Hell on Wheels - 1988 Article on UPS

Hell on Wheels

by Jeremy Schlosberg Originally published in the New England Monthly, January 1988 Help wanted, truck driver. Great pay, spectacular benefits, abusive bosses. Apply to UPS, Greenwich, Connecticut "I pity the man who wants a coat so cheap that the man or woman who produces the cloth shall starve in the process." - Benjamin Harrison In a monstrous building in a decidedly un-Shakespearean section of Stratford, Connecticut, a redeyed group of young men, maybe a woman or two, are gathered in the middle of the night to perform a task of crucial importance to countless area businesses - critical, indeed, to the progress of American commerce itself. To accompany them in this task, a local Top 40 station plays rock and roll, staticky and loud. At 4:15 A.M., a buzzer blares, a dizzying array of conveyor belts jerks into motion, and the nightly battle between human and package has begun. Welcome to the preload shift, Stratford hub, United Parcel Service. Abandon sleep, all ye who enter here.

The preload shift, happening daily at a UPS sorting facility near you (1,300 nation-wide, 37 in New England), is where packages are loaded onto those boxy brown trucks with the tiny UPS logo for local delivery. The process starts when huge trailers stuffed with packages are unloaded at one end of the gargantuan building, and ends many color-coded ramps and conveyor belts later as the packages converge on nearly a hundred brown trucks lined up at the other end. On this last stop the preloaders work - typically sixty or so guys in their early twenties who together in a four-hour shift may load some twenty thousand packages onto their brownies. The preloaders share a countenance a look combining concentration, sleepiness, and panic - knowing that if they aren't shoveling packages onto trucks at a UPS-approved rate of speed, the supervisor likely as not will soon be by to bark at them. It happens all the time.

Sloth is the deadliest of sins at Greenwich-based UPS, which, with $8.6 billion in revenues last year [circa 1987], is New England's largest private company. Here's how deadly a sin: one halfpenny more spent on every package UPS delivers would cost the company $11 million a year. A penny saved is $22 million earned.

To combat wasted time, UPS has developed an elaborate work-measurement system that analyzes and quantifies every task along the great package-delivery chain. UPS's crack team of two thousand industrial engineers has come up with sorting techniques and loading techniques, driving techniques and washing techniques (the trucks are washed every day), each with precise amounts of time attached to their completion - so-called time standards.

Take the drivers, who must follow at least twenty-six separate "delivery methods" at every stop.

Drivers are told which foot to enter the truck with (the right), which arm to carry the package with (the left), and how to carry the keys (on the right pinkie). They are trained to leave the truck in the gear they'll use when they get back in. Techniques that are timeable are timed, and the whole thing is multiplied by a driver's planned stops that day, giving him or her a specific number of hours - such as 9.2 (UPS works, oddly, with tenths of hours) - in which to deliver the day's packages.

Tight control is to everyone's benefit, says Big Brown. Not only does it keep costs as low as possible (UPS has raised its basic rates only six and a half percent since May 1982), but measuring each job element means that employees know what is expected of them. "We think that prevents misunderstanding or bad feelings," says company spokesman Ken Sternad.

This is the theory. For reality, let's return to preload. You're a supervisor. It's now maybe six o'clock in the morning. In the winter, it's pretty damned cold inside; in the summer, you sweat like a wrestler. In either case you soon stop noticing the temperature amid the racket, the darting people, the relentless movement of packages. The boxes coming down your belt - so stately, almost, earlier in the morning when there weren't that many - are suddenly doing the forty-yard dash. This package says FRAGILE, but it probably won't mind if you toss it to that truck over there - it's only ten or fifteen feet away. That clown who keeps letting packages pile up - time to go scream at him for a few seconds. You hear occasional jokes on the PA, belt supervisors paging Lloyd Bridges because they're drowning in packages. You remember the night one supervisor walked along a two-story ramp and waved a jury-rigged white flag. One former supervisor calls preload "a hellhole."

The preload shift is supposed to be finished at 8:30 on the nose, all the packages on the trucks so each driver can turn the key (which was left in the truck) and go. If this doesn't happen, then it's your turn to get barked at by the delivery supervisors. Reasons are called "excuses" and are not tolerated. If there are mounds of packages still outside a truck or two, you, the belt supervisor - who are never supposed to load packages - roll up your sleeves and load packages.

The UPS theory is a nice theory: measurable goals, profitable company, 180,000 happy campers.

The pay is good, and for full-time supervisors and managers there are generous stock benefits. It all sounds so, I don't know, Japanese. The problem is that the theory and the practice don't necessarily mesh. There is a faction of former and current UPS employees who look at the reality of the workplace and see chaos instead of structure, and a tyrannical obsession with numbers in place of realistic goals. They view the company's ample perquisites not so much as "golden handcuffs" but as a golden rack, an instrument of abuse that both salves the conscience of the abuser and causes the abused to suffer in silence. "It's the best delivery system in the world," says a former UPS manager.

"But they're the most rotten bastards to work for."

Once, it was so much simpler. All Jim Casey wanted to do, as a nineteen-year-old messenger boy starting his own company in Seattle, was deliver people's packages promptly and courteously. It was 1907, and people still cared about things like that. Building his reputation on a simple motto ("Best Service - Lowest Rates"), Casey became a specialist in package delivery for retail stores. By 1930, UPS had moved its headquarters to Manhattan, where Casey, working in a stark room, was so consumed by the package delivery business that he rarely spoke of anything else. He shunned publicity even as his company made him uncountable amounts of money, much of which wound up in a charitable foundation. (The foundation, too, carried on Casey's publicity-shy ways, breaking into the public print only a few months ago, when it announced that it would put $100 million into various programs aimed at helping "children at risk.") Casey never married, lived in an unadorned two-room suite at the Waldorf Towers, and was known, in his spare time, to wander through Manhattan department stores, invariably ending up in the room where workers wrapped packages for delivery. He liked watching.

At UPS, Casey was George Washington and Ben Franklin rolled into one - a founding father revered as a legend, and a widely read philosopher. His annual addresses to the UPS Management Conference became gospel, and have circulated to employees ever since. He had thought hard about

the mechanics of human organization and had arrived at simply stated, sensible conclusions about the importance of modesty, quality, and the great potential of average men working together.

Casey stepped down as CEO in 1962 and died in 1983 at the age of ninety-five. To this day, his presence is palpable in upper management at UPS, from the company's absurdly pedestrian corporate headquarters - never mind the Greenwich address, the place is essence of office park - to the continual cultivation of executive modesty. If you happen to bump into CEO Jack Rogers near the copy machine, chances are he'll be making his own copies. And if you happen to get hold of the UPS Policy Book, you'll find it full of Caseyisms, epigrams like "A leader does not have to remind others of authority by the use of a title." Or, "You can't be a big man until you have shown competence as a small man."

Art Young (a pseudonym), who lives in Westborough, Massachusetts, remembers reading the Caseyisms and thinking, Hey, this really makes sense. Young started with UPS as a Boston College student in 1972 and became a full-time supervisor upon graduation. "If the place really ran like that," he says, "it would be a great place to work." In the old days, it generally did run like that. But Young, who still considers himself "a sixties kind of person," quit the company last year because he could no longer live with the dichotomy between theoretical UPS and the UPS he faced every day.

Young encountered a frontline management philosophy that forced everyone into near-maniacal focus on numerical goals. "That's the thing that drove me nuts in the end," he says.

Rick Carlson (also a pseudonym) is another former supervisor. Carlson, a thirty-three-year-old Massachusetts man, supervised drivers, a job that often involved making the rounds with an underling. UPS prints a list of "least-best" drivers by geographical area each week, and these are the ones who are given OJS: on-the-job supervision, wherein the supervisor dons a brown uniform for the day to match the driver's, and accompanies him from eight-thirty A.M. until six or seven P.M., or however long it takes to deliver all the packages. With only one seat in the cab, the supervisor spends his time balancing in the wheel well. He begins to summarize the six or twelve or nineteen things the driver is consistently doing wrong: maybe he keeps forgetting to have his key ready when he comes back to the truck (losing valuable seconds to fumbling), or failing to announce "UPS!" when he enters an office. Then the supervisor begins a running commentary, usually a continual hammering of instructions: "Pull up the emergency brake as you stop the engine!" "Get that package under your left arm!"

That's the pleasant approach. There are plenty of stories, however, of supervisors who prefer to be unpleasant. Maybe bouncing around in the wheel well all day gets them irritated. How, in any case, is this for advice: "What are you, stupid? What's the matter with you? Are you stupid or something?" And then there's the story of George, we'll call him, a hardworking but average UPS driver in Massachusetts who, during a particularly brutal OJS involving not only his supervisor but his supervisor's supervisor, stopped midway between the truck and the house on one stop, dropped his package and clipboard, sank to his knees, and put his hands on his head. George was having a nervous breakdown. Reportedly there are still bumper stickers at the facility where he worked that read, WHY GEORGE? "I felt I had to be much harsher with people than I was comfortable with," says Julie Aasen, of Arlington, Massachusetts, who worked for UPS from 1979 to 1982 in the Ashland area. She has memories of standing in long, dim trailers with muscle-bound teenagers, amid piles and piles of boxes. What she remember most is screaming at them to go faster. "I never treated people like that before," she says. "I went to school to be a social worker."

What is especially noteworthy about this criticism is that not one of the critics is opposed to the idea of work measurement. "I'm an honest believer in the time standards," says John Scott, who worked for UPS from 1969 through the end of 1985. A thoughtful forty-two-year-old from Worcester, Scott believes the problem is not so much the numbers as it is the inability of UPS managers to motivate without intimidating. He characterizes most of those he saw as "a bunch of ex-truck drivers," which is quite often true. Because UPS has a policy of promoting from within - "You can't be a big man unless you have shown competence as a small man" - today's managers are usually yesterday's loaders and drivers, many of whom began working at the company out of high school. When these people become supervisors and managers, they do not magically acquire managerial finesse. That requires training, and Lord knows UPS gives it to them. Training at the company is extensive, expensive (UPS spends tens of millions of dollars on it), and rigorous. But is it teaching the right thing? Ex-UPSers are unconvinced that the managers are learning anything beyond how to become slaves to their daily goals. "Their idea of subtle," recalls one former part-time supervisor, "is picking up the phone and saying, 'What the hell do you want?'"

And it's not only the lower-echelon managers. John Scott was once ushered into the center manager's office at the end of a year in which Scott, replacing a supervisor of an inefficient shift, had increased package-handling effectiveness from sixty-seven to ninety-five percent. "This is no good whatsoever," the center manager scowled. "Just what the hell are you doing out there, anyway?" As Scott describes it, the man then began "ranting and raving," beside himself that Scott's formerly ineffective handlers were now five percent less than perfect.

Another time, Scott made a two-dollar mistake in his monthly expense report. For fourteen years he had written out his expense reports promptly and neatly, without a single item ever being questioned.

It was a point of pride. This time, however, he found and envelope in his desk the next night. His report had been returned with a note from his boss. "The man is either stupid," the note said, "or he don't care."

Now, certainly, is the time for senior management to enter the picture here: set the record straight, accuse the critics of being ingrates, sore sports, whatever. Not at UPS. Requests for interviews never got past Sternad, the spokesman. Indeed, the staunchest defender of Big Brown I found was someone not officially connected to the company at all - Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, an associate professor at the Harvard Business School who recently spent ten months working with the management committee to study organizational behavior. Sonnenfeld is a believer in the effectiveness and sincerity of UPS management. "The company," he says flatly, "has never been a nasty, coercive place to work."

Never? Well, Sonnenfeld concedes, maybe he did hear top management admit, "in candid, offhand moments," that "residual pockets" of unpleasantness exist. But, he hastens to add, "I think they feel that in ninety-five percent of the country they've got the problem licked." He then springs away from this subject to speak in earnest of the company's hardworking executives, of their unusual humility, their willingness to tackle problems. A lot of this took place at the upper management level where Sonnenfeld spent all his time, and he acknowledges the trouble organizations can have turning philosophy into reality down through the ranks. "It's a paradox," he concludes, "but it would be unfair to call it hypocrisy."

But what about the criticisms? Sonnenfeld's ultimate refutation is UPS's turnover rate, which he says is very low, but which I have no way of confirming, since the company won't disclose it. "If people have such terrible things to say," retorts the professor, "why do so few of them leave?" _______________________

"Are we working for money alone?" asked Jim Casey in 1947. "If so, there is no surer way not to get it." Here, the theory never even has a chance. Everybody, but everybody, is initially attracted to UPS by the dinero. Part-time package handlers start at eight dollars an hour and soon move up to nine. "You don't find nine dollars an hour too often in part-time jobs," says Sternad. The drivers start at more than ten dollars an hour and peak out at more than fifteen - the best in the trucking industry. Then there's the remarkable benefits package, including medical, dental, optical, life insurance, the works, for the whole family, all free - no payroll deduction.

The plum of plums, though, is the stock. Calling UPS a growth stock is like calling the Taj Mahal a house; $2,000 of UPS paper in 1980 is worth $18,000 today. Don't bother seeing your broker, though - you can't have any UPS stock unless you're UPS management; active and recently retired UPSers hold an estimated ninety-eight to ninety-nine percent of the company. In a good year (and most recent years have been very good) the company reserves as much as fifteen percent of its pretax profits for the awarding of stock; an average supervisor might receive some $7,000 to $9,000 worth of it at the end of the year, a manager twice that. The stock can theoretically be sold back to the company at any time.

Casey had felt that awarding stock would be "a much more powerful incentive to work hard and to provide good service than just about anything else," says Sternad. This remains the company line, and of course it is a theory widely held among the more enlightened American companies, which offer an array of stock options and benefits to employees.

Again, however, UPS had managed to turn the theory upside-down, in this case crossing the line between enticement and entrapment. The stock is one hefty piece of free pie to dish out. UPS knows this. And it wants a return on its investment. "We're not shy about expecting a full day's work from our people," is how Sternad puts it.

But some of these people have questions about the definition of a full day's work. "They want to own you twenty-four hours a day," says Rick Carlson. He considered himself a valued worker, yet remembers bitterly how they "bastardized" him when he need some time off in 1986 to support his wife through a miscarriage; suddenly superiors were giving him icy stares and one-word answers.

Anything he said to defend himself brought storms of abuse. Later, when his wife needed surgery for an unrelated problem, he felt pressured into working the day he'd planned to take off. Not surprisingly, Carlson saw divorces all around him at UPS. "If I hadn't left the company six months ago," he says, "I'd be in divorce court right now, too."

Yet even those with the harshest criticisms are generous in their praise of the company's accomplishments. Even those with the worst horror stories acknowledge a battery of nice people they met during their UPS tenure. Down in the trenches, though, it somehow goes to pieces. "They give you the stock," says John Scott, "call you an owner, and now you're expected to be abused and tolerate it." _______________________ So the question is: Why tolerate it? Return, now, to the concept of golden handcuffs. "You have supervisory people walking around saying, 'I hate this place,'" says Art Young, the BC graduate who became a supervisor. "But they're making a very good living. That's why they're here." Where else can a high school graduate in his mid- to late thirties make close to $40,000? Plus benefits. Plus stock. With a mortgage to pay, kids to support, how can you quit?

"You reach a point," says Young, "where you say, 'Holy smoke - I can't go anywhere.' You're not marketable except to another trucking company." Indeed, even most UPS defenders admit that many of the company's employees, because of their limited education, are priced out of the market.

After a while, they really don't have any other place to go.

The man from Harvard, however, finds this last a point worth disputing. Sonnenfeld does so in an ivory tower sort of way, pointing out that, in theory, good salaries and good benefits "should be an enabling factor for job change instead of a hindrance." He also notes that the term golden handcuffs refers to situations where employees cannot cash out until retirement. "At UPS," he retorts, "it's not handcuffs. They can sell the stock and the company would eagerly buy it back."

But can they, really? A number of former UPSers report hearing the opposite message. When you want to sell stock you have to request a special form from your immediate supervisor, who will not want to be associated, in the eyes of his supervisor, with the likes of you. He will ask you why you want to sell and if you're sure you know what you're doing. Former employees report that stock sellers were made to feel guilty, and were even told that their stock privileges would be rescinded.

To men for whom stock is the bond of partnership, someone wanting to sell, for whatever reason, is saying, "I don't want to be a partner." It is an act of treason.

Another Casey ideal gone awry. He, too, had always hoped employees would hold on to their stock, but his motives were mainly paternal: don't sell your stock and you'll retire a rich man. Which is true: John Scott knows one recent fifty-five-year-old retiree who will be receiving up to $300,000 a year for the next ten years as he sells back his stock. But at UPS, good-hearted theories glow for a moment and then flit away, like sparks from the hellhole of preload. There is hope, from more than one critic, that things will get better, and suspicion from others that the environment of choice for UPS, the grunting, churning work of moving packages around the country, is a hard place, with no room for nice-sounding theories.

"A guy I worked with told me something I've always remembered," says Scott. "He said, 'It's easy to pick up a package. It's easy to deliver it. What comes in between is hell.'" _______________________ Jeremy Schlosberg lives in White Plains, New York.