Empire of Illusion - Chris Hedges [75]
Anthony Vasquez is a student at Berkeley. Sitting on the steps of Berkeley’s Kroeber Hall on a sunny evening, he describes his experience with positive psychology at FedEx Kinko’s, a photocopy and printing store. He has hazel eyes and messy black hair, and he is wearing corduroys and a brown mountaineer jacket. He worked at FedEx Kinko’s for about two years and was “always called negative, a com plainer, and not a team player.”
Vasquez recalls that his store’s slogan was “Yes We Can.” “It meant that if a customer asked us to do a job for them, no matter what it was, we were to say, ‘Yes We Can!’” Posters of the slogan were posted near telephones and around the back room. Corporate auditors would phone the store to make sure employees said, “Yes we can!” to every request. Employees would be punished as a group for failures, and individuals could be fired. Other slogans included, “Winning by engaging the hearts and minds of every team member” and “I promise to make every FedEx experience outstanding.”
Vasquez tells about the scandal that ensued when his trainee, Sam, was fired. The store managers did not announce the dismissal but kept Sam on the schedule to make it appear that Sam was skipping work. The managers then used this as grounds for Sam’s removal. After two weeks and several conversations with Sam, Vasquez wrote “Fired” in pencil under Sam’s name on the schedule. The store managers were outraged. They called Vasquez into the office and reprimanded him with a “Positive Discipline Documentation Form.” He was charged with defacing company property and slandering Sam.
“The document explained how I had made ‘false or malicious statements’ against Sam,” says Vasquez. “I told [the managers] they were being duplicitous and that nothing I wrote had been false or malicious. I told them that if they wanted to make ‘our organization a success, ’ they could start by paying me a fair wage. I went on and on until they both threw their hands in the air and told me to stop being difficult. I told them that I wasn’t the one being difficult. They stared hard at me and said reluctantly, ‘We know.’” Vasquez signed the document and left the office.
“It must have been in 2006, the company was holding another mandatory meeting for ‘team members,’ which is what they call us,” he says. “I went with a couple of co-workers to Fresno, where we met a lot of other employees from various stores in northern California. . . . [T]he meeting took place in this rented room, and the woman from corporate had all these toys, markers, and candy in the middle of each table. The first thing she had us do was organize ourselves according to duration of employment at the company. While in this line, we had to introduce ourselves and say how long we had been working. The girl on the far end had been hired two months prior; the man on the other had been with the company for almost twenty years.”
Some of his co-workers didn’t like having to reveal that they had spent a lifetime working at FedEx Kinko’s. But the corporate manager tried to muster up corporate pride. “She spun it so hard I felt dizzy,” says Vasquez. “‘Isn’t this wonderful?! We have such a wide range of great team members. This really shows what a great place this is to work, and how you can make a career here!’ she said.”
One man stared at the floor in anger and embarrassment. “[I]f he had said anything, she would have e-mailed his center manager and he would have been written up and probably denied a raise. By the way, raises are twenty-five cents a year.
“The purpose of the meeting was, her euphemisms aside, to push merchandise and services onto customers that they didn’t want. I believe it’s called up-selling. She wanted us to talk about our positive customer service experiences. Most of us struggled with this, as nearly all of our experiences with customers and the company had been extremely negative and