Team Player — Reflections on Working for UPS while the Teamsters still Sucked as a Union
I needed another job. I was already working construction for some friends of my father’s, but the work was erratic. I needed to make some quick money if I was going to make it back to college by the fall. It was 1985, and Reagan had already gutted the financial aid programs and in any case, I didn’t want to risk perjury claiming I had registered for the draft in order to collect federal student loans (I was still receiving threatening form letters from the Selective Service System for my refusal).
I was taking a class at a local junior college affording me the use of their “career center,” which consisted of a wall of index cards with dead-end jobs a step or two above minimum wage. Among them was a job for “loader” with the United Parcel Service, starting at $8.32 per hour, with three hour late night shifts.
I was hired easily, along with the other few white applicants in a large pool of color. My interview was short, with just a few questions ostensibly designed to flush out klepto tendencies. Given the length of my interview compared to the others, I was obviously presumed more trustworthy based on my color. Fifteen open positions. Six out of about forty to fifty applicants were white, the rest were black, Latino, or Filipino. Six whites were hired, and nine people of color.
We were paid to attend an orientation, where we were fed the history of UPS, and the “vision.” I was informed that I could never aspire to be a driver as long as I insisted on retaining my beard, but that it was tolerated from loaders and unloaders. My smile and rolling eyes did not go without comment from our hostess.
“You can smile all you want mister, I’m just giving you some constructive criticism.”
So many things I wanted to say as I didn’t really believe that my choice to wear a beard necessitated “criticism,” but I needed the job. “Well, we can cross that bridge when we come to it.”
Not entirely satisfied, she continued with the presentation.
We were then given a sheet of paper that amounted to a pop quiz about what we had just learned. Contrary to popular belief, the first UPS truck was not brown. It was red. The company started as a bicycle messenger service in Seattle. Fascinating stuff. No really!
“Are we being graded on a curve?” I asked.
A few awkward laughs, then dead silence, as the woman glared at me. I had already lost several points. My file was filling up before I could load my first parcel.
“No. You are not being graded.” A very flat response, and none of the other hirees looked me in the eye for the remainder of the session. I suppose most of them needed the job; obviously more than I did. For the life of me, I just couldn’t take the exchange very seriously. Anyway, once they had decided to hire me, I became a Teamster. Big tough right wing union at the time (the only Union in the U.S. to endorse Reagan in the 1984 election), which, as I later learned, had negotiated a drop in wage for my position from $14.00 to $8.32.per hour, probably over scones and scotch. The only thing I really had going for me was the fact that they didn’t have any other white people to replace me with.
My shift was from 11:00 to 2:00 in the morning, which put my home commute with the parade of drunks being forced out of the closing bars. Because of the intensity and pace of the job, we were limited to three hour shifts. I don’t know if this was an OSHA rule or part of what passed for the union contract. But we had to neatly stack over 650 packages in an hour, sometimes more. We were fed mantras of “safety rules” primarily designed to impress on us that any injuries we suffered were our own fault as opposed to the conditions and expectations.
“Always lift with your legs, never your back.” The sage advice would come from wandering supervisors, always with a renewed profoundness. The advice usually accompanied a test of sorts in which the supervisor would send a “missort” down the conveyor; a missort being a package with a zip code or address not located within the destination area of the truck you were loading. Every night you were given a report on the number of missorts that had slipped by you on the previous night. We were even tested on our ability to memorize the zip codes on our “break,” (the areas of delivery of the parcels in our truck) so as to avoid missorts based on identically named towns in different parts of the country. A supervisor’s deliberate missort (ie. Fort Bragg, North Carolina instead of Fort Bragg, California) contained even more points against you if it ended up in the stacks. A tally of all missorts was kept in the file that you never saw, but only heard about.
The South San Francisco plant was divided into numerous “breaks” in which about five to ten workers were assigned to about the same number of trucks. Our break consisted of parcels from all over the country headed for Marin County and portions of Sonoma County and parcels of local origin headed to Oregon and Washington. Because missorts traveling across state lines were given special notice in our supervisors’ files, our supervisor put his most experienced and efficient loaders in the trucks bound for the other states. Because the volume of parcels was much lighter, the more experienced loaders essentially graduated to easier jobs. Add to this the fact of the $6.00, wage differential (which the senior workers were supposed to keep secret), the result was a serious potential for resentment between the workers. Sometimes, the Oregon/Washington truck loaders were temporarily sent in to help the loaders who were caught in a rush of parcels.
The job would have been much easier if the parcels came over the conveyor at an even pace. But more often than not, you spent about forty-five minutes waiting around for parcels, then you got slammed with a large pile in scenes reminiscent of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, or Lucy and Ethel in the candy factory. The piles would push on you and push on you, fall over the side of the conveyor belt, and occasionally burst open. I once had a box of bubblegum balls come open; which meant that I had to close off the conveyor belt and retrieve a broom while the parcels piled up on one of my co-workers. I had heard of worse, where for instance a box of ladybugs came open and thousands of them were flying around the “hub” and getting crushed in the roller sections of the conveyor belts.
The rushes also created a safety problem for drivers, though I’m sure the company faults its workers rather than the process. In addition to sorting the boxes according to size and shape to create near perfectly symmetrical walls, reading the labels for errors in zip codes or addresses in order to flush out missorts, and keeping the conveyor belt bridge safe for those walking underneath; you were responsible for removing the outer portions of any “hazardous substance” tags that were attached to some of the parcels, and placing them immediately into a pouch located at the back of the truck. Presumably the driver would collect the pouch before taking the driver’s seat and have it ready in the event of an accident. Although we were specifically instructed to take each tag to the back of the truck as soon as we tore it off, the rushes simply didn’t allow for it. Often, we would put the tags in our pocket with the intent of placing them in the pouch with the next break in action.
Unfortunately, I occasionally forgot to do this. I would drive home, undress for bed and discover a stack of them while reaching into my pockets to empty them. What shocked me the first time was the marked lack of interest when I called them in. The voices on the other side of the phone didn’t even ask me for the information on the tags. After the third or fourth time, I stopped calling.
When we were hit so hard that someone else was sent in to help; you could occasionally feel the resentment. The more experienced loader would try to put you “in your place” by suggesting that you should have worked more efficiently to prevent the back-up. As in other contexts, co-workers unwittingly performed the disciplinary tasks for the supervisors, which would work until you learned that these jams were inevitable.
I worked with one guy who refused to play the role. Like me, he had no aspirations for a career at UPS, and held the work at arm’s length. Jim would come into my truck with a smile, adjust his gloves, and dig right into the pile.
“Slam-bam-jam, huh?”
“Yeah. A lot a missorts tonight. Watch for em.”
“We’re beginning to get the Christmas rush. It’s going to get a lot hairier. They won’t hire more loaders until September.”
“‘Christmas rush’ in the middle of summer?” I remembered that Christmas’ shopping season had slowly crept beyond Thanksgiving and approached Halloween as I was growing up. But this seemed ridiculous. Decades later I would marvel at the August Christmas displays in Costco.
“They call it the ‘Christmas Rush,’ but for whatever reasons, there are probably a bunch of em, the volume of parcels increases in the later half of the year. They hire people as the volume increases.”
“I suppose then that they lay off people at the beginning of the year.” Any guilt I had felt about my short term plans quickly evaporated.
“I don’t think they can according to the union contract. As you’ll see soon enough, the turnover in this job is pretty fucking high. And with the wage cuts, oops. Not supposed to discuss that. Gotta watch your ass around here lately.”
Jim was right about the turnover. By the end of the summer, all but one of the six guys who originally held seniority over me had either quit or were transferred to daytime hours; a transfer that was coveted by most. By then, I was working the cush loads.
But I had made up my mind to quit long before, almost as soon as I realized that I would be in a financial position to return to school by the following semester. Probably the decision to quit came on Founder’s Day, when we were all given a free “safety first” t-shirt, as a reinforcement of the notion that the worker was personally responsible for his or her own safety. We were given “collector’s item” programs of sorts with all sorts of trivia about UPS. I was never able to find a collector interested in buying mine. We were also offered free hot dogs. As part of the ritual, there were not enough hot dogs for everyone in the hub. The hot dog was an incentive to finish early, though the speed at which you could finish was mostly dictated by the speed at which your break was fed parcels.
My break finished in well enough time to collect a hot dog, but at 2:00 in the morning, all I wanted was a cup of coffee for the trip home.
The supervisor behind the table stared at me.
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“Please take a hot dog. You earned it.”
“Oh, no thanks sir. I just want some coffee. Thanks anyway.”
I don’t believe that there was anything in my tone to suggest belligerence, but I had clearly violated some unwritten code. I was supposed to take the hot dog. The supervisor deliberately ignored my attempts at small talk, which was fine with me. Maybe I should have lied and said I was a vegetarian.
UPS prides itself on being a culture of sorts. They have a company song, which was never shared with those of us down in the loader classes. They tried to implement the Japanese style calisthenics and stretching prior to the shift as part of their “safety first” hype, which would have been taken more seriously had the conveyor belt bridges contained larger guard walls to prevent parcels from being pushed over the side during jams; although to be fair; I never heard of an injury occurring as the result of a falling parcel. It was well known that drivers who worked for long periods of time incurred back pains, no doubt due to their failure to follow the liberally provided lifting instructions.
The closest I came to an injury was an incident in which I bent down (not using my legs) to pick up with one hand a parcel that was maybe ten inches in length, width, and height. As it happened, the box contained a metal chain. It wasn’t all that heavy, but much heavier than I anticipated. I can’t even blame it on a rush, but it was a simple mistake. I pulled something, and the supervisor was genuinely concerned for my welfare. I was grateful for the concern, but not for the boilerplate lecture that followed the next night. He was just doing what he had been taught to do, and probably truly believed that the lecture would reduce the chances of my suffering any further injuries. I told him that I agreed that I had made a mistake, but that such mistakes were natural to the job and that many injuries were inevitable.
“No injury is inevitable.” He spoke again as a patriarch in some Old Testament capacity. “You can prevent them.”
“Sure. Maybe. But the company can prevent more by hiring some more people to take the pressure off. Might even save em some money in comp claims.”
A sigh and a pause, followed by, “Well, Eric, maybe this job involves too much pressure for you.”
“Well maybe Ron. Guess I’ll have to think about that.”
“Hey Eric, I’m not saying you’re not a good worker. I don’t want to lose you.” I imagined that he had attended some company sponsored motivational work-shop, and was trying to play both “good cop” and “bad cop” simultaneously. He really wasn’t the worst person I had ever worked under, but he was enough of a true believer to be extremely annoying in role.
“Look Ron, why don’t we just chalk this up to a philosophical difference of opinion?”
“Well, I am responsible for putting together a team here. I need team players on my break.”
“Well, I certainly don’t want to get injured and I don’t want anyone else injured. I will certainly do what I have to to prevent that. Isn’t that enough.”
He seemed relatively satisfied.
“It’ll have to do for now I suppose.” With that, he left me to down my coffee in peace before I took my shift.
Well, it had been only a few weeks after I was hired that I had my true lesson in “attitude.” We had already heard rumors about a guy in our hub that was breaking records for unloading a truck. Each of us at the rookie level were given an opportunity to work with him so that something might rub off on each of us. Even though I loaded rather than unloaded, I was told that I might learn from this worker’s “technique.” Maybe we were supposed to be shamed into better performance. In any case, my turn came one night as I was in the middle of a relatively light load.
The “veterans” were probably a bit irritated at being relegated back to heavy duty for a few nights to accommodate these “lessons.” The attitude was naturally encouraged to discourage absences, and I doubt that management spent much time trying to convince them of the difference in this one case where our absence was for the good of the company.
I was brought across the floor to a portion of the hub I hadn’t seen and wouldn’t see again as long as I worked there. I was introduced to the hero. I recognized him immediately. He had been hired in my group and was wearing much the same outfit as before. He was a black man just out of high school, with long hair underneath a “Peterbuilt” cap. He wore a navy blue derby jacket with sleeves rolled up to his elbows. As during the interviews and orientation, he looked very intense, and spoke few words.
Being the smug middle class self-appointed revolutionary with scant awareness of my own relative privilege in this situation, I immediately judged him as “suck-up supreme.” He had said little during the orientation, only speaking when spoken too. Now he was the poster boy for management’s efforts to teach us the “winning attitude.” No beard, no back-talk, and he was breaking records. Soon he would no doubt get promoted to management, where he would be far less of an asset to his company and co-workers, hopefully before his pace caused him or someone else injury.
I had him pegged for the functionary that “the system” thrived on. I hadn’t exactly been attending union meetings myself, and I knew I was going to bolt the company anyway; so there would have been nothing particularly courageous about any overt resistance on my part. But I immediately judged this man, as he extended a hand with recognition, and said, “I remember you. You’re the guy with the beard, at orientation.”
I swallowed my disappointment and shook hands. I just wanted to get this lesson over with, get back to my shift, go home and go to bed.
“Hi Rico, I remember you too.” I even managed a smile.
We climbed up into the truck, attached the conveyor and I began to lift a box onto the rollers.
Rico put his hand on my shoulder and said, “No man. Just go back and keep an eye out.”
Huh? I was confused.
“Ummm. What exactly am I looking for?”
“Anybody. Just let me know when they’re coming.”
Now I was interested. “Okay. Will do.”
I walked to the back of the truck and looked both ways. “All clear.”
Rico immediately began pulling the wall of parcels down all at once. Much of the wall fell directly onto the rollers. The other boxes were shoved and kicked up onto the rollers and other parcels. They left the truck stacked by two and three and an entire wall was out of the truck in a matter of seconds while he was already pulling the next wall down.
Whenever a supervisor showed up, we would immediately unload from the stacks one parcel at a time as was “proper.” We would work quickly to give the impression that we were maintaining a very intense pace. I acted like I was trying to keep up with Rico, accentuating my performance to look appropriately awkward and embarrassed at my inferior pace.
The supervisor was friendly enough. “Don’t try to keep up with him son. He’s obviously very experienced.”
I immediately corrected him. “No sir. I think it’s a question of attitude.”
