Before Teamsters' UPS settlement and ratification, some background on the contentious negotiations

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One of the summer’s most important stories is that a Teamsters strike at UPS could be just six weeks away. It would be not only the first UPS strike since 185,000 workers walked out in 1997, but the biggest work stoppage of the 21st century, involving more than 340,000 workers.

In West Central Illinois, Teamsters leader Gregory Wheet, President of Teamsters Local 627 in Peoria, is watching developments closely.

“All Teamster agreements have a clause that protects members for honoring picket lines,” Wheet tells the Labor Paper. “I am not involved in negotiations, but what I’m hearing is the bargaining unit is sick and tired of the workload that they have to endure and, yes, they will picket if they have to.”

The Teamsters’ contract talks with UPS, the nation’s largest unionized private-sector employer, could be a defining moment in the struggle for family-sustaining jobs. Despite its enormous profits, UPS is managing its workers to extremes, demanding six-day work weeks from some full-timers while part-timers can be paid just $15.50 an hour for 3.5-hour shifts.

“We won’t really know until mid-July where things are at, but I think there’s obviously a different model that UPS wants to impose on its workforce,” said Joe Allen, a former Teamster in Chicago and Massachusetts for almost 10 years and author of “The Package King: A Rank and File History of UPS.”

“People call it ‘Uberization,’ or the digitizing of the UPS workforce,” he continued. “They want a much more casual workforce.”

UPS, once known as United Parcel Service, dates to 1907 when teenager James Casey started a bicycle messenger service in Seattle, expanding to packages in 1919. Later, Casey invited the Teamsters to represent its labor force.

Today, headquartered in Atlanta, UPS delivers about 24 million items a day, according to the Pitney Bowes logistics company. That’s some 6% of the country’s Gross Domestic Product, UPS says – millions more packages than a few years ago.

That’s boosted UPS’ yearly profits to about three times what they were before COVID – $8.6 billion in shareholder dividends and stock buybacks on $100 billion in revenues last year alone, and economists forecast $8.4 billion more this year.

Teamsters at UPS have serious issues:

■ time, particularly the pressure to make x-amount of stops a day,

■ company surveillance,

■ safety and working conditions in trucks that are sweltering or freezing, depending on the season,

■ forced overtime and split shifts,

■ improving pay for part-timers,

■ independent contractors such as using Personal Vehicle Drivers (PDV), and, especially,

■ the two-tier wage system that separates workers’ pay, benefits and hours, from clause 22.4 in the current contract, which expires July 31.

 

“The two-tier wage scale is a big issue for UPS as well as other workers across the country,” Wheet says.

Other carriers such as FedEx and DHL aren’t likely to accept more than about 10% of the daily volume from existing customers, according to Mark Solomon from the industry magazine FreightWaves, so there could be chaos in commerce.

But UPS CEO Carol Tome in an earnings call last summer downplayed the tension, saying, “Our goal with the Teamsters is win-win-win.”

Still, she ordered managers not to take time off in July or August and has indicated plans to try to keep operating with management employees and scabs.

“As far as what the corporate guys claim they will do if a strike happens,” Wheet says, “they should be thinking about the issues that their workforce is telling them and sit down and negotiate accordingly.”

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters has about 1.2 million members – and about one-fourth of them work at UPS’ package division or warehouses.

In 1997’s 15-day strike, the Teamsters won 10,000 additional full-time jobs and significant wage increases. In 2018, however, a Tentative Agreement was voted down by the rank and file, but the union’s administration – led by James Hoffa for almost 25 years – imposed it, with the two-tier language.

After the controversial move, Sean O’Brien – a fourth-generation Teamster who’d led Boston’s Local 25 since 2006 – broke with the Hoffa team and easily won the Teamsters presidency as the insurgent candidate and revived the membership, especially at UPS.

“The days of concessions and walking all over our members are over,” O’Brien said. “We’re going into these negotiations with a clear message to UPS that we’re not going past August 1.

 “It’s going to get bloody. It’s going to get painful,” O’Brien warned business leaders. “So, ice up, because when you take one of us on, you take all of us on. If you are corporate America and you want to take us on, put your helmet on and buckle your chinstrap, because it’s a full-contact sport.”

In Peoria – where Wheet makes clear Local 627 doesn’t represent UPS workers – he stresses the union’s unity.

“The Teamster union [locals] have one thing in common and that is solidarity,” he says. “We support all brothers and sisters who are on strike, trying to make a better life for their family.

“Currently, all labor organizations are inspired, and workers have had enough of taking it on the chin,” Wheet continues. “If the workers at UPS have to strike, it would have big implications nationwide, when you consider everything that they deliver each day.”

The implications go beyond the disruption of one corporation, said Allen, the ex-Teamster writer.

“A strike at UPS not only has the potential of putting into motion something like 340,000 workers, and shutting down a very important corporation,” he said. “It has the possibility of elevating the struggles that we’ve already begun to see throughout the industrial sector of the economy and some of the new organizing and the possibility of injecting that spirit and organizing into the larger non-union sector of the logistics industry, most notably Amazon.

“The potential for building a new industrial labor movement is here,” Allen added.

Back in Peoria, at Local 627’s building off Allen Road, Wheet adds, “The American worker, union and non-union alike, is fed up with Corporate America, and they feel it is time act to make a better life for them and their families!”