[theranfear]

I enjoyed reading the article as a former supervisor of UPS. It's funny how apt some of the descriptions were from my own experience while working there. I've come to the belief that most low/tight margin jobs come with the peril that you just have to eat "you know what". I think part of my frustration when working there was the performance numbers that you have to run were unrealistic. The performance is broken down into (packages per hour) / total hours. Meaning that you need to have people loading at a rate of essentially ~450 packages per hour per person. The pressure is always on for you to get your work force moving to hit an almost physically impossible production rate. Your tactics are really one of two things which is to try to 'cut' down the work force to reduce hours or to yell that they're going too slow. In some ways this always made me feel pretty lousy because I like to treat humans with respect. Now the question is what happens when supervisors don't meet their production quotas? You get written up or in my case you write yourself up, then you get dressed down by your boss, and if you're really taking a lot of aggro, your boss's boss. It is incredibly easy to get written up, everyone I knew would constantly be written up for small things.

The methods which is mentioned in the article is literal instructions on how to safely do your job if you could physically adhere to them while maintaining production would actually be really great because they're pretty thoughtful, however, it's easy to cut corners and do things that speed you up slightly at the cost of increasing injury.

One thing that would be really great for my production is small packages because smaller packages = more pph which means less boss aggro. One thought that I've had is that Amazon gives all UPS the junk packages which we would call large cube or irregulars which were either exceptionally large boxes or super heavy boxes > 70lbs. (Btw they say you won't have to pick up more than 70lbs, that's a straight lie).

Anyway wanted to give some additional perspectives.