National Grievance Cases for June

The latest information on the national grievance cases are up and the Teamsters for a Democratic Union aren’t happy:

The decisions are in from the June meeting of the National Grievance Committee in Philadelphia and the results aren’t pretty.  If the National Grievance Committee was a UPS employee it would be fired for poor job performance.

In four days of hearings, the highest UPS grievance body under the contract ruled in favor of the union just four times.  The company won 13 cases outright.  Another 42 cases were deadlocked.  An incredible 78 cases were postponed.

Management Choosing Employees Vacation Times

Recently R, who works as a sorter, came up to me telling me that he received a vacation check and was given a list by one of the supervisors who handles employee’s hours that told him he was to take each of his vacation periods within the next couple of months.  This despite R never having actually signed up for vacation during the March selection period.

Also, another employee, F, told me that he too receive a letter from the same supervisor telling him when he was to take his vacations because he never selected his during the March selection period.  But he said he didn’t mind and wasn’t going to change the dates they chose.  But the fact still remains that UPS management is arbitrarily choosing vacations for its own employees rather than the employees choosing their own vacation times.

According to Article 22 in the Northern California Sort Rider vacation selection is to be done during the four weeks of March and done in seniority order.  When a person chooses their vacation they choose their vacation in-between their seniority dates.  R’s seniority date is in May, so he would choose his vacation weeks in between May 2009 and May 2010.  Section 3 of Article 22 states that:

vacation periods will be assigned at the employee’s choice…

Section 7 states:

Those not signing up in the correct week [of the month of March] shall loose their choice of vacation and must take what is left.

No where does it state that if the employee fails to choose in March will she or he have their vacation assigned to them by management.  It only states that when they do choose their vacation they must only choose weeks that aren’t blacked out (due to other employees choosing those weeks before hand).

When I let this be known to the Night Hub manager he refused to take R’s check back and rescind it and all the vacations arbitrarily assigned to him.  The manager said, “I won’t take the check, just grieve it.”

But after a few more days of bugging management and the division manager they obviously realized that it would be pointless to go through a grievance process as they would automatically lose the case in pre-panel.  So they canceled R’s vacation check and cleared all of the vacations they previously assigned to him.

Lessons

1. Management cannot choose your vacation for you, only you can.
2. If management tells you that you must choose a vacation during a selected time period tell them that they are wrong and that you can choose whatever week is left within your seniority year.

Supervisor Doing Pick-Off Duty

Yesterday E. demanded a shop steward to be present on his PD [1] due to complications he was having with his supervisor.  E, who is a pick-off for his belt, [2] told me that his supervisor was having him load (which he has no problem with) throughout the night; but while he was loading his supervisor was doing his job by picking off, which is in violation of UPS National Master Contract Article 3 Section 7, which states:

The Employer agrees that the function of supervisors is the supervision of Employees and not the performance of the work of the employees they supervise…supervisors…shall not perform any bargaining unit work…

When a supervisor does work the grieved employee can file a grievance and receive double their daily pay rate for the time the supervisor worked.  E stated that last week his supervisor worked three hours so I informed the Building C supervisor that this had to stop (which he agreed) and that E should receive 3 hours of pay at double his daily pay rate (which he said he would look into).

Lessons

1. When a supervisor is doing bargaining unit work (that is, union work) that is in violation of Master Article 3 Section 7 and should be grieved.  Inform your shop steward of this and then if you can’t resolve the situation by getting a fair amount of pay at double your rate within a five day work period then file a grievance immediately.

Notes

1. A PD is a “Parcel Delivery” area in where a group of workers and one supervisor take packages that are being delivered there by a moving belt and then load those packages into trailers.  There are 12 PDs in my hub.
2. A “pick-off” is someone who is next to a moving belt and then sorts the packages that go by it by zip code and then sorts those packages into specific trailers.

Worker With Headaches Forced to Stay and Work

A worker, S, in Building A, who has been suffering from headaches the past four or six months told me that when he has asked to go home due to the severity of his headaches he has been told no by some of his supervisors because his doctor had “cleared him to 100% full duty.”

Some back-story on this guy.  S had been suffering headaches since (I believe) a package fell on his head (or some sort of related work injury) around four months or so ago.  He originally went to the UPS snakes doctors at US Health Works (who should be avoided at all costs!) and they gave him some medication but then released him for full duty.  The medication ended up making him drowsy (he said he felt a little drunk when taking the pills) which is really bad when you are around heavy machinery with moving parts and gears all day.

When he came to me I pointed him toward the union who pointed him to another doctor who he could trust.  Not surprisingly the doctor had S take two weeks off and gave him different medication, which didn’t fully get rid of his head aches but didn’t make him feel drowsy.

So now because he is back at work and is back from paid leave management is forcing him to stay on the job despite him still having severe (but not crippling like before) headaches.

Lessons

1. If you are feeling sick or cannot complete your job you must tell management that you would like to go home right away.
2. If they refuse then tell them you won’t go back to work until you have a shop steward present.  They can’t fire you for refusing to work until they give you a warning in front of a shop steward.  Once your shop steward is there she or he should be able to convince management to send you home.
3. If they threaten your job and really push you then your shop steward should be able to work out some type of compromise until the end of the night.  Immediately, the next day, go to your union and file a grievance.