Hey Harry and cltrat,
Your posts go to exactly what I have been harping on for some years now. If my understanding of Fleet Service is correct you guys are the ones who get my bag off the inbound flight and hustle it over to my connecting fligh to some God forsaken southern rat hole city.
Oh Piney, were I ever to see you in the terminal I'd bull rush you, give you a great big bear hug and then a great big kiss on the cheek. When will you next be in PHX? Complimentary freelance consultancy in the fleet service thread? Hot dog!
So let's go back to the concept of Happy Employees are required to in order to ensure happy customers. In this case we have a manager who apparently has nothing better to do then police the attire that a worker places upon his or her head.
Now in the overall scheme of life this is not the end of the world, but let's consider the possible consequences for a minute. Let's say I'm oh a 26 year employee with a Mets hat on instead of a US hat. Boss orders me to take the hat off. I comply. Now ask yourself how motivated am I to run a bag that got left behind to make a connecting flight or just "accidentally" not see it?
Willfully allowing bags to miss is not a "consequence" of one being advised to wear his or her correct hat, as calling it such implies that the agent had no choice given the circumstances, or that this would likely happen given the type of people FF's seem to think rampers are. No matter how pissed off a ramper is at the company or a manager or god or whoever it should never be taken out on the passenger. Ever. I know that this is not a universally-held opinion among rampers but if I were to ever see someone try to purposefully misdirect a bag I would first retrieve the bag and get it where it needs to go or if it were to miss, I would consider telling the expedite office or maybe even the ROC management what happened, even if that does mean ratting out on another agent.
I don't bust my arse each day to try to give the pax (on at least the flights I work) the perception that we have
some measure of professionalism just to have them punished because one person wasn't allowed to share his love of the Mets with the world (Better the Mets than the Yankees though). IMO, a 26-year veteran that has so much invested in his time with the company and still plays games like this should have probably been let go 25.5 years ago.
Ponder if you will the thought that if the Manager in question would create a positive work environment then workers would want to wear the correct hats and be uniform compliant and perhaps even be proud to say "I work for US Airways"
Who determines whether or not the work environment is "positive"?
Think about it.
The perception of positivity or negativity is purely subjective to the individual. That is to say that to a point, the person determines where his work environment falls on the positive-negative spectrum and it is this perception that can have an effect on productivity. Obviously most people will feel they work in a negative environment if their manager is a sadist and the only tools available to do their job are a broken tug, a nightwand with a missing battery, and some old pair of kneepads found lying around that smell kind of like pickled cheese. Personally I consider most of the work environments in PHX to be positive or at least adequate, and I don't have a lot of patience for belly-achers if I don't feel their concerns are legitimate.
I could go to CLT and watch y'all work from from the terminal window and conceivably say that you also seem to have a positive work environment but in this context my opinion is irrelevant because 1.) CLT is not PHX, and 2.) I've never worked in CLT and so can't say for certain what the work environment is really like.
Nobody here thinks the issue is so simple that there's a MAKE WORK ENVIRONMENTS POSITIVE button (it would be green) somewhere in Tempe and like a Disney movie amazing and beautiful things start happening system wide and the only pandemic we'd have to worry about is the one of smiles. The problem of a satisfactory work environment is that anyone trying to hit the target will soon find that it moves, when you have two parties disagreeing on which moving bull's eye to try to hit you'll likely never hit either, and never both; that is to say, it's taken years for management and labor to come up with solutions that work for both of them and apparently this is still very much a work in progress.
Pride is a funny thing in the context of US. Labor says, "we're given nothing to be proud of", and management says "nobody's taking pride in the job they're already doing". Now who is really right? I consider both of these to be legitimate observations. How many years of pride-less, lackluster work are people willing to give until they feel that the company is making them emotionally fulfilled? How many embarrassing months and years of bottom-of-the-barrel customer service rankings and pathetic news reports will management choose to endure while they wait for their work force to experience a mass epiphany?
Obviously, there's no easy solution. Personally, I think that when considering changes to the operation or kicking around new ideas, management should get heavy and regular workforce advice and input in addition to all of the numbers they crunch. We need buy-in. Before something is rolled out, it should have the stamp of approval both of the people that make the decisions and count the money AND of the people who will be doing the actual work.
This is how the seeds of pride of good will are sown; when everyone gets on the same damn page and BOTH parties have to live up to what they said they'd do and HOW they'd do it then it's much more likely to work.
Management and labor are not the problems. The distrust and animosity between them are the problems. Until people are willing to really swallow their pride and get their hands dirty, we can expect to still come here regularly and spin our wheels. The scanners are a perfect example of this. Huge amounts of time and money could have been saved if the ramp had been brought in during the initial configuration and implementation; as far as I know feedback was never even solicited from the ramp, so why should it be a surprise when the stupid things don't work right, need regular software updates to conform to the operation, and are handled carelessly? If our managers and well-respected rampers approached the workforce together with a working model of how scanning should go down, we'd never be stuck with what we have now: a burnt meat loaf too expensive to throw away so we keep trying different spices to make it delicious.
Ponder how many bags get left behind because unmotivated employees don't bother to "Go the extra Mile" anymore because they realize that no one cares about them and they are viewed as liabilities to be disposed of in favor of cheaper new hires.
Again, motivation from where? Should there be 55-gallon drums of Motivation(tm) with candy ladles every three gates and next to the soda machines? I motivate myself. Ain't nobody ever got motivated because some stooge in a collar and khakis thinks up some magic formula or shells out more dough. What's the point in paying more if it's a safe bet your workers will perform only nominally better because they still don't feel valued?
Also getting bags to the right place is not "an extra mile" or any extra measure in standard or metric because in reality it's that person's job, and I think you will agree that if a person is so depressed that he or she cannot fulfill such a simple and important aspect of customer service he or she would be better suited for the analyst's couch than the ramp.
Compare the attitudes of the employee of US and WN, then look at which group makes more and the CASM of their respective airlines and ask yourself how much of that CASM difference is caused by Chicken Sh*t Managers like this person in CLT?
Agreed. Petty instances like this do absolutely nothing to solve the problem. If it's a Mets hat it's probably blue anyway. It's unfortunate that there's no shortage or driftwood managers that swagger aorund doing what they think it is a manager is supposed to do: act managerish. They have no real concept of what makes the ramp work and their most striking disabilities are their lack of being able to think in the abstract and empathize. Simply put, they're idiots. These people should be dismissed and ignored, and it's always fun to make fun of them when they're not around.
If every ramper worked exactly by the company rules, flights would be at a standstill.
This is funny because it's so true. This operation works only because different parts of procedure and policy must be selectively ignored; it's a labor in grace and I think it's funny that we're never given any credit for ignoring the right rules at the right time. I think this is largely true of any bureaucracy, but especially ours. It's a beautiful thing.
You are benefiting off the backs of what the East rampers endured and fought for and you have the audicity to criticize them, and you wonder why the union has solidarity issues, look in the mirror and you will see the answer to that problem
The same East employees that were willing to let the West be damned and gambled and lost at arbitration? But I digress; how many dead horses can we beat at one time?
