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NEWS & LETTERS, APRIL 2003
Canteen speedup
Chicago--The new warehouse boss at Canteen called in
every warehouse worker on the vending side and wrote them up--for not meeting
the “industry standard” of speed in picking orders. The workers they wrote
up have 60 years of experience between them with clean records. Suddenly they
can’t do the job? The main reason they are working eleven hours a day and more
is that only four warehouse workers are being told to do what seven workers did
just a couple years ago. The company put the discipline on hold after a grievance
hearing, but the charges are still pure harassment. The company spent plenty to
install TV cameras monitoring nearly all the working areas. If they had
seen any idle behavior, they would have used that against them. Canteen apparently wants to count as work only pulling
orders and not the hours of ordering and receiving product and otherwise making
it possible to pull orders at all. From that point of view, even the grunt labor
of putting stock away is not work. But that point of view is wrong. It is the
same mindset that leads supervisors to set up vending routes as if driving time
between routes did not count. Setting arbitrary standards won’t get any more
work done, but hiring another warehouse worker would. |
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