All praise the power and glory of God. After a long year of wanting to file a lawsuit against FEDEX, we finally have been assigned a lawyer. I know I know you must be thinking why so here is our tale of how a fortune 5oo hundred company can really, excuse my french but "screw a contractor".
It all started three lovely years ago when my husband bought two routes at FEDEX Ground. Oh my husband was so happy, he had a nice truck and step van. And on top of that we paid cash for the route's so we didn't have to get a loan and have that extra payment. Well a few months go by and the truck is not being loaded right and what I mean by that is I had to make a load chart for the van and truck so the "loader" would know where to put the boxes according to the chart. That NEVER happened. Every morning at 4:00 AM me and my husband would go and RE-LOAD our vans, now after time that gets VERY OLD. Needless to say that we were never able to leave the terminal by a decent hour so that always put us behind schedule. Especially when you are doing about 150 stops a day plus pickups , doesn't give you ample time to do your job to the fullest. After many attempts to try to get the so called managers to get us new loader, we decided that we would just go in every morning and re-load our trucks and deal.
So we deal with the bull crap of re-loading trucks and then we start noticing our check gets lower and lower. Well my husband the smart man that he is had always copied our settlement at the end of the day that told us how many stops we had done, packages delivered and how many pickups we had done along with their packages as well. So we go to wonderful management and tell them our problem, their solution was "we will get your money to you in next weeks check". Well next week comes and no money and we get the same answer again. Now most contractors would have just blown it off but we didn't. I mean when you own the trucks and have to keep the maintenance up on them you need your money, right?! Well we finally find out why we were not getting all the stops and packages keyed in one night. I was looking at the girls that were typing in our settlement sheets and they were eating, talking about which club they were going to, men and just plain old gossip. So Mikey just blows up, I cannot blame him especially when you are working 15 hour days and are just plain exhausted. Well needless to say the girls were offended and told management. So blah blah blah I could go on but that would take forever.
Well last summer on a hot and humid day we wake up at 3:30 AM to go to the terminal to do our daily re-do of the crap job that the alcoholic loader had done and I could tell there was something in the air about this day. So me and Mikey arrive and we are tending to our own business and the belt manager comes over to ask what we were doing. Well Mikey explains to him for about the umpteenth time and the manager did not like it.He old us that he didn't care if we delivered the packages or not and that he was not going to fix the loading problem. Well Mikey went off and said a few choice words . Well the manager who has a engineering degree which he told us when he insulted us by saying that we only had a 4Th grade education and how dumb we were, started mouthing off and I could see Mikey getting redder and madder and Mikey took his fist and put if through a box, I started crying and I started throwing boxes at the manager. That was the day we decided to sell the routes.
It took about two months to sell but when we did were finally free. Yes we took a loss, we sold the route's for twenty thousand, the buyer got a steal because the routes made over 150 thousand a year. We did make good money but it was not worth us killing ourselves over. Working crazy hours and management not helping when we needed it. I could on and on but there is not enough time in the day for all the crap we went through.
So now we are just waiting back to hear from the lawyer about our case, I do not intend on getting any money, I just want justice to be served. I come from a family of hard middle class workers and I do not want other contractors to go through what we went through. But when you have pencil pushers and CEO's not caring about their employees and contractors that's what you get.
Our case is with a few others, so hopefully it will go over smoothly. Before we decided to file I did my research and found out that there were over 100 lawsuits against FEDEX Ground by other contractors being treated the same way we did.
Well I hope you all have a lovely weekend and I just really had to get that off my chest since that had consumed a big portion of our life for so long. Thanks for reading my rants.
Until I blog again ~ Gal Molly
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