UNITED STATES-LABOUR: Part-Time Workers Enjoy Rare Spotlight

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Aug 11 1997 (IPS) - The United Parcel Service (UPS) strike is putting the larger plight of part-time workers, the fastest growing segment of the U.S. labour force, in the limelight.

John Sweeney, head of the main U.S. labour coalition, has for years dismissed reports about greater job creation in this country by joking about one worker who, when confronted with what officials and the press hail as the ‘good news’, responded: “Yeah, I’ve got three of those jobs.”

For Sweeney, the president of the American Federation of Labour- Congress of Industrial Organisations (AFL-CIO), that quip is symbolic of the dilemmas confronting all sides in the U.S. labour market – a dilemma brought into sharp focus by the UPS strike, which involves 185,000 members of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

“The issue is going far beyond UPS,” Sweeney said in an interview on ABC television Sunday. “The workers are angry, they’re concerned…The economy looks very good, but our concern is that workers aren’t (receiving) their fair share.”

The strike, which entered its second week Monday with no negotiations expected between management and the Teamsters, has enjoyed widespread sympathy for drawing attention to part-timers. About 18 percent of the jobs in the United States are part-time labour. Roughly 60 percent of UPS workers are package sorters or loaders who work on a contingency basis and are paid roughly 10 dollars an hour as part-timers, even though many work 35 hours or more a week.

Teamster President Ron Carey contends that UPS must do more to bring the part-time workers – including some two-thirds of all union members – into full-time jobs, which pay twice as much and provide pensions and other benefits. Management rejects Teamster proposals to create some 10,000 such jobs over the next five-year contract, offering only to create 1,000 new full-time jobs while allowing part-timers to apply for any positions left vacant by retiring workers.

There may be a problem nationwide over part-time jobs, James Kelly, the UPS chairman, told ABC – but he claimed that the package-delivery giant was not part of that problem. “Part-time workers at UPS earn 11 dollars an hour (sic), they have a range of benefits and 25 paid vacation days a year,” he argued.

Despite management’s claims, part-timers who put in a standard, 40-hour workweek still earn less than 16,000 dollars a year, below the amount that a U.S. family of four would need to qualify for public welfare benefits, said Teamsters spokesman Steve Trossman. In one survey, he added, two-thirds of former UPS employees polled cited the lack of full-time prospects as their reason for leaving the company.

For years, industry analysts say, UPS has stood apart from other employers, who tend to provide no benefits at all to part- time workers. But the UPS dispute nonetheless shows how the low- wage, often temporary jobs have become a standard part of the U.S. workplace: Of the 46,000 jobs that the 300,000-worker company has added in the past four years, 80 percent were part-time positions.

The strike therefore is about a problem that hits “the pocketbooks of every working family,” Sweeney told a Teamsters rally last week. “Working families are being squeezed because companies are replacing good-paying, full-benefit, full-time jobs with low-paying, no-benefit, no-security, part-time jobs.”

“Part-time America won’t work,” argued Trossman. “We want to see the corporations in America, UPS included, create good jobs that Americans can live on. There are no part-time mortgages, and there are no part-time bills.”

Delivery giants like UPS and Federal Express stand out for using part-time workers, Trossman said, but the practice is equally common in retail stores and other service-sector businesses, where most of the recent U.S. job growth has been concentrated. “A lot of the big retail chains use far more than (the national average of) 18 percent part-time employees,” he said.

Many corporations contend that part-time labour is essential to the health of the economy. Some, like UPS, say that much of their work is done in a short span of time, such as the sorting and loading that is performed almost entirely in the early morning hours. Others say that their workforce consists largely of groups – particularly working women and students – who need flexible working hours to manage their households or maintain their studies.

These corporations present an irresistable target for organised labour, which has seen its percentage of the workforce fall from 35 percent in 1945 to about 15 percent today. Supermarkets, stores and package carriers are entirely domestic, and cannot threaten to send work to developing countries if labour costs are too expensive in the United States – a tactic that manufacturers and apparel firms have used to discourage worker unrest.

UPS “is in an industry that is particularly vulnerable to a strike,” said Carl Biers, director of the New York-based Association for Union Democracy. Responsible under normal conditions for 80 percent of U.S. package delivery by ground, UPS has lost as much as 80 million dollars each day of the strike, business analysts estimate. The company now faces the risk of permanently losing much of its business to Federal Express, Airborne Express or other carriers.

By contrast, companies that can threaten to relocate operations to Mexico may not be similarly vulnerable, Biers added.

It remains unclear what steps can be taken to rectify the growing imbalance between part-time and full-time labour. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin this week dismissed any idea that the “rigid regulations” by which European governments seek to equalise the two categories would be considered here. Such policies, Rubin argued, could lead to the double-digit unemployment seen in Europe.

“I don’t think we’re calling for government regulation at this point,” the Teamsters’ Trossman cautioned. For now, the question of part-time work continues to be discussed at a level rarely seen in recent labour disputes.

Sweeney last year despaired that median family income had fallen by five percent between 1989 and 1994, even though corporate profits had surged by 205 percent since 1980. Now, in the figure of the part-time worker contrasted by a booming Wall Street, Sweeney may have found the symbol for his revamped labour movement.