Beach babe falls for syphilitic philosopher (12/18/94)
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Addressed, with a fair imitation of naive good faith, to the acting director of circulation and a couple of his henchmen, on Pearl Harbor Day, 1994:
...........
Personae:
Thank you for your expression of interest in the concerns of the newspaper delivery personnel of the
Boulder Daily Camera.
Attached you should find a memorandum summarizing the principal points on which we think any discussion should focus.
Your comments will of course be welcomed.
Again, thank you for your consideration.
[yours, etc.]
...............
In the last two years there has been a very obvious decline in the ability of the
Camera’s production facilities to provide newspapers for delivery in a timely fashion. In recent months this trend has accelerated, and to many now suggests impending catastrophe.
The consequences have not been fortunate.
Most motor-route carriers are required to pick their newspapers up at the
Camera; where newspapers are, for the most part, dispensed on a first-come, first-served basis. Thus carriers have no option but to plan their delivery schedules on the basis of anticipation: i.e., whether or not their draws should be available when they arrive at the dock, they must appear — and, of course, be prepared to wait —simply to establish priority. In the past this has entailed occasional lengthy waits in occasionally lengthy lines, but such difficulties have not been commonplace. In recent months, however, it has not been uncommon for carriers to spend ten to fifteen hours a week queued up to nowhere.
Waiting for newspapers has, in short, become a part-time job in itself; one for which no one receives any form of compensation.
When newspapers are finally made available, they are often miscounted and incomplete, and it is frequently impossible to guarantee their delivery before the
Camera’s increasingly unrealistic delivery deadline of six-thirty a.m.
Since most carriers have other obligations, many have been forced to cut back their routes, with attendant loss of income. Since in turn there is a certain minimum compensation one must expect to get out of bed in the middle of the night seven days a week, many have chosen simply to find more profitable employment. This has transferred a very heavy burden of responsibility to their managers, who have responded predictably: no district manager remains from the first of the year.
In short: lacking newspapers to deliver or personnel to deliver them, the rather meager resources of the circulation department have been severely strained. Customer complaints have reached record levels; circulation figures have begun to suffer. Advertising revenues will presumably decline.
Now: though the basis for our interest should be obvious, repeated requests for clarification of the circumstances that have led to this situation have been met by our [numerous] supervisors with obfuscation, misstatement, and indirection.
Nonetheless it has not proved difficult to identify the causes of these difficulties. The size [if not the circulation] of the newspaper has, quite obviously, increased substantially over the last several years. In addition the number and volume of extraneous advertising supplements has increased dramatically. It is not difficult to verify that there has been an effective doubling of the throughput expected of the production facilities of the
Camera in the last two or three years. But there have not been similar increases in capital investment in new equipment, in maintenance budgets, in the personnel needed to operate production machinery, nor particularly in the trained maintenance personnel essential to ensure the continued functioning of an increasingly decrepit physical plant.
Though we all recognize that it is unfair to pass judgment in retrospect, still, it is difficult to resist the temptation to state that these were rather obvious needs, which might have been anticipated by more attentive management.
As a corollary of this ongoing crisis, attention has been drawn to a number of pre-existing problems which might otherwise have escaped scrutiny.
We find, for example, that there is general agreement on the following points:
[1] The notorious loopholes in the Fair Labor Standards Act exempt publishers from applying the provisions on the minimum wage, equal pay, overtime pay, and child labor to employees engaged in the delivery of newspapers to the consumer. But though it may not be illegal to require people to wait for hours to pick up newspapers without compensation, it is certainly immoral. And no one will accept it.
[2] The piece rate which is the basis for the carrier’s compensation is set [for motor routes] at about seven cents per paper. Mysteriously, this rate has remained fixed for [at least] the last twelve years; this despite startling increases in the cost of living, the revenues of the publisher, and even the minimum wage.
[3] The piece rate is apparently meant to perpetuate the fiction that one is purchasing the newspaper at a fixed price from, e.g., Boulder Publishing, and then reselling it at the cover price to the customer. [The contracts for single-copy distributors are explicit on this point.] But nothing in this calculation reflects the fact that the actual revenue to the publisher is several times the cover price, almost all of it in advertising revenue. The relationship of the newspaper to the bundle of glossy advertising inserts it contains has, in fact, become something like that of the skin to the sausage. But for these additional items, each representing an additional return to the publisher and an additional source of delay in production, the carrier is only occasionally compensated.
[4] Moreover the carrier is billed against the piece rate for customer complaints of every description, whether or not these represent avoidable errors. Even complaints which are the direct result of production delays are billed to the carrier.
[5] Whatever limits a low fixed piece rate may place on the return the carrier realizes for his time and his effort,there are nonetheless very obvious economies of scale in newspaper delivery which he may exploit to augment his income: once you are out of bed and in the car, in other words, it represents a relatively small additional effort simply to deliver more newspapers. But stated policy sets a rather low upper limit on the size of an individual’s draw, whatever inefficiencies may result. The fact that chronic shortages of personnel force continuous exceptions to these rules is never recognized.
[6] In addition to the piece rate, the principal form of [apparent] compensation to the carrier is a reimbursement for mileage. This rate has also remained essentially fixed for the last decade, and falls well short of the allowance permitted by the Internal Revenue Service [$.28/mile], let alone any reasonable estimate of the cost of operating a motor vehicle [even for normal driving, probably on the order of $.40/mile.] Furthermore, it is reckoned only from the beginning of the route to its end, though, obviously, most carriers must take responsibility for hauling their newspapers from the dock to the point at which their routes begin [mileage for which a contract carrier would have to be reimbursed.]
[7] In sharp distinction from the policy at other newspapers, the
Camera does not consistently process carrier tips: though it is known that customers frequently forward additional payments as gratuities with their bills, these funds are, apparently, applied to the extension of subscriptions, and, therefore, accounted to the
Camera rather than the carrier. Depending on whom one questions regarding this practice, it is either denied [in the face of considerable evidence] or attributed to a minor [and easily corrected] error in the computer software which processes billing. Comparing this situation with that at other newspapers [and, one might add, with exactly the same set of subscribers] allows the estimate that as much as two hundred thousand dollars a year may be mislaid in this fashion. This is not a trivial sum.
[8] Since the carrier’s paycheck is computed from a piece count, since a running tally is difficult to maintain, and since no accounting is provided with the paycheck to provide a basis of comparison with whatever records one may be able to keep, it follows that no one is ever really sure whether his paycheck is correct. Those unusually compulsive carriers who keep running track of their accounts with, e.g., their own spreadsheet programs, almost invariably find systematic errors. Remarkably, these errors always seem to favor Boulder Publishing.
[9] On at least one occasion the complexity of this accounting process has been used to disguise a deliberate deception: the addition of the topping credit for Sunday deliveries was used to conceal the fact that the previous credit of three cents per piece for the monthly coupon books had been removed.
[10] For these and other reasons the honesty of management has fallen into question. Continual turnover has contributed to this perception: this week’s manager may not, after all, realize that he is perpetrating a deception originated by last week’s manger; next week’s manager even less so.
[11] General issues of health and safety are not adequately addressed. Newspaper carriers work seven days a week, without pause for weekends or holidays, in all seasons irrespective of the weather, precisely during those hours of the day [between three and six in the morning] when the human organism is most vulnerable to malfunction. [There is an extensive literature on this subject, which any specialist on sleep disorders can cite.] No one who has held the job for any length of time has escaped without some illness or injury brought on by chronic fatigue. But in practice it is nearly impossible to take a day off, let alone indulge in sick leave or vacation, without putting one’s job at risk. This contributes to the pervasive impression that carriers are not perceived as human individuals, whose efforts are essential to the functioning of the organization, but rather as disposable parts, to be replaced at the first hint of weakness.
The following points might serve as the basis for further discussion:
— Obviously it would be far more efficient to return to the traditional system, in which a small number of haulers queue up at the dock, and the majority of carriers wither receive their newspapers at home or pick them up on their routes.
— Failing this, it should not lie beyond the capacity of the
Camera to provide a rational and predictable production schedule, in which carriers would have fixed dock times. It should be the
Camera’s responsibility to enforce this schedule, and in the event of delay it should be the
Camera’s responsibility to ensure delivery of the newspapers. Should the carrier elect to wait, he should be paid overtime.
— In keeping with precedents set elsewhere, it should be possible to pay carriers fixed salaries based on average workload. Regular increases for seniority and merit should be possible. Benefits should not be unthinkable.
— A larger number of supporting personnel should be made available at and below the district-,manager level. This would ensure better training, ease transitions during periods of turnover, allow substitution for occasional vacation and sick leave, attend to emergencies, and provide assistance on those occasions when the newspaper is burdened with something ridiculous [e.g., product samples.]
— Competent managers might be attracted by competitive salaries.
— Should it prove impossible for the
Camera to resolve its current production difficulties within the existing structure, the possibility of a return to an independent contractor system should be considered. It should be understood that carriers may be willing, e.g., to take greater responsibility for the assembly of the newspaper [particularly for the insertion of advertising] if the possibility of a larger share of the publisher’s revenue is offered in return. A contract structured on the basis of a percentage of advertising revenue might not be unacceptable.
At the risk of belaboring the obvious, it should be stated: that the current situation is untenable; that the apparent costs of any or all of the steps proposed above need not exceed the real costs of constant turnover, a substandard product, inferior service, continual customer dissatisfaction, and declining circulation; and that a greater sense of contractual obligation between the
Camera and its employees is an essential prerequisite for the continued survival of an antiquated vehicle for the transmission of information in a rapidly modernizing and increasingly competitive data-retrieval environment.
____________Der Satz ist ein Bild der Wirklichkeit (10/4/94)
