Taking the underdog's view
Marc works for the UPS helpdesk. Or rather, he did before they got closed down. While this was not a complete surprise (they had been shrinking the desk's workforce through attrition for the last 9 months or so, going from an ensemble of about 20 employees down to their current count of 3), what was a surprise was when he showed up for work yesterday to find no body there.
That's right -- they'd decided over the weekend to cease calls to the desk and didn't bother to let some of the employees know, sending Marc upon arrival to a different office to do whatever work they could find for him there. This is reflective of their overall attitude toward keeping their workstaff informed throughout this process. Marc (and some of his coworkers) have for months felt the desk was going to be shut down, but not until about 4 weeks ago did management actually announce any such plans to the dwindling helpdesk staff. They said then that generally UPS gave 90 days notice but would give no date. About a week later, they told them the close date would be Feb. 28th (well short of the 90 day window they'd mentioned). Then last week, management told them that the desk might close sooner (though again they would not give a date). They have made a habit of being extremely stingy with information, have given wrong or misleading information in order to coerce employees into particular positions, have flip-flopped on closing dates and promises of benefits. Today, they were supposed to have a meeting with the HR manager, but no such meeting seems now to be going to happen. All this has left the remaining employees with an incredibly distasteful distrust of management, leaving them and me by association with the sense that UPS is horribly mismanaging its IT force layoffs.
You can read the opinions of others in the company on the website Brown Cafe (not sponsored by UPS). Under 'UPS People' click 'UPS Discussion Boards', then click 'Brown Cafe', then 'UPS Discussions' and look for 'UPS laying off Technical hourly employees'. This public, and mostly anonymous, forum (due to fine print in the employee handbook telling employees they are not to talk about any of this) is bringing to light the sentiment that the UPS marketing engine would not have us see.
This makes me think about another mental munchy tidbit -- how the free availability of information to anyone who wishes to seek it out is changing the way corporations (and the military, for that matter, but that's a different post) do business. No longer can the 4000 pound gorillas hide behind their PR screens, filtering out predigested information to a coddled public. We want the raw, the real, the hard information, and now we can get it.
Dr. VanSlyke once mentioned in class that any business that gets unionized deserves the union it gets. While the UPS driver force is unionized, its IT force is not. Until now, it hasn't made much sense in general to unionize IT because the working conditions tend to be pretty good. I'm curious to see if UPS will have the ignominious credit of pushing their IT divisions to unionization. Note the thread on the Brown Cafe labeled "Information on making TSG unionized", and the link there to find more information at http://uatups.com/.
I'm also curious to watch how the way they've managed this IT reorganization will affect UPS in the long run, curious to see what of it makes it out into mainstream news, and curious to see if this decision to save money now in the short term will adversely affect long-term productivity and health of the company. My personal interest aside, I believe this is a case study in the making.
posted by Naomi Butterfield @ 2/14/2006 12:13:00 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
It always amazes me when organizations take such a short-term view. When you mistreat employees, it may well make it that much harder to get good employees in the future. Word travels fast in the digita world!
Indeed, fast as lightning (literally!). "Computers let you make mistakes faster than anything in human history with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila."
I've since found out that there's a clause in their severance package that says any employee that accepts it can never be hired back to UPS. Talk about burning bridges! I'm wondering if that has anything to do with their reticence to let the helpdesk employees take it (in realizing that they'll forever lose those employees), though I suspect they may just be trying to push them into other UPS positions.
Another possibility is that, once they move to another position and go back to a 90 day probationary period, employees can be fired for not getting up to speed. This scares me for one individual who is 2 years away from retirement and not doing so well with the changeover -- he had a system for helpdesk (very organized, always knew where to find his notes) that is not translating over so well to having to take care of hardware issues. It's the human side of cutting out dead wood. And *that* is also a cautionary tale to always be flexible and be willing to shift if need be, because there is no guarantee that what we do now will exist in this form 5, 10, 20 years from now (something which I think you've mentioned in class).
Time will tell how much of these thoughts turn out to be reactionary paranoia. As Fox Mulder once said, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you.
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