In 1975, Arthur built a $750,000 recreation center next to the executive offices as a monument to the new covenant of respect. Replete with pool, sauna, gyms, weightrooms, and tennis and bocce-ball courts, it's free to every A-P-A employee. In addition, every year there are picnics and dinner dances. And every five years, Arthur throws a special party for the entire company. This year, for example, he's chartered the entire Queen Elizabeth II for a three-day float to nowhere and offered a trip to Las Vegas as an alternative. "I work at it," Arthur says. "I'm always asking myself if I'm treating my people right. I want them to know they're appreciated."
It's hard to imagine that this is the same wild man who used to throw his own hat on the ground and stomp it flat, who used to convene meetings with his men by jumping on the back of a truck, shaking his fist and shouting, "Listen here, you bastards!"
"I'm a lot calmer now," Arthur says. "That kind of behavior just doesn't work. It drives the good men away with the bad. The lessons of the '50s were invaluable. We learned to talk with our employees." Arthur and his employees hand't exactly fallen in love with one another, but he had taken a step in the right direction. "I saw it as kind of a primus inter pares," Arthur says, "where I would still be first." Over the next five years, Arthur engineered a system that would nourish and protect the fragile relationship.
During the winter of 1958, A-P-A opened a terminal in Reading, Pa., its first outside North Bergen. Arthur and one of the Reading employees were working together to clear the yard after a snowstorm. "No matter what we did," Arthur recalls, "shovel snow, move a truck, all this guy could do was complain. He certainly didn't want to work."
Too little thought, Arthur began to realize, was being given to the hiring process. It was too haphazard, too much was taken for granted. Given the job security built into the labor agreement with the unions, Arthur felt it was essential to screen prospective employees carefully. "Marriage," says Arthur, "is not nearly as close, especially these days, as the working relationship of an employee with an employer under today's labor agreement in the motor freight industry." So that year, Arthur sketched in the rough outline of the selection process that today produces an A-P-A "Ace."
Burt C. Trebour, A-P-A's director of labor and personnel, says that out of every 100 applicants, 4 become job candidates, and out of those 4, 2 are finally hired. The culling begins even before the application form is completed. The personnel department subscribes to 30 newspapers from cities and towns where A-P-A has a terminal. Any time an arrest is listed, for whatever reason, that person's name and the information are transcribed on three-by-five file cards for future reference. Even the original newspaper clippings are preserved. Indexed and cross-referenced, the total file now contains 750,000 names and takes about 20 seconds to check. Before this check took hold, 1 out of every 4 1/2 applicants had a criminal record. Today, it's about 1 in 35. "The word gets around," Trebour says.
Provided his name doesn't pop up in the criminal file, and provided his application form isn't full of holes, and also provided that he gets through a 20-minute interview with Trebour and a polygraph test in states where they're allowed, the future A-P-A truck driver has one week of orientation with no pay and two weeks of on-the-job training during which he rides one specific route with an experienced driver. "I would prefer the person who comes here," Trebour says, "to have never driven a truck before. That way he hasn't picked up any bad habits."
When the training ends, the driver begins his probationary period. This period is set by the prevailing labor agreement and at A-P-A varies between 15 and 33 days. At the North Bergen terminal, for example, it's 15 days. A prospective employee can be fired peremptorily during the probationary period. After that, his relationship with the company is governed by the union contract.
For those 15 days, the prospective driver works his training route alone like any other A-P-A veteran. His productivity is measured on a daily basis and on the 10th day one of the company's industrial engineers rides with the man and does a thorough time-and-motion study. At the same time, the terminal manager and the dispatchers are also evaluating his performance. As the probationary period draws to a close, the man gets a series of back x-rays and a urinalysis for drug abuse. Then he's interviewed once more by the personnel department. "Everybody, all down the line, has to want him," Trebour says. And even then, he's not home free. There's one more interview to go and that's with a member of senior management.
For years Arthur himself conducted the ultimate hour-long interview, which also means that during that time he hired every A-P-A employee personally. He's very serious about the interview," Trebour says. "I've seen him hold them from his sickbed, in the back seat of his car, and in front of the New York Athletic Club." Arthur asks questions about a man's habits, his relationship with his brothers and sisters, his marriage; he wants to know him heart and soul."Every man chosen right," Arthur once said, "can have the most singularly dramatic and forceful effect on impacting productivity favorably." And further, "The successful candidate becomes quite proud that he's been selected in preference to many others. This helps to underpin a strong spirit within the company that we aim to be the very best."
A-P-A entered the '60s as a company greatly different from the one jolted by turmoil only five years earlier. Of course, it was bigger, having passed $1 million in gross revenues in 1958 for the first time. It had opened its first out-of-state terminal and, in the years ahead, would aggressively expand its service area in the Northeast and into the mid-Atlantic states. But more important than sheer physical size, A-P-A had changed qualitatively. Since every piece of freight required 225 individual actions involving up to 100 people, cooperation was mandatory. "Before, it was just tough, physical work done any way we could," Arthur says, "but in the '60s we learned to work through others, to coordinate the efforts of everyone."
