[ The five-year period of ‘peace’ in reality strengthens the
ability of the capitalists to wage class war, while severely limiting
the leverage of workers because of the no-strike clause in effect for
the contract’s duration.]
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IN FAILING TO STRIKE AT UPS, THE TEAMSTERS MISSED A BIG OPPORTUNITY
 
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Sam Gindin
August 22, 2023
Jacobin
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_ The five-year period of ‘peace’ in reality strengthens the
ability of the capitalists to wage class war, while severely limiting
the leverage of workers because of the no-strike clause in effect for
the contract’s duration. _

UPS delivers about 20 million packages a day in the U.S., making it
the second-largest ground courier behind the U.S. Postal Service., LM
Otero / Associated Press

 

There is a debilitating tendency on the Left to instantly judge
bargaining settlements as either sellouts or breakthroughs. But
neither the cynicism nor the cheerleading gets us very far in grasping
the actual significance of these agreements.

Sober assessments pivot on the relative weights given to context,
material gains, building the union, and contributing to broader
working-class consciousness and organization. But even here there are
differences that extend beyond “the facts.” More often than not,
disagreements reflect underlying divergences in political perspectives
and goals. Making these transparent is crucial to moving forward.

Measured in conventional union terms, the Teamster
[[link removed]]s
[[link removed]]-UPS
contract
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seems a clear Teamster victory. Backed by the threat to strike, the
union pretty much achieved the goals it set out at the start of
bargaining: no new concessions, some limits on overtime work, throwing
out a two-tier structure accepted in the last agreement, and
impressive wage increases of $7.50 an hour over five years across the
board, with $2.75 of that coming in the first year.

UPS also agreed to alleviate excessive heat conditions in trucks by
phasing in air-conditioning as trucks are replaced, to eliminate the
use of driver-facing cameras for surveillance, and to create 7,500
more full-time job opportunities for part-time workers (and fulfill
22,500 full-time job openings overall). That the union achieved all
this and more without having to make the sacrifices involved in a
strike can, from an individual workers’ perspective, be taken as an
added plus.

The Teamsters quickly declared the agreement “historic,” and the
broad left quite generally concurred. Notably, the Teamsters for a
Democratic Union [[link removed]] (TDU), the
longtime militant opposition in the union, hailed the agreement. Ditto
Labor Notes
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prominent since the late 1970s in the rank-and-file struggles for
internal democracy and militancy, and influential in the development
of TDU. _Jacobin_’s coverage has also been generally supportive of
the agreement, though a thoughtful article by Barry Eidlin
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raised important qualifications. (In the_ Nation_, Jane McAlevey
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labeled the agreement a “victory” but moved on to raise larger
questions posed by the settlement.)

“Historic” union victories rarely occur without testing the bosses
on a matter of principle through a protracted withdrawal of labor. The
agreement clearly includes significant gains, especially in monetary
terms, and it is no surprise that members voted to ratify the
contract, with an 86 percent yes vote
[[link removed]].
But the Left’s conspicuous and generally unreserved enthusiasm for
the agreement — very few exceptions aside — merits serious
questioning.

Looking Closer at the Agreement

Against the excited headlines about “ending two-tiers,” the
reprehensible secondary status for part-time workers — generally the
“inside” workers in the warehouses and a majority of the union
members at UPS — remains firmly in place, and the promise of more
full-time jobs is little more than a paper commitment. Also, warehouse
workers saw little or no attention paid to their working conditions.
How then do supporters of democracy and militancy so readily accept a
settlement, resolved without a strike, that limits workers’ active
resistance for five years?

_The Normalization of Part-Timer Status_

At the beginning of the 1960s, Jimmy Hoffa’s Teamsters accepted the
creation of a new category of workers: part-timers. Until 1982,
part-time warehouse workers received the same wages as full-time
drivers, but in the early 1980s the wages of the part-timers were
slashed and the gap between them and full-timers steadily increased.
This expansion of the proportion of part-timers with their
dramatically lower wages became a core part of the competitive
strategy of UPS.

In 1997, the then-reform-led Teamsters went on strike
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in large part to challenge this creation of a second class of workers
among their members. According to polls, the strike — popularly seen
as a reaction to the national growth in precarious labor — was
supported by the public at a ratio of two to one.

Today part-timers are a majority — 60 percent — of the Teamsters
membership at UPS. Five years from now, the hourly rate for most
part-timers
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will still be only slightly more than half the top rate for full-time
drivers ($26.25 for a part-timer with less than ten years vs $49 top
rate for the drivers). Based on research commissioned by TDU
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even if inflation was kept at 2 percent per year over the life of the
agreement, many part-timers will still be earning less in purchasing
power in 2028 than they did in 1982, a span of forty-six years.
Moreover, the agreement includes an entirely new tier among
part-timers themselves, with new hires starting at $21 an hour and
reaching $23 by the end of the contract.

The Teamsters did end a tier introduced in the previous agreement. The
Teamsters and UPS had worked out the creation of a new “hybrid”
category that the union subsequently defended as a transition to
full-time work; the now-infamous “22.4s” combined part-time
warehouse work with some driving and provided an intermediate wage
that fell between the part-time warehouse workers and full-time
drivers. The full-time drivers saw this as the introduction of a
lower-paid category that threatened to take more of their own work,
and closing down this second-tier of part-time drivers was angrily
demanded — and won — in the agreement.

But this came at the expense of a concerted focus on addressing the
far larger part-time/full-time differential in wages. That the
Teamsters set aside the move to close this gap at a moment when the
union had such great leverage reveals the extent to which their
inferior status has, sadly, been normalized. Defending this by
pointing to the significant monetary gains the part-timers received
misses a clear lesson of the labor movement of the past few decades:
the decisive long-term solidarity costs of tolerating the creation of
permanent secondary workers within and across workplaces.

_More Full-Time Jobs?_

The fight for increasing the number of job openings by reducing work
hours for full-time workers — so prominent in the early building of
the labor movement — has long been abandoned by organized labor.
Without the reduced work-time demand, negotiating more full-time jobs
is notoriously difficult. The classic example here is the promise,
contract after contract since the end of the 1970s, of “job
security” for United Auto Workers (UAW) members at the Big Three
(General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler/Stellantis) in exchange for
concessions. At the end of the day, the concessions accumulated, while
UAW membership at the Big Three fell by a stunning 80 percent, from
some 750,000 in 1978 to under 150,000 today.

Among other things, the number of full-time jobs is not entirely under
the control of individual corporations but affected by broader factors
like the state of the economy and competitive pressures. At UPS, the
Teamsters won a corporate pledge in 1997 to create ten thousand new
full-time jobs (two thousand a year over five years). This was given a
high profile in the media, but only a fraction of these jobs
materialized for part-timers (a fact less commented on by the same
media). And when James P. Hoffa’s administration wrested back
control of the Teamsters from reform leadership, it had little
interest in trying to hold the company to its commitments.

In any case, promises of adding full-time jobs are easy to fudge. For
one, in its 1997 “pledge,” the company “made clear that all
proposed increases in full-time employment under the new agreement
would be subject to growth in business
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More important, attrition alone would create more openings than the
promised “new jobs.” But if the part-timers moving up were simply
replaced with _new_ part-timers, the ratio of part-time to full-time
wouldn’t change (as it hasn’t over the past quarter century). Only
negotiating a declining _ratio _of part-timers to full-timers can
properly address more full-time jobs.

Some workers do want part-time work but opt for full-time only to
access the higher hourly wages. If the pay differentials were
significantly narrowed, this minority of workers might find part-time
more acceptable, while the corporate incentive for hiring part-timers
would be reduced.

_Working Conditions_

Talk to workers in any section of the labor movement, and the unifying
theme is, and has been for some time, that of the intensifying
pressures of work itself: speedup, stress, deterioration in health and
safety, exhaustion, disrespect. Yet this is rarely on the bargaining
agenda of unions or a cause for strike action. If anything, working
conditions and basic dignity on the job have been traded off — under
pressure of trying to maintain income — for wages and benefits (a
trade-off that is central to characterizing “business unionism”).

The Teamsters did, to their credit, address the heat conditions in UPS
trucks, even if this will have to wait for a turnover in trucks. But
the question of workloads for drivers did not come up, and the
production rates
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and health and safety of the predominantly part-time warehouse workers
seems to have had no priority at all. This too reinforces a
“two-tier” outlook.

_Five Years of __“__Peace”_

Corporations understandably dream of long-term agreements: by avoiding
union strikes for a longer period, it promotes corporations’
treasured “stability.” In the 1980s and ’90s, corporations
aggressively demanded, and got, longer contract durations. Ron Carey,
the reform president of the Teamsters during the 1997 UPS strike,
acknowledged that “the union made what he considered a major
concession in that agreement — it accepted a five-year contract
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The new contract continues the pattern of five years. During that
period the company will be constantly restructuring work and
increasing pressure on workers. The five-year period of “peace” in
reality strengthens the ability of the capitalists to wage class war,
while severely limiting the leverage of workers because of the
no-strike clause in effect for the contract’s duration. A worker
hired after this agreement is ratified and working at UPS for thirty
years can expect to go through bargaining six times in his work life,
with perhaps one or two of those culminating in a strike — hardly
the kind of involvement that can build a fighting union.

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* UPS/Teamsters Contract; UPS; Teamsters; US Labor;
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