You know, of all the forms of psychological warfare my favorite right now has to be striking. It’s an idea that has dawned on me a good way of negotiating for better wages and fair treatment of a company’s employees. Take my job for instance; I am a shuttle driver for a parking company at the airport, as in the shuttle in the photo on my blog called “Reflective Choices”, and there has been much talk for the last two months from the drivers, dispatchers, and lead drivers about a new acquisition of our company. Some of you may know of Terminal Link from past experience with it at the airport.
It’s what you need if you fly out on American Airlines after parking your car in the terminal that you departed from, but American decides to bring back to a different terminal, that shuttle will take you to the terminal where you parked once you come out of security. Of course I see other points of interest there, such as the shuttles being identical to the shuttles we drive, or the fact that their repair bills are much less than ours because they don’t have to deal with parking lots. But most importantly for the sake of this blog, is that their drivers are paid a buck more an hour, their dispatchers are paid almost two dollars more an hour, and it’s all for doing less work.
I mean, they don’t have to drive their shuttles on a lot that was originally built to be a rental car lot, they don’t have to pick people up at their car on those lots, or even touch a parking lot at all unless they are coming into our base for a break, and even then the lot they go into is empty. The dispatchers don’t have to worry about balancing their limited number of shuttles between spontaneous pick-ups on the lot and sweeping the terminals so the airport keeps us around, and they don’t have to worry about guests being lost on the lot and having to allow a shuttle to find them, or wait for a supervisor to find them and then have a shuttle ready right away to take them to the terminal.
To me it sounds like they have a much easier job, yet they are paid more, I just don’t understand that. Further more, the company I work for is the reason that they were able to acquire Terminal Link in the first place, due to becoming one of the world’s most dependable parking systems, which is true.
But let’s say for a minute that all of the drivers I work with decided one day that their time and effort was worth just as much an hour, if not more as it certainly is, than that of the Terminal Link drivers, what then? There are several ways it could play out, one of which already has been motion for some time now, and that is to gripe about it to management all of the time, but as I learned yesterday, being a dispatcher makes me a part of management so what good would it do for me to complain to myself about it? Well probably about as much as it’s done for anyone to go to our Operations Manager.
So there is another idea that I’ve been pondering over, and I believe that it has the highest chance for success, though I also feel that it would be the hardest to pull off. I would personally like to organize all of the drivers and dispatchers and lot attendants from our second and third shifts for a strike. It would be simple to construct, simply have each driver from third shift show in full uniform at their scheduled time on Sunday, but have them not clock in and form a line in the break room, and that includes the lot attendants.
Now for the first hour or so this wouldn’t seem like much more than a driver being insubordinate, but as the second shift drivers and lot attendants were going home, if they were to clock out and take their places in line, by about four in the afternoon, a time in which it tends to get a little busy for us, there should be roughly 30 drivers and 10 lot attendants, plus the 4 dispatchers. Now Sunday is a special day for this sort of problem, for one Sunday is a very busy day in both of our lots every week, mainly because there are a lot of people who use our service for their weekly business trips, and are either coming home or leaving for work on Sunday, but the prospect of this not being solved by the following morning is the big predicament.
Monday morning is when we have the most traffic waiting to get into our lots, and this presents a major problem for our management team because getting them into the lot and parked is how we make our money.
It still gets my head spinning a little bit, the thought of seeing the pure frustration on the faces of supervisors, one or two of which may join the strike after seeing everyone else do it, as well as the management team. It wouldn’t take five minutes before the phones started ringing off the hook from people wanting to be picked up in the terminal that had been waiting a while, nor would it be much longer for the people parking on the lot to give up on waiting for a shuttle and start walking up to base to get a ride.
Of course management would assume that because we all need the money from tips so badly that we wouldn’t do this, an if we did that it would only last a few minutes to make a point, but regardless that is something they can survive if their supervisors continue to do their job. There are enough supervisors to drive the shuttle, but not enough to dispatch them, and certainly not enough to park the cars. So it most likely would start off as management threatening to fire anyone who did not clock in and get on their bus, and that would be followed by bigger and more dramatic threats.
Ultimately though, and I think it would be before the third hour of everyone striking, they would have to cave in and begin negotiating. The only difficult part about actually setting all of this up is getting my co-workers, who need the money as badly as I do, to participate at the cost of losing a day or so of pay, not to mention the tips, which is what we all live off of between paychecks. But there are several that I think would be willing to do it without any form of persuasion aside from just laying out the plan, and their support of this idea would be enough to convince the rest of the drivers to join in. now there are some who would be resistant regardless of having two or having twenty people ready to strike, so they would have to be the last ones approached in order for them to agree.
It’s just too bad that nobody will actually try to start it, because It would work, this company cannot operate at all without any drivers, and the dispatchers and lot attendants would only surmount to a problem that must be taken care of immediately, because they can’t hire enough people in a matter of hours or even days to replace the striking employees.
Well, maybe the company I work for will just suffer an attack of conscience and start paying all of their employees equally, without unjustly reducing anyone’s pay.
That’s my rant for the day, but I also want anyone who reads this to think about what they could benefit from a similar action at their workplace, it seems many companies are finding it more acceptable to shit on the little guys, and that’s sad.
