How UPS and the Teamsters Staved Off a Strike—for Now

UPS和卡车司机如何阻止罢工——目前

On last Tuesday (July 25^th), the two sides (Teamsters and UPS) resumed talks and, after just a few hours, reached a surprise deal. The Teamsters’ negotiating committee announced that it had “reached the most historic tentative agreement for workers in the history of UPS.” Carol Tomé, the company’s C.E.O., called it a compromise “win-win-win” and boasted of having retained “the flexibility we need to stay competitive.” But it was hard not to see the agreement primarily as a win for the union. The draft contract included starting pay of twenty-one dollars an hour for part-timers hired after August 1st (up from around sixteen dollars) and raises for current part-timers based on seniority. Package-car drivers would earn a top rate of forty-nine dollars an hour. The old two-tier system for drivers was gone; there were provisions for air-conditioning in new vehicles, paid rest on Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, better ventilation in warehouses, and seven thousand five hundred new full-time jobs. The contract will not take effect unless a majority of union members vote to ratify it next month.

Some part-timers, who’d hoped for a starting base wage of twenty-five dollars an hour, felt disappointed by the tentative agreement. On social media, they posted stop-sign emojis to encourage others to vote down the proposal. “If our wages had kept up with inflation, it would be twenty-five dollars today,” Audrey Johnson, a sorter and a member of Local 177 in northern New Jersey, who plans to vote no, said: “That was a number we could have actually fought for in this contract.” (Fifty-five per cent of UPS employees are part time.) But other workers I spoke with were optimistic—and eager to review the contract language. “It looks like our union pulled it off,” Braswell said: “Hopefully, the rest of labor sees the victory.” Beyond the individual provisions of the agreement, he interpreted the present moment as a vindication of decades of organizing. The last—and only—time UPS workers went on strike, in 1997, the international president of the Teamsters was Ron Carey, who was known for his progressive organizing style. His successor, James P. Hoffa (yes, that Hoffa family), took a conservative, count-your-chickens approach. In 2018, Hoffa oversaw the negotiations of a contract so lacklustre that the membership voted to reject it. He then invoked a rule from the Teamsters’ constitution to put it into effect anyway. That betrayal, combined with the treacherous overtime of the pandemic, pushed many members to seek reform through Teamsters for a Democratic Union.

In 2021, T.D.U. helped elect a new slate of national leaders. Sean O’Brien, who became president, promised to fix unpopular sections of the Hoffa contract, give more power to rank-and-file members, and invest in new organizing—crucially, at Amazon, whose logistics division poses an increasing threat to UPS. “The Teamsters, for the longest time, have almost been like a shadow organization, staying in the background,” Vinnie Perrone, the president of Local 804, said. “Now you have a general president that’s out there, on social media, all media, and I think it’s great. I think other unions are feeling empowered.” Earlier this year, the Teamsters unionized drivers with California’s Battle-Tested Strategies, one of thousands of subcontracted “delivery service partners” Amazon relies on to make local deliveries. (They’re the ones in those ubiquitous navy-blue Sprinter vans.) Those workers went on strike this past month.

Lots of pickets are popping up these days—from Hollywood actors and writers to hotel workers and Starbucks baristas. The United Auto Workers union is preparing for a possible strike, in September, of nearly a hundred and fifty thousand members. As Audra Makuch, a labor educator in Massachusetts, said, “It’s the sexy face of labor and the traditional face of labor at the same time.” Across industries, people are tired, and tired of getting so little of the money accounted for in quarterly earnings reports. Inflation, congressional paralysis, climate change, and the real and symbolic threats of A.I. don’t help. “The strikes are drawing on a broader sense of unrest and instability and uncertainty in our society,” Ahmed White, a professor of labor law at the University of Colorado, said: “Where are things going to go? Where am I going to be? The current system, the one we’ve had in place for several decades now, isn’t working, and it isn’t something workers are content with.”

Whatever the causes, a “hot labor summer” does appear to be under way. Braswell felt slightly disappointed that UPS Teamsters would not be part of the action. “The reason I would want to strike is, I believe, right now, everything is falling into place,” he said. “The public is supporting us, the politicians, they seem to be on our side, and all the other unions are rallying around us.” On the left of the labor movement, strikes are sometimes treated (a little blithely, given the personal costs) as a good in and of themselves—the ultimate flex of the working class. In logistics, the potential of such a flex is indeed profound. A strike at UPS might very well have stunned, if not paralyzed, the flow of goods in the U.S. and beyond. Striking can humanize a workforce and expand seemingly narrow issues into a social cause. Not striking risks the inverse, as a movement shrinks to contract size. Reformers within the Teamsters will soon begin to vote on their tentative agreement, and they must confront a new challenge: How to keep up the energy of the fight when the fight is over?

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