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JULY 27, 2023

Meyerson on TAP

Will the Teamsters' Gains at UPS Help Them Unionize Amazon?

The wage increases matter, but banning the constant surveillance of
workers should really resonate with Amazon employees.

Ever since he prevailed over the incumbent regime in last year's
Teamster presidential election, Sean O'Brien has been clear that the
union had a twofold goal in its bargaining with UPS, where 340,000
Teamsters were employed. The Teamsters were out not just to win sizable
gains for their members, but to make those gains so significant that
they'd bolster the union's prospects for its next, decidedly
herculean, venture: unionizing Amazon.

Did the agreement that the union reached with UPS on Tuesday accomplish
that goal? Could be-but chiefly because of some provisions that
haven't been widely reported.

The wage increases that UPS felt compelled to agree to were real, but
some reporting has indicated that at least some members were expecting,
or at least hoping for, more. (UPS-employed Teamsters will vote on the
proposed contract next month.) The starting hourly wage for part-time
employees, who constitute roughly half of the company's unionized
workforce, will rise from $16.25 to $21-a major hike, but less than
the $25 for which one group of members was advocating.

But I don't think the wage increases are really the key to convincing
Amazon's hundreds of thousands of warehouse and trucking employees to
sign up with the Teamsters. The wage differential between UPS and Amazon
employees working equivalent jobs will have some impact, but Amazon has
shown a willingness to raise wages when it needs to. But then, its
entire business model is based on attracting workers because it may pay
more than the local competition, and, knowing it can always hire their
successors, compelling them to quit in less than a year because working
conditions are so onerous and exhausting. Which is why some other,
non-wage-related provisions of the proposed UPS contract will likely
prove especially compelling to Amazon employees.

The first is the company's agreement to air-condition its trucks,
which one driver memorably compared to microwave ovens. The heat in
Amazon warehouses has long made work there gratuitously uncomfortable
and frequently dangerous, so the Teamsters' ability to compel UPS to
invest in AC can only bolster the union's cred. More significant still
is the contract's elimination of the company's surveillance cameras
trained on the drivers, whose every move had been monitored by UPS
supervisors. That, I'd think, would hold particular importance in
Amazon warehouses, where workers' every step, every pause, and overall
speed rates are continually monitored and recorded by Amazon's
high-tech system of cameras-a Yeatsian rough beast with "a gaze blank
and pitiless as the sun."

Amazon's workers are subjected to the same dystopian surveillance that
official America decries when China's government inflicts it on its
citizenry. But now that the same technological capacity enables American
employers to subject their workers to this dehumanizing and abusive
surveillance, it takes a powerful union to free such workers from this
21st-century Taylorism. (California has enacted a law banning companies
from using metrics based on such surveillance to punish workers, but it
doesn't ban the surveillance itself.) I suspect that this feature of
the UPS contract will be one of the Teamsters' major selling points as
they hope to roll the union on to Amazon.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

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