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JULY 6, 2023

Meyerson on TAP

What the Teamsters Are Really About

As a strike at UPS looms, the union's plans may encompass more than
winning a good contract.

The negotiations between the Teamsters and UPS have broken down, with
each side blaming the other for walking away from the table. The
prospects that the roughly 340,000 Teamsters who work for UPS could
strike when their current contract runs out on July 31 have obviously
risen, though given the vagaries of labor relations, you might want to
hedge your bets on that. (By the way, the media have taken to touting
the prospective strike as the largest in U.S. history, which it
wouldn't be: In 1959, 500,000 members of the United Steelworkers
struck the big steel companies and stayed off the job for a remarkable
116 days.)

Before the negotiations shuddered to a halt, the Teamsters issued press
releases noting the gains they'd already secured in the talks:
notably, UPS's agreement to air-condition its trucks, and to eliminate
or greatly reduce its "two-tier" employment model, under which some
workers have been paid less than the union norm. The two-tier model was
forced on the UAW members who worked for the Big Three auto companies
when they required a federal bailout in 2009; it then became a common
practice at other companies that browbeat their unions to accept it
during the following decade. As those companies recovered from the Great
Recession, those unions have sought to get the practice abolished, which
the Teamsters now appear to have done.

So, what are the outstanding issues that have yet to be resolved? I have
no insider information, but it stands to reason that the main issue for
the Teamsters-as it is for most American workers-is securing wage
increases that offset or exceed the rising costs of living, most
particularly of housing and food. In 2023, the issue of wages keeps
rising to the top of the heap. It came as a surprise that the
historically militant West Coast Longshore Union was able to reach an
early accord with employers on the fraught issue of the mechanization of
jobs performed by their members, but held out until the issue of their
members' wages-which are the highest of any blue-collar workers in
the nation-was settled to their satisfaction.

If wages are in fact the main outstanding issue for the Teamsters, does
that mean this is just traditional meat-and-potatoes bargaining? I think
not.

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The new regime at the Teamsters, headed by President Sean O'Brien,
clearly views its confrontation with UPS as crucial in itself, but also
to its hopes to organize Amazon (and, who knows, maybe rival FedEx,
too). Amazon workers have a very distinct set of needs. They're
disproportionately young, drawn to their jobs by the company's
higher-than-McDonald's pay rates, and the great majority of them stay
on the job for less than a year, so grueling are the pace and conditions
of the work. Many of the things that union contracts customarily
deliver-retirement benefits, health coverage, and so on-are of
little if any importance to them. They're there for the wages, and if
the Teamsters can deliver major raises to their members at UPS-who are
already paid several times what the Amazon workers make-that could
make the task of unionizing these transient Gen Zers a little less
daunting. It could also prompt FedEx workers to ponder why they're
making so much less than those UPS drivers schlepping the same kind of
packages that they're schlepping.

If the Teamsters can win that kind of victory at UPS, they'll be
better able to activate a slice of their membership to proselytize their
Amazon peers-and who know who else? By having let their members know
about what they've already won in the talks, they're laying the
groundwork for motivating members to a more militant posture, which
they'll need if they strike. A widely publicized big victory at UPS,
then, is a precondition for the union's future organizing.

In that sense, the Teamsters aren't just bargaining-and if comes to
that, they won't just be striking-for their own members. Like the
UAW of yore-and like no union since then-they're bargaining for
the American working class. That, as Joe Biden once said, is a big
fucking deal.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

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