First there is the favoritism. Certain employees get special treatment for kissing up, Others are treated unfairly because they don't tow the line and keep their heads down. This problem goes from the first day workers right up through the ranks. Even management has this issue. As long as you play company politics you can get what you want. Working hard and asking for things will rarely get you anything. To the point that anyone who starts out as a hard worker just becomes lazy. There is no reason to work hard when the alcoholic who's late every day gets everything that you've been asking for while you get snubbed.
Secondly, Corruption. Union Representatives (Shop Stewards) who have been around a long time tend to be corrupt. They are untouchable by management so they tend to be extremely lazy and unwilling to do anything to improve your work conditions. Failure to report management doing union employee work, Sitting on the job, Failure to report safety hazards and even causing safety hazards are just a few things. But the real problem is how they ignore problems that management should fix and in return management gives them the job they want to do and ignores the laziness. Nothing like having a 50+ year old lazy overpaid jerk doing a fast paced job slowly and causing the rest of the team to have to pick up the slack.
Third, Safety. I have never worked in a job as unsafe as the UPS location i'm at now. On a weekly bases we have a truck driver pull off the doors with an employee in the trailer. It has caused injuries in the past and yet the core of the problem has not been addressed. They value speed over safety. Equipment is horribly outdated and under repaired. Steel rollers that carry hundreds of pounds of packages have cracks and broken supports and are never repaired even after as much as a year of asking for it. Dangerously unsafe floors, There is no non-slip protection anywhere. the floors are all smooth concrete that gets soaked with the slightest rain, They say that the reason for this is because we are supposed to have non slip soles (we do by the way). The floor is even dangerous with non slip soles and although a simple rubber mat in some places would fix the issues they instead prefer to maintain a dangerous condition.
Oh, you might as well forget about safe work practices. They'll make sure you have safe lifting procedures drilled into your skull but you better not actually try to be safe. That's too slow. Load stands? too slow. Lifting with your legs? too slow. Team lift? bwahahaha. All you need to do is memorize the safety manifesto so that we can pretend to be safe at the audit.
Oh and you better hope there isn't a fire. Because of the speed over safety attitude we just run the conveyor at ridiculous rates that overwhelm the guy that has to do 2 employees worth of work so that packages are falling over the floor and blocking egress. That's ok. as long as we make PPH.
This is the worst job you will ever have. It's a revolving door. i've been here over 2 years and there has been a non stop hiring cycle ever since. they cannot keep employees. and for good reason. Anyone who isn't desperate gets out of here as fast as they can.