issues

32 MIN. DELAY TIME - The 32 min. delay time go hand in hand with the production standard. The standard is so high that if you go back for an item or if you drop your pallets you lose time. There are many obstacles to order selecting crowded aisles, recieving pallets in your way, new order selectors in the way. All these things are time consuming obstacles that we are not given time for. The company claims that it has given us 32 min. of delay time engineered into our orders, but nobody in management seems to know how it works. This problem is exclusively a grocery warehouse dept. problem. No other warehouse in the facility has this 32 min. delay time in their standard. Ironically the grocery warehouse is the largest warehouse in the facility and by far more production is pumped out of there than any other warehouse.

OUR REMEDY - Get rid of this so called 32 min delay time. Give us actual delay time as it occurs not in the form of a phantom engineered standard.

AUDIT POLICY - The audit policy is totally unfair. Summit has what they call a 90 second audit in which 5 cases are randomly audited. There is no set standard for this audit in other words you could be audited by 5 different auditors on the same order and you could be audited all day long as many times as they want. If you get them all right throughout the day, week, month, year they don't count, but if you get one bad you're automatically disciplined and/or terminated. We strongly feel that this is unfair and totally in the company's favor.

OUR REMEDY- Count every audit good or bad if you get one bad then one good removes the bad and visa- versa.

BREAKS- We work a 4-10 shift if we work more than 10 hrs. we should get a 15 min. break every 2 hrs. worked. Not at Summit they save money anyway they can. We must work 2 hrs. over to get a break at the end of our 10 hr. shift. In other words if we only work an hour and 45 minutes over we don't get a break. Which means we sometimes work almost 5 hrs. without a break. And we still have to maintain the production standard. This is unacceptable

OUR REMEDY- It's simple give us a 15 min. break if we work more than 10 hrs.

WARM UP TIMES- In the frozen dept. our brothers and sisters work in temperatures well below freezing. They are not given adequate time to thaw themselves out. They are subject to longer periods in the freezer box which not only makes it unhealthy, but unsafe. They are also on high standards and not given time to gear up or gear down.

OUR REMEDY- We want warm up time for our frozen dept. and delay time to gear up and gear down.

DRIVER HOURLY WAGE- Every driver in the grocery industry is paid an hourly wage except for Summit drivers. They pay our drivers piece work/activity base salaries. They are paid by the number of trailers that they haul . They have to work 13-15 hrs. per day to make a decent living which makes it not only unsafe for the driver, but for the public at large. Like everything mentioned Summit wants to hang on to this activity base, because they're saving lots of money. And if they're saving lots of money that means they're ripping off the drivers. Martin Street was quoted in the Stockton Record as saying "It would cost millions to change the way they want us to change". Those millions rightfully belong to the drivers.

OUR REMEDY- Pay our drivers an hourly wage just like the rest of the industry pays it's drivers.

EMPLOYER RIGHTS- The high production standards, audit policy, unfair break schedules, for both the grocery and frozen depts. and the activity base pay all came about because Summit was able to implement these programs/policies at will, and we were powerless to stop them under our current contract. We understand that the company has a right to be competetive and to make a profit, but not at the expense of it's workers. The unrealistic working conditions that we work under should never have become policy. Our futures are at stake now.

OUR REMEDY-We want a say when implementing new policies and procedures. Up to this point it's been in the company's favor and it's taken a heavy toll on our workers.