FedEx
Loophole

Wait a minute. The United States post office paid FedEx $1.4 billion in fiscal 2010 to haul express and first-class mail on its cargo jets? A government monopoly is paying a private company to do what the private company is barred from doing while the post office is bleeding red ink like there’s no tomorrow? [...]

There’s been a significant development in the legal challenges over FedEx’s abuse of independent contractor statutes.  Joe Celentino of Courthouse News Service has the update:

It’s October…and we all know what that means: FedEx is in the news for being in hot water in Montana. In October 2009, the Helena Independent Record reported that Montana Attorney General Steve Bullock intended to sue the company if FedEx didn’t stop treating its Ground division drivers as “independent contractors,” stating the drivers appeared [...]

I was forwarded an email over the weekend from a friend and tea party activist which calls for a boycott of UPS and urges folks to use FedEx instead. And what, pray tell, did the 105-year-old UPS do to deserve being targeted for such financial pain by conservative activists? Well, nothing actually. This turns out [...]

When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight…but your express delivery service drops the ball….what do you do if you’re the express delivery service? Well, according to a recent court settlement, if you’re FedEx you blame it on al Qaeda. In a settlement reached with the government last week, FedEx agreed to pay a [...]

In recent column I noted that FedEx was slapped down in 2007 by California’s Second Court of Appeals for abusing the independent contractor law. To which a self-identified FedEx employee responded in an email that a more recent court decision upheld FedEx’s independent contractor method. Um, not really.

According to a story in today’s Memphis Commercial Appeal, “In the battle between rivals UPS and FedEx for dominance on Capitol Hill, an influential think tank on the influence of money in politics says FedEx has the ‘upper hand’ these days.” When it comes to lobbying, the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) reports that “FedEx [...]

The government, at all levels, would prefer that every worker work for the government so as to better control society. Fortunately, heavy-handed government bureaucracy, red tape and taxation have yet to quash the American entrepreneurial spirit. But don’t think they won’t keep trying.

As reported by the Memphis Commercial Appeal last week, FedEx and its pilots “secured labor peace, at least for another year or two, with union approval of contract amendments Wednesday.” The pact, hammered out by FedEx management and the Air Line Pilots Association in less than six months, was approved by about 68 percent of [...]

When I first created the FedExcess blog, it had nothing whatsoever to do with FedEx’s abuse of the Railway Labor Act – a form of corporate welfare allowing FedEx Express to classify its van drivers as 747 jumbo jet pilots, thus giving them an unfair advantage over competitors. But now that the effort to close [...]