Tales of Derangement, From Union and Management
The trappings of workplace power make people nutty.
How has my summer been? Well, one day at the end of June, a coworker, clocked out and driving his personal car back when gasoline was over $5 a gallon, decided to tail me for four hours while I drove a company vehicle around to carry out my daily duties. He only stopped following me after someone else from work showed up to tell him he had to leave me alone or he would be fired for harassment.
I’ll add some context to this tawdry episode in a bit, but first, allow me to backtrack:
Back around Christmastime, at the end of my tenure as a holiday season package delivery driver, someone from management approached me to offer a job to stay on past peak season. This was a blessing, since I had no other work to fall back on if they didn’t keep me. The job I worked at for most of 2021 was a warehouse position for a small business that does most of its jobs during the summer, and more or less grinds to a halt after Halloween. I had an urgent need for work, holiday season delivery being a logical choice in an immediate pinch, and since that warehouse company doesn’t begin to ramp up its operations until the spring, I had little choice but to accept the management position at the start of the year, unless of course I wanted to scour around for some even more miserable and even worse paying retail gig. For what it’s worth, the warehouse job has been my second job since spring of this year to supplement my income since I don’t get FT hours from my main job.
Unionizing has become one of the left-liberal causes du jour in the Biden era, possibly because all the mass protesting, resistance symbolism, and destructive anarchism that defined the reaction to Trump proved fruitless in achieving much of anything. What’s more, those behind such actions can never muster quite as much agitation when the Democrats are running the show, no matter how much they deserve it.
And that’s… that’s just peachy. I got no quarrel with unions, even if I think the kind of Twitter-brained individual for whom unions are basically a political fetish object is mostly just engaged in trend-chasing and virtue-signaling, like everything else on that platform. I was a dues-paying member of the guild when I worked for The Washington Post, not that it did anything on my behalf when I was forced to resign over blogging on the side about sports, which I did not cover at the paper. I single-handedly organized employees at the small moving company where I worked for years, to eliminate the extensive wage theft the company was committing. I still have the letter posted in my bedroom that the owner wrote announcing the policy change.
When it comes to championing workers’ interests, I got some bona fides to prove it, but one thing I’ve learned the hard way about cancellation and puritanical, identitarian left-liberals is that it simply doesn’t matter what you’ve done right, or how many times you’ve done right - they’ll always contort some bad faith line to throw in your face to make sure they never have to reconsider their reckless smear campaigns, corporate media worship, and brutal excommunications. It strikes me as amusing that one of the union drivers I frequently deal with is a youngish conservative from California (“my dad made me promise to join the union”) who came east after joining the Army. He complains non-stop about inflation, Biden moving away from domestic oil drilling, and customers ordering “cheap Chinese crap.” I wonder how your average Twitter progressive would handle such a person. Would they realize they need to find common cause with him? More likely, they’d demand him banished from the union for wrongthink.
So management wanted me to join their ranks? Not that I had much of a choice, though shelving my moral compunction remained an obstacle. I tried to rationalize that I wasn’t being paid particularly well, so how could I be a boss? Every full-time route driver makes more than me, solely by dint of having full-time hours. If you’re talking about the veteran drivers making top pay of $40/hr, I’m not even close to them. If anything, I’ve spent the last eight months being little more than an errand boy for the higher-ups, who in turn have screwed me plenty and assiduously police my hours, so much that a week when I get 33 hours instead of my default 27.5 feels like a small miracle. They’ve strung me along with the promise of a promotion to full-time for half a year, as I jumped through all their hoops, amid a looming vacancy at the end of July for a full-time position in the department, only to give it to a person from a different center who had been performing a wholly different role, with little to no explanation as to why.
I haven’t fired or disciplined any of the workers, though I’m sure those above me in management are itching for me to do just that - my boss makes very clear her desire for more and more punishment of drivers - and my failure to do so might explain why I got passed over for that promotion (they sure haven’t given me any other reason). The vast majority of the drivers like me and find my contributions helpful. One of the route drivers understands my plight: he was a part-time supervisor for three whole years, constantly getting jerked around and passed over for advancement, until he gave up and switched to driving full-time.
In view of this, why did I find myself getting stalked by a union employee off the clock?
The driver who followed me is an “air” driver. Airs are the company’s term for their next-day guaranteed packages, boarded on a plane to their destination, hence the name. It’s the company’s most expensive service. Each regular route driver has a certain amount of airs to deliver each morning before their standard, less-expensive “ground” packages. One day I did a ridealong with a driver who observed that once he has delivered his airs, he’s already paid for all his own work for the day, and everything else he does for the next eight or so hours is pure profit for the company. Sometimes we have late shipments of airs to the center from the airport, and the entire day then becomes about shuttling them out to drivers on route, even though they’re all gonna be received late.
Airs are so important that there are a handful of drivers at each center who only deliver air. Their days are typically shorter, only a few hours.
My schedule as a part-timer is unusual. Most days, I don’t show up to the center until 10 a.m., when regular route drivers are just getting on route. The first couple months in my role, drivers seemed confused when I showed up to bring them a misload, a replacement truck, or a master key to open their bulkhead door when they locked themselves out of the back of the truck. How come we don’t see you in the morning, they would ask. Well, because I don’t get in until you’re already on road.
Except the air drivers are usually getting done and returning to the center around the time I arrive, or not long after. A week or two before I got followed, the air driver who ended up tailing me saw that I was about to get into a truck and leave the center. He asked what I was doing, and if it was work a union employee could be doing. Truly, I wasn’t sure, given that management colleagues hadn’t explained the ins and outs of such matters to me. I took the driver up to the supervisor office to ask. They seemed annoyed that I did that, curtly told the driver to make sure he was clocked out, and go home. Hey, I tried.
As soon as he left, the other supervisors lectured me that I never have to explain myself to drivers, and if they ask what I’m doing, to say it’s none of their business.
Union members can file grievances over supervisors delivering packages. I understand the underlying principle: it’s seen as taking work from union employees. The thing is, the vast majority of union drivers I’ve encountered do not give a shit about one or two packages. More often than not, when I bring a misload to a driver, they’ll grumble that I didn’t deliver it myself, or complain that they already stopped at that place, and now they have to go back. Most regular route drivers work a tough job with long hours and they’re more concerned with getting home to their families than fighting over a single delivery.
A week or two after that initial incident, I passed that air driver walking back into the center as I strolled out to the yard to find a vehicle I could take on road. There were maybe four or five packages that got missorted in the morning chaos that needed to get to drivers or be delivered. After about 20 minutes on road, I noticed the same car behind me, following me on what had been a circuitous path. I pulled over, and immediately gathered that it was him.
I walked up to his driver’s side window.
“Why are you following me?”
“You’re taking work from the union! How can you not see that? Maybe you don’t understand how they’re using you!”
I sighed and pinched the bridge of my nose. He was looking for cause to file a grievance against me. I feel for this dude - I struggle enough on my own to get decent hours and pay. I’m not trying to impede his efforts for the same. Yet he couldn’t explain what I was doing wrong aside from a vague gesture to the union. His car has a sticker indicating he was (once? maybe still?) a member of the staff or faculty at an expensive private liberal arts college in New England. No wonder he’s all about the LARP of being a union man. Nothing like academia to get one into performative leftism.
He hardly struck me as an imposing figure, so I didn’t fear for my safety. Mostly I wanted to tell him to fuck off, but I figured a more diplomatic approach was necessary, since we were in choppy union-management conflict waters.
“Whatever, do what you gotta do,” I peevishly shrugged, then returned to my truck.
I figured he would soon pull off. What more dirt could he hope to get on me? Surely, he’ll get bored after an hour, I thought. But he kept following me. Eventually, I had to meet up with delivery drivers on route for observations and whatnot. So I was driving my truck following a route driver in his truck, and this off-the-clock air driver following me in his Honda Fit. A real Human Centipede of workplace agita. By this point, we were in a densely developed part of the area, and it was getting hard to fit our three-vehicle convoy on the cramped streets.
Another supervisor called to check in with me and see what I was doing. I mentioned the air driver had been tailing me, for what had been about three hours at that point. This supervisor is a lifer at the company, been there since 1998. He takes what I find to be a disturbing relish in discovering drivers doing minor things he disapproves of (driving 10 minutes to your lunch spot before beginning your lunch instead of filing it after your last stop! gasp!), and chiding or writing them up for it. His idea to get back at the driver following me was to send me way over to the west end of our territory to waste as much of his gas as possible. I reminded him of the constraints of my 5.5 hour shifts, that I needed to get back and clocked out relatively soon, since they usually take great pains to hold me to those hours, and he seemed disappointed. Apparently I could get more hours if only I devise ways to let this supervisor exercise his spite toward underlings. Instead, another supe showed up, told the air driver he had to split or else he would be terminated for harassment, then he left, praxis over.
The air driver didn’t get fired, and I’m cool with that. I have no beef with the guy, and hadn’t interacted with him at all prior to those two run-ins. I’m simply puzzled why, of all members of management he could fixate on, why the one with by far the least amount of power? Didn’t I try to help him at first? My boss told me she doesn’t sympathize with his frustration, as he’s had plenty of opportunities to bid on a longer route, and hasn’t. He only wants, she says, to get paid to do easy, simple stuff. Hey, don’t we all? Still, better to find out I was not clearly in the wrong.
A month later, on a ridealong with another union driver, I mentioned how I got tailed and why, though didn’t indicate by who. He nailed it on the first guess.
“That guy has no fuckin’ life,” the driver said. “Always walking around with his little grievance book.”
Of course, it’s not only union members who allow their roles to drive them into deep neurosis. There’s plenty of disturbing cult-like behavior on the management side. For instance, during the spring, I had to take two week-long management training courses. These are comprised of several full-day Zoom sessions, for which the company made me show up to the building in full uniform and participate in them in some drafty conference room. Seems like something I could have done at home, but what do I know? Worse still, the final day was in a live classroom setting in a center an hour away where we had to test out on several pages of memorized jargon. That was followed by an order to HANDWRITE A FULL-PAGE THANK-YOU LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE REGION FOR THE *PRIVILEGE* OF ATTENDING A MANDATORY TRAINING SEMINAR, I SHIT YOU NOT.
During the next training week, the participants had a group chat going while doing ridealongs with drivers to reduce their time on road. One aspiring supervisor, in what can only be described as a fit of pique, exhorted us to “do it for Jim Casey!” To be clear, I don’t give a rat’s ass about the current girlboss CEO, much less the founder of the company who died 40 years ago. I expected to observe some bootlicking behavior in this role; my error was expecting reasonable limits.
Management tends to leave me in the dark about a lot. Your average day, I have no idea until I show up what I’m doing or what needs to be done. A driver returned a few months ago after leaving the company the previous year, and I was assigned to three separate full-day safety observation rides with him in his first two weeks back. I get why these can be useful, especially to brand-new drivers, though they are by far my least favorite part of the job: breathing down someone’s neck while they’re working, evaluating them and giving feedback on literally hundreds of prescribed safety methods, some of which are counterproductive when the company simultaneously stresses speed so strongly. The driver remarked that he never had to do that many supervised rides when he got hired the first time around. Only later, from another driver, did I learn that the guy had quit right before peak season last year despite my boss begging him to stay. It became clear: this was a form of petty retaliation.
During the spring, I had to travel to another center for a ridealong. That morning, addressing staff at a morning meeting, the center manager mentioned a company driver had died days before elsewhere in the country after being hit by a car. Another worker remarked to me, “They never used to talk about that stuff. Now they do. Guess that’s progress.”
Over the summer, when there was news that a driver died of heat stroke in California, and another passed out briefly from the heat in Arizona, in full view of a resident’s Ring camera, it was hard to shake my disgust. As I write this, I see another happened this week. Amazon drivers are out here being sloppy as all get-out, but at least they have working AC in their vans. Another summertime insult: my company willingly distributes shorts to workers as part of the uniform, yet won’t allow workers to wear them unless they spend their own money to buy the company’s branded tall socks. I rode with a driver who said he begged management for two measly little fans in his truck, but they kept dragging their feet. When it was time to put in a new scanner cradle, that went in without delay. The first week of July, a driver in our center had to drop route due to heat-related illness symptoms, and I had to finish his deliveries for the day. A week later, I ran a full route (supes can run routes if there’s no one else available) on a day it was 93 degrees, with the typical, oh, 8,000 percent humidity. However hot it is outside, it’s 15-20 degrees hotter in the back of those trucks. It was a Wednesday, and since I get paid Thursdays, I was broke. I ran through my water by 1 p.m. Thankfully I had barely enough money on hand to get an overpriced Powerade at a gas station around 2, but that was it. By 6:30, when I was finished delivering and ready to get back to the center, I was showing clear signs of dehydration. I know from previous manual labor jobs in DC summer what danger that can entail. I’m thankful I made it back without incident.
I’ve been trying to make my exit for the last month or so. I had my heart set on a full-time position as a data and volunteer coordinator at a local homeless shelter about 10 minutes away. I get wistful thinking I could maybe one day have a single consolidated, full-time job and make - could it be? - $50k a year??? Such modest dreams seem fantastical these days. Alas, I didn’t make it past the first interview. Now I’m carpet-bombing applications all over. In the meantime, I’m still the errand boy.