US-LABOUR: UPS Strike Is a Key Turning Point

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Aug 5 1997 (IPS) - A strike by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters against the United Parcel Service (UPS), the largest U.S. package-delivery company, is shaping up to be a major test of organised labour’s strength, union analysts say.

“This is the largest group of Teamsters in the whole union, and they’ve never gone on a nationwide strike before,” says Carl Biers, director of the Association of Union Democracy, a New York- based group which monitors the labour movement. If the strike is successful, he argues, it could go beyond the Teamsters and embolden other unions to organise their membership.

The strike, begun at midnight Sunday when UPS management and the Teamsters failed to agree on improvements in full-time employment, pay and pensions, ended its second full day Tuesday without any new negotiations between the two sides.

Teamster officials say the strike is being widely observed by the union’s 185,000 UPS workers, as well as by large numbers of the more than 100,000 non-union employees and the 2,000 members of the International Pilots Association who fly UPS goods. According to UPS officials, only some 3,000 workers of its overall workforce of 300,000 have crossed the picket line in the strike’s first two days. The company is almost at a standstill, with management officials delivering only a small proportion of the roughly 12 million parcels shipped on an average day.

“I don’t see how UPS can withstand a strike for much longer, given that the overwhelming majority of the workers honoured the picket line,” Biers says. “They’re losing billions of dollars.”

But one UPS manager, speaking on condition of anonymity, doubts the strike can last long. “They asked for more pay, and we’re offering more pay; they asked for more benefits, and we’re offering a UPS pension plan,” he says. “There’s not that much to fight about.”

For the Teamsters, however, one crucial issue stands out: UPS’s reliance on part-time labour, which accounts for 60 percent of the workforce. Some 120,000 Teamsters, or two-thirds of the union’s membership represented in UPS, are only part-time workers. Although the part-timers often put in as many hours as regular staff, they are paid an average of 10 dollars an hour. By contrast, full-time workers earn roughly 20 dollars an hour, and also have pension and health plans.

UPS argues that, in the modern economy, it needs to maintain a pool of “flexible” part-time workers who can meet its needs on a contingency basis. Dave Murray, UPS’s chief negotiator, says that about 13,000 workers moved from part-time to full-time jobs over the past four years, but adds, “We don’t anticipate the same growth in jobs over the next five years.”

Teamsters President Ron Carey has insisted that the company do better, by creating another 10,000 full-time jobs over the next five years, as well as by raising the pay of both full-time and part-time staff by as much as 2.50 dollars an hour.

UPS may have anticipated a short fight, since its last strike, in 1994, lasted only one hour and did not attract the support of all the Teamsters employed in the workforce. Last week, when the 90-year-old parcel company offered to include the union workers, who participate in a Teamsters pension fund, in a purportedly better-paying UPS pension plan, management clearly thought it had outflanked the union. “The people in the workforce wanted our pension plan, but it was only the union that opposed it,” says the UPS manager.

What UPS was not counting on was stiff opposition from the revitalised Teamsters, a union previously noted for its corruption but led since a 1991 government-monitored election by Carey, a reformist. “Carey has tried to make the union more participatory,” Biers says, and has distinguished himself from previous Teamster bosses by avoiding secret negotiations with management.

The Teamster president not only has the union rank and file watching him to see whether he secures a strong agreement, but is also being pressured by charges that he may have won a close election last year against James Hoffa Jr with illegal campaign funds. A federal monitor, Barbara Zack Quindel, will have to rule whether the Teamster election was legitimate, and, if not, if it will have to be re-run. If that happens, Biers says, it could certainly help Carey’s re-election chances if he can present his union with a major victory against UPS.

For the time being, the other major hope UPS had in ending the strike quickly – federal intervention by President Bill Clinton – is unlikely. Although Clinton is empowered to force strikers back to work under conditions of national emergency, the White House says it does not feel that the present strike meets that standard. Analysts add that Clinton may be unwilling to offend a major union whose political wing – the Teamsters Political Action Committee – last year contributed more than 2.5 million dollars to Democratic Party candidates for Congress.

“UPS is a very important company to our country, and there are a lot of employees there, and I hope that they’ll go back to the table,” Clinton said Monday. “But at this time, I don’t think further action by me is appropriate.”

Still, more companies than just UPS are feeling the pinch, since the carrier moves about 3 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product each year. The longer UPS trucks remain idle, economists say, the more likely it is that factories will wait for parts, finished products will be unable to make it into stores – and the economy overall could decline.