Last week, I used a tow strap (I keep it in my truck bag in the back of my truck) and my big Chevy Tahoe to pull a UPS truck out of a ditch. You know, the standard UPS package car – big, brown, GMC service chassis with a Grumman aluminum body with dual rear wheels. I know GMC makes 4×4 drive-trains for those things; they’re not that much more expensive, either. I would sort of expect that each UPS motor-pool would have a couple 4×4 and the rest rigged for highway driving.
But, no, they’re all rear-wheel drive and they all carry highway tires that are practically drag-racing slicks. As I was hooking up the tow strap I noticed the UPS trucks down have tow points, either. This is in the mountains in Pennsylvania! I made some kind of expletive-laden exclamation and the driver said, “I know the guys in Montana have 4×4 and knobby tires but we don’t. The FEDEX lady’s a friend of mine and she doesn’t, either.”
That’s true. My regular UPS driver, and the FEDEX driver, both have my cell phone number and text me if the weather is nasty and they have a delivery for me. Then, I meet them at the end of my driveway. It’s no big deal and it’s a lot better than having to tow a UPS truck out of a ditch. They call when I have something heavy coming, too – like the 3 foot section of victorian railroad track I got in the summer – I drive up and collect it so they don’t have to wrangle it onto my porch (it needs to be in the back of my truck, anyhow!) Those people work very hard and I see no reason to make their lives more difficult.
After we got the truck out, we talked a bit and the UPS driver said, “this is nothing…”
Apparently, the supervisor who oversees the trucking operation sent out a directive early in the winter, regarding snow chains. It had come to his attention that snow chains were a hazard, because if they were not stowed properly a driver might trip on them, fall down, and they’d have an insurance claim. Because, I suppose, UPS couldn’t be arsed to buy a bunch of aluminum toolboxes and bolt them down in the back of the trucks, and fill them with tire chains, jumper cables, and whatnot? Or, was it because someone might shock themselves with jumper cables? I offered the driver that, if he wanted me to write the supervisor a letter, I’d be happy to explain to them that UPS is incurring huge liability having trucks on the road with inappropriate tires and that they might have killed someone instead of merely winding up in a ditch. And, furthermore, by becoming a road hazard they risked a customer being injured, or being injured trying to help get a UPS truck out of a ditch. I would conclude by speculating that he had graduated from business school not the school of hard knocks and mud and that he needs to spend less time playing golf.
Two years ago, my old FEDEX driver complained that she was not allowed to wear a snowmobile suit in the truck – she was freezing in the alumibody (those things are awful to heat!) and I suggested one of the USB/battery-powered sweaters. By the way, those things are great except you get so used to them you can’t live without them.
I do genuinely believe that corporate executives are often totalitarian sociopaths, who desire power but cannot recognize they have it unless they use it to exert control over others. There is something totalitarian lurking behind the drive for uniformity: it’s control. I’ve often quoted O’Brien’s speech from 1984:
“How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?“
Winston thought. “By making him suffer”, he said.
“Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery is torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but MORE merciless as it refines itself.
Why would someone who is responsible for managing a team of truckers want them to be less than comfortable and well-equipped? I would expect that manager to be thrilled if one of the team came and said, “I was thinking we could get a toolbox of essential gear and bolt that down to one of the shelves in the back where it can’t get it in the way or shift, and we could put stuff in there.”
Now, I wonder if the trucks have 1st aid kits and fire extinguishers in them.
Corporate America has outsourced a lot of dangerous industrial processes to China, etc, because safety is so expensive. I suspect this is another case of that. What they mean, though is not that safety is expensive, it’s that they are unwilling to take even a microscopic hit on their profit-margins to make their employees’ lives a bit better. I’m pretty sure that Andrew Carnegie, who fought tooth and nail to claw pennies from his nearly destitute steelworkers, would understand. Executives fight with labor over tiny amounts of money, in terms of the company’s bottom line – and usually the excuse given is “if we give them a bit they’ll just want more.” Because, you know, if you give a capitalist an inch, they’ll take your life, your health, and your pension, then leave you in a ditch and blame you for being lazy. Next, they’ll go hit the links for a quick round of golf.
Doesn’t O’Brien sound like Paul Ryan, only articulate and passionate and competent?
Well, probably some corporate executives really are sociopaths and sadists, but I can think of other simpler reasons why FEDEX employees are forced to freeze in their cars. Maybe the executives were ignorant about the problem, maybe they simply didn’t care about it enough to be willing to spend their mental energy and time on solving the issue. Maybe they simply wanted to cut corners and save a few dollars. In general, I don’t assume sadism as the reason behind why some problem persists when greed or ignorance are also possible explanations.
I somewhat disagree. It seems like my definition of power is broader than Orwell’s. You assert power over another person by making them do whatever you want. Making the victim suffer is optional.
What difference does it make? Who cares whether your victim mistakenly imagines that he is following his own will? Let the naïve victim keep on believing that he’s free. What matters is that he’s doing what you want him to do.
The way I see it, it makes no difference whether the victim is forced to obey through brute force or whether he is manipulated into believing that he wants to do your bidding. In both scenarios you have power over the other person. As far as I’m concerned, manipulation can be a worse form of power because it can be so hard for the victim to recognize and correctly interpret. When you know that you are being abused, you can try to escape or revolt. When your mind is being manipulated, escaping gets trickier, because you don’t even realize that your freedom has been taken away from you. This is what Isaiah Berlin called positive and negative liberty—there is more than one way how somebody can take away their victim’s liberty, how they can assert power over another person.
There are actual scientific studies showing that sociopaths are present in top management significantly more than in general population.
American managers are definitively idiots with over inflated egos.
This kind of callousness about the safety and comfort of the people who work for them is disgusting.
But isn’t it also inefficient? You would think that the time lost by drivers getting stuck or not being able to make deliveries or spending time inside a coffee shop getting warm would be a factor in favor of giving them the right equipment to do their job safely. But it looks like the owners and management just don’t care.
Aren’t fire extinguishers and first aid kits a legal requirement in the US? Both are required in most countries of the EU, I believe. If there’s no law or no inspector and no fine, I expect the lack of even the most basic safety equipment to be a foregone conclusion.
There’d probably no point either. From what I’ve read about these kinds of jobs their schedule is so tight* that truck drivers might not have time to wear a seatbelt, let alone pull over and help someone who’s had an accident. Ergo: no need for a first aid kit. Money saved, profit margin bolstered, shareholders pleased, exec bonus paid. Everybody (of note) wins!
*I’m under the general impression they’re already way behind before their shift starts. Just like working in an Amazon warehouse…
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Re: Ieva Skrebele, Suffering vs. Manipulation
I think the need for suffering in 1984 is meant to underline the insecurity of the authoritarians. As O’Brien says, the victim must suffer because otherwise he can’t be certain he has all the power. And that’s very important to some. Merely having the upper hand and being in control most of the time might not be good enough when there’s still some leeway.
Perhaps it’s more of the inch-giving mentality. Once they have a little freedom they’ll ask for more. Perhaps it’s the worry of not knowing what the peasants are doing with that little bit of freedom.
When manipulating people you’re still missing that certainty. Are they willingly doing something because you have bent them to your will or were they always going to do this? We don’t know. As you say, it doesn’t make a difference to the victim. But for a paranoid authoritarian like O’Brien it would be an intolerable state of affairs. They can’t tell if they still have the power of if their grip is already slipping.
I think you can see same need for absolute control at work in abusive relationships.* The abuser frequently tries to completey isolate their victim from the outside world. They could probably assert their control over someone and still leave them small freedoms, to make their abuse less conspicious, and to make it less likely for their victim to try and break away when/if they realise their situation.
*Note: I only know about these dynamics from reading about them. If I’m wrong or somehow out of line please let me know.
According to the drivers I’ve talked to, FedEx requires them to purchase and maintain their own trucks as part of the contractor (not employment) relationship. They also dock several deliveries’ worth of payment for each complaint received, regardless of merit, so please don’t call the company unless your FedEx delivery driver really seriously screwed up.
UPS does provide trucks to the drivers they hire – but gives them all kinds of hell for each scratch on same. Living down a rather overgrown quarter-mile country road, I’ve grown accustomed to looking under upside-down recycling bins at the highway end for packages the drivers very rationally don’t want to bring to the gate.
Delivery services here in Germany also like hire “subcontractors” so they don’t have to pay any health insurance ans social security for their workers.
It’s not unusual to get your delivery out of a rusty old family car.
As to efficiency mentioned by Mano@3, this reminds me of a company I worked for a few years ago:
A number of the IT guys were young dads who occasionally worked from home when their kids were sick.
The management were control freaks who really didn’t like that and forbade home office in all cases!
German law allows a certain number of days of paid leave for parents with sick children the employer has to give, so what do you think the dads did?
As for the rest of us, we used to do server maintenance from home late in the evening, now the downtime happened during work hours!
mordred@#6:
Delivery services here in Germany also like hire “subcontractors” so they don’t have to pay any health insurance ans social security for their workers.
Yes, it’s odd how the “gig economy” seems to be nothing more than using computers to manage a labor force so that you can screw them out of benefits and push their ability to earn lower and lower.
If they have fire extinguishers in the truck they have to (or should) train people how to use them, and check them every year to ensure they work. So my bet is they don’t, unless there’s a regulation requiring them to.
dangerousbeans@#8:
The number of people who know how to use a fire extinguisher is shockingly low.
Just an idea, but perhaps you could build some sort of lockable enclosure at the end of your driveway. Perhaps with a re-settable simplex-type lock. The delivery driver could phone you for the entry code and you reset the unit when you retrieve your delivery. This idea is, evidently, being used to deter porch pirates.