Lead Article from News and Letters newspaper
October 1997
UPS strike awakens passions in contingent army of workers
by Bob McGuire
The September strike of transit workers against Bay Area Rapid
Transit (BART) gained added significance as the first major display
of the state of labor after the UPS strike. Workers fought BART not
only over wages, but for an end to a permanent two-tier wage system.
To do so, the rank and file had earlier tossed out local union
officials who had negotiated concessions in the last contract.
What the strike achieved was considerable: an end to the permanent
two-tier system limiting workers hired since 1995 to 90% of the full
wage; compression of the timetable to receive full wages to three
years; and 4% annual wage increases.
BART management counted on rider inconvenience and its publicizing
what it called bloated union wages to isolate the strikers. But what
a BART workers wrote in News & Letters during a 1979 strike "We
aren't overpaid, other workers are underpaid" summed up what struck
a chord with the public in 1997. Plenty of commuters, even while
enduring hours-long alternate routes into San Francisco, expressed
support for the strikers.
A turning point for labor?
What focused our eyes on the BART strike was the question of whether
the Teamster victory at UPS has carved out space for labor to
operate once again, after two decades of economic restructuring
under relentless corporate and government attack.
Labor victories have been scattered since the era of giveback
contracts which began with Chrysler and the UAW in 1979, and the
growth of non-union trucking unanswered by the Teamsters after
President Jimmy Carter deregulated the industry. Reagan opened the
floodgates by crushing and replacing the PATCO air traffic
controllers who struck in 1981, and got away with it as Mechanics
honored their no-strike clause in union contracts with the airlines.
As we learned a whole new vocabulary-"replacement workers,"
"lockout," "give-backs," "two-tier" and "contingent workers" Nthe
number of strikes so plummeted that corporate cheerleaders have
crowed that the strike weapon was ancient history.
UPS had reason to feel in command as it faced the strike that began
on Aug. 4. The corporation had hauled in a billion-dollar profit in
1996 from which to build a war chest, while the strike fund for
185,000 Teamsters at UPS was essentially depleted. The 80% of the
package delivery business controlled by UPS could not be absorbed by
all its competitors combined. The company had made full-timers a
minority of the UPS workforce with a flood of part-time hires since
the 1993 contract. As arrogantly as UPS had unilaterally increased
the package weight limit form 70 to 150 pounds, it stuck to what it
called its "last, best, final offer" until the day it offer
something better as the strike entered the third week.
To the astonishment of UPS, picket lines were at least 95% solid
nationwide, from union towns to right-to-work Southern states. The
Teamsters had held months of pre-strike meetings and rallies
involving rank-and-filers. Credit also strike issues that for the
first time in years drew support from the public at large as the
struggle became a referendum on part-time life and on untrammeled
corporate greed.
The UPS carnival pitch-man appeal to workers, by promising a higher
pension than what they would get with the portable, region-wide
multi-employer fund, was transparent even to the public as a simple
pension grab. The great division UPS had created in its workforce
between full-time and part-time was supposed to undermine strike
solidarity as well.
UPS finally caved in to Teamster demands after a show of solidarity
from other AFL-CIO unions committed to loaning the Teamster pension
fund enough to maintain the strike. After their new offer was when
Clinton intervened. He who had Taft-Hartley in his hands predicted
erosion of support if Teamsters rejected the offer, ending the
possibility of further gains.
But strikers returned to work with a victory. They had defended
themselves against UPS demands to subcontract out the semitrailer
runs and to grab their pension money. They had began making inroads
into the dominance of part-time jobs at UPS with contact language
that, in addition to 10,000 promotions into full-time, 10,000 new
full-time positions would be stitched together out of existing
part-time jobs if business didn't drop. The likely outcome is a
drop of part-time workers from 57% to under half the
workforce by the end of the five-year contract. The contract length,
less than the seven years the company had demanded but still one
year longer, is the concession that workers say UPS really wanted.
UPS an industry leader in exploitation
UPS had been resisting converting even back-to-back part-time shifts
into full-time jobs, saying shifts or four hours or less were more
"efficient." That betrays the underlying intensification of
part-time shifts-UPS made workers sprint not jog for three hours,
then recover on their own time. They get "volunteers" to come back
for extra hours just to afford to eat. Split shifts in the
comparable railroad industry were abolished in the strike of 1919.
Part-time starting wages rose for the first time since 1982, just
50c, to $8.50 per hour, but the maximum increased $4.10 an hour, a
full dollar more than the full-time increase of $3.10 an hour,
which, though just about 3% a year, is more than double management's
"last, best, final offer."
Teamster President Ron Carey publicly marked as the union's goal,
following on the heals of the UPS victory, organizing Federal
Express which had lobbied Congress to make it immune to any union
election except a national all-or-nothing vote. But attention
focused immediately on Carey's 1996 election being overturned by the
government election monitor. UPS whined that that announcement
should not have been withheld until the strike was over.
Oddly enough, the Teamster opposition behind James Hoffa Jr. voiced
an identical protest, in effect regretting that UPS wasn't given
another weapon to use against the strike.
Since the Hoffa spokesman is a LaRouchite named Leebove, we can't
help but be reminded of the 1980s reign of mob-connected,
FBI-protected then-President Jackie Presser who brought in the
classically fascist LaRouche organization to try to disrupt
Teamsters for a Democratic Union and any other rank-and-file
challenges to his autocratic rule.
Meanwhile the fledgling trucking company Overnite arose unchallenged
after deregulation as the model for non-union trucking companies,
closely followed by the growth of non-union subsidiaries of
unionized outfits. Only now and belatedly are the Teamsters doing
organizing that we would expect of any union, and with widespread
rank-and-file involvement winning elections at dozens of Overnite
barns.
New economy, new revolt?
The best proof that the UPS strike created new openings is the
effort by business spokesmen to prove that this strike was unique
and could have no offspring. The most comical reason given for
victory at UPS is that people liked their UPS drivers. Considering
that when companies can sow divisions, strikes divide workers,
neighbors, even families.
Another argument heard for the union's success was that "UPS
couldn't threaten to move Mexico." This ignores that fact that,
after the first wave of runaway shops to the right-to-work South or
Mexico or China, even more companies demanded conditions like to
those in runaway shops-without moving.
That is what the low-wage, part-time workforce is about, and the UPS
demand to subcontract semitrailer runs. Even cities act like runaway
shops, as Chicago's latest budget again threatens more privatization
for municipal workers.
Another claim is that UPS lost because they couldn't use replacement
workers, either because the routes were too complicated or because
unemployment was too low. All that belittles the accomplishments of
UPS strikers who maintained solidarity across all company-created
divisions and maintained links with other unions and rank and
filers, and whose demands registered even with people who weren't
involuntarily part-time themselves. If Caterpillar dared replace
skilled mechanics, or disrupted the airlines and endangered the
skies for years by firing uniquely trained PATCO strikers, give
credit to the worker and public support for UPS not going that
route.
After all, the 4% unemployment rate was already a sham and a severe
undercount before considering new workfare workers. UPS had at the
time of the strike already become a dominant private employer of
workfare workers, slotted into part-time jobs.
As to the claim that manufacturing shop floor conditions are not
relevant to a service sector employer like UPS, how does one tell
sorters and loaders who handle upwards of 1,200 parcels an hour that
they aren't in a factory. When it suits them, capitalists treat
every kind of human labor as one, and service workers have been hit
hard by two decades of economic restructuring.
Service workers step up
Sixty years ago clerks at Woolworth with an affinity for the wave of
sit-down strikes in auto shops and factories of all kinds sat down
to gain a union in their stores. Now as the Woolworth chain closes,
unionized Sears workers are under attack as the workforce moved from
70% full-time employment to 70% part-time in a decade. A union
election at a Wisconsin Wal-Mart, though defeated, is a sign of
battles ahead for a company that has answered to no workers in
pocketing the fruits of its restructured distribution system. And so
endangered labor gains in every competitor.
Any reversal of capital's drive toward the ultimate contingent
workforce, whether by victory at UPS or battling outsourcing at GM,
has come none too soon. From PATCO to Hormel in Austin, Minn., to
Staley in Decatur, Ill,. to the Detroit newspaper agency, labor has
more than a few defeats. Undermined by lack of solidarity, workers
were permanently replaced or forced to work alongside scabs.
Even those strikers who never got their jobs back have almost always
said that going on strike was the best thing they had done. Those
strikes paved the way for whatever cracks in the dominance of
capital that the UPS strike has exposed.
CLICK HERE TO GO BACK TO CONTENTS PAGE
CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE TO NEWS AND LETTERS
| 
