehouse management about strapping the pallets in and the lack of shrink wrap, if they can't get the workers to do those two simple things, how are they gonna make them zone the pallets? Sometimes I'll get lucky and the freezer and dry pallets are zoned, and guess what? I'm done early!
If something happens once, I can blame the worker, but if it happens over and over (yeah, I got pictures) I blame the management. Really? You can't make these guys put straps on the pallets? You can't control your crew? Or maybe you just can't be bothered. How much damage could be avoided if they would only shrink wrap the pallets top to bottom, and maybe make that shrink wrap tight, and also go around the pallet more than once. My solution is to drive really..... really...... slow, and maybe they won't fall over.
The warehouse workers are overworked and want to go home, and they'll be fired if they work too slow, those are their incentives. We postulate that they think that since the drivers are making so much more money, no one really cares if we have to do a little more work. But if X amount of work needs to be done, wouldn't it, in the long run, cost less to have the warehouse workers do it? The time is going to be taken to lift the cases twice, they'll either be stacked correctly on the pallet, or thrown a few times by the driver, who do you want to pay to do it? The driver, of course, because he makes more, and that saves us money.
as our extra labor doesn't cost them a dime
If you're on DIP only it won't, but when some fool wipes out on the highway and I'm just sitting there, I have the consolation that they are paying me to do so. At least four times this week I have been routed to drive a considerable distance in the direction of rush hour traffic, they'll give me 20 minutes to drive and it takes 45 minutes. So on ABC I'd fall behind and I would try to catch up, but now, I'm stuck in traffic, or have to reload the trailer, or a pallet falls over, or the customer isn't there, or I can't find the product, and I fall behind, I have no incentive to bust my butt to catch up because I worked hard and feel like I deserve that money. Don't get me wrong, I'm gonna continue to work hard the rest of the day, I'm not a slacker, and I might make up some of the time, but it's not my focus. It's good to be hourly.
