WASHINGTON—The plight of part-time UPS drivers and warehouse workers, who are approximately half the firm’s workforce, has become a key issue in the Teamsters’ struggle with UPS.
With talks resuming on July 24, after company bargainers walked out at 4 am on July 5, a forced strike by the 340,000 Teamsters members that work for UPS looms ever larger.
Union President Sean O’Brien, who ran on a reformist and more-confrontational platform, especially against UPS, repeatedly warns that when the contract expires at midnight July 31, UPS will have brought the strike on itself by forcing his members to walk.
Conditions for the part-timers are a big reason, part-timer Josh Medina of Local 243 in Detroit and full-timer Ben Quick of Local 38 in Everett, Wash., told a People’s World town hall. Joe Henry, a veteran of the last big Teamsters strike against UPS, joined them.
“The company sat around for two weeks,” Medina said. “I don’t know if they’ll meet our demands” when talks resumed. “It’s more and more apparent how greedy they are.”
The Teamsters documented UPS greed in a commissioned study by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: Revenues topping $100 billion yearly, and a 13% profit margin. Economists, and UPS, expect those figures to increase.
Workers demand the promotion of part-timers to full-time jobs, more hours, and more predictable schedules for any remaining part-timers—especially in warehouses—and higher pay.
“We had to work as fast as possible in three and a half to four hours with boxes piling up everywhere,” on a part-time shift, Medina said. “Starting wages are very low and it takes nine months” on the job “before you can get health care benefits.”
That’s important because, as he put it, “It’s a hectic pace and an unsafe pace” in the warehouses.
But UPS refuses to promote part-timers to full-time, a key Teamster demand in the talks. They’re also forced to work overtime and have been ever since the coronavirus pandemic officially began more than three years ago.
They’re demanding full-time work, at predictable hours, rather than having to take two jobs just to survive, the workers said.
Unacceptable wage offer
The company’s response, at least before the talks resumed, was an unacceptable wage offer, though it agreed to eventually air-condition the UPS trucks. That could take five years, Henry said. It didn’t mention the warehouses’ working conditions.
Instead, UPS bosses turned to the White House to jawbone a contract on the workers—under federal labor law, imposing a contract is illegal, except for railroad and airline workers.
In a letter the U.S. Chamber of Commerce initiated and co-signed by national and local corporate lobbies—including the National Retail Federation, a Wal-Mart front, and lobbies for trucking firms, railroads, and anti-worker construction contractors—the bosses asked Biden to intervene and “provide the support necessary” to get the union and UPS to settle.
The letter raised bogeyman threats of massive harm to the U.S. economy and noted that UPS’s competitors in shipping packages, including FedEx, the Postal Service, and Yellow Freight, do not have the capacity to handle UPS’s share.
The administration “successfully utilized its formal and informal convening power in the past year to help parties reach agreements in both the railroad and West Coast port terminal contract negotiations,” the bosses’ letter said.
The Teamsters picked up key national and international support. The national support comes from the Independent Pilots Association, the separate union for UPS’s 3,400 pilots. President Robert Travis wrote O’Brien that if UPS forces the Teamsters to strike, the pilots will not cross their picket lines. That grounds UPS’s air force, literally.
“In the 1997 IBT strike, 100% of our pilot group respected your picket lines by not ’turning an aircraft wheel’ on behalf of the company,” Travis wrote.
“Just as we did in 1997, the IPA is committed to exercising our contractual rights, both domestically and internationally, to honor any potential IBT strike and act in sympathy with our fellow workers at UPS by not working. “No one wants a work stoppage, but should a legal IBT strike be initiated, you and the IBT can count on the IPA for support.”
And Henry, a veteran of the last long Teamsters strike against UPS, reported 118 international transportation unions are prepared to walk out in solidarity, too. That’s important because more than a tenth of UPS revenues comes from overseas operations.
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