The International Brotherhood of Teamsters won a great victory after it called its 185,000 members employed by United Parcel Service (UPS) out on strike in August. But the union's president, Ron Carey, had been visibly reluctant to call a strike. He did so only after UPS management refused to budge in negotiations for three days.
The last thing Carey could have expected was that within a few days he would be leading a crusade against corporate greed on behalf of millions of working class people. Yet that is exactly what has happened. The Teamsters' strike against UPS sharpened class consciousness across the US.
Before the strike the news media paid little attention to the plight of low paid workers. But suddenly, during the 15 days the strike lasted, the UPS workers' demands were featured on the front page of every newspaper, and as the most important news items in virtually every broadcast. Millions of people watching television saw a triumphant Ron Carey emerge from negotiations to declare victory on 18 August, stating, 'This fight with UPS shows what working people can accomplish when they all stick together.' And they also saw UPS management's chief negotiatorwho had arrogantly declared at the start of the strike that the company would not shift from its 'last, best, final offer'shamefacedly admit that UPS had given in to most of the union's demands.
Not only was the UPS strike the first national strike of any kind in 14 years in the US, but it was the first strike in generations to win widespread popular support. Two weeks into the strike opinion polls showed that the public supported the strikers against UPS management by a two to one margin. Even the Wall Street Journal was forced to grudgingly admit, 'The strike, oddly popular with the inconvenienced, has wide public support.' Pollster Daniel Yankelovich argued, 'This strike is a consciousness-raising event. What so often happens is that an event like this suddenly and unexpectedly focuses attention on something that is on people's minds and makes their concerns more of a political issue.' The UPS workers were able to have a major impact on public awareness for several reasons. First, UPS is the corporate giant among package delivery companies, moving 12 million packages per day, which amount to more than 5 percent of the US Gross Domestic Product.
Second, most people are personally familiar with someone who works at UPS. Drivers deliver along regular routes, and get to know workers who sign for packages. Moreover, with an over 400 percent turnover rate for part time workers (last year UPS hired 180,000 part timers but only 40,000 are still with the company), many people know someone who has worked for UPS and experienced first hand the company's torturous working conditions.
But most importantly, UPS, which made more than $1.1 billion in profits last year and ranks 37th in the Fortune 500ahead of Coca Colais an obvious symbol of the shameless greed of US corporations. UPS has more than doubled its profits since 1992, yet the real wages of its full time workforce have not risen since 1987.
The company has also come to rely increasingly upon part time workers, who now make up 60 percent of the workforce, up from 42 percent 10 years ago. UPS's part time starting wage of $8 to $9 an hour had not risen since 1982. Even after two years of employment, part timers still earned as little as $9 an hourcompared with a $20 wage for full time workers.
As Jose, who has worked part time at UPS for three years, told Socialist Review, 'Rent and other bills are not part time. They are full time. And somehow we have to get the money to pay them.' Yet few part timers have had hopes of landing a full time job at UPS. Many part time workers actually work more than 35 hours per week for UPS, by combining two 'part time' jobs.
Work at UPS is backbreaking and dangerous, with an injury rate two and a half times the national average. Workers are expected to sort 2,000 parcels an hour, or load several tons of goods onto a truck during a three hour shift. As Christopher, a Chicago part timer, explained, 'The job we have is nothing but hard labour, back to back. They say you get ten minutes break, but it's really five minutes. And the supervisor just keeps on rushing you, on your back, constantly harassing you.'
Full timers' conditions are not much better. UPS drivers usually work ten to 12 hour days, often without taking a lunch break. As one driver described it, 'You've probably noticed that UPS drivers don't walkthey run to and from their trucks. If we make good wages, we earn every penny.'
The UPS workforce roughly mirrors what is happening to workers everywhere in the US, after two decades of an unrelenting employers' offensive. The Teamsters' demands have resonated throughout the working class. Today, nearly one in every four workers in the US is classified as part time, temporary or 'contingent'who, for the most part, earn lower wages and receive no health insurance from their employers. UPS striker Laura Piscotti voiced the sentiments of millions of workers when she told the New York Times, 'These companies all have the formula. They don't take you on full time. They don't pay benefits. Then their profits go through the roof.' And New York Times columnist Bob Herbert went so far as to call the UPS strike a 'workers' rebellion', 'the angry, fist waving response of the frustrated American worker, a revolt against the ruthless treatment of workers by so many powerful corporations'.
UPS management was financially far better prepared for a strike than the Teamsters' union, which was forced to borrow money from other unions to pay workers just $55 per week in strike pay. Management hired off duty police to harass and, given the opportunity, beat up strikers. But UPS' vast fortune couldn't buy public sympathy. Its slick public relations team issued full page newspaper ads calling upon the Teamsters' union to allow workers to vote 'democratically' on management's offer, while it persuaded the National Asso- ciation of Manufacturers to demand that Clinton intervened to stop the strike to avert economic disaster. Both these plans backfired.
Ron Carey quickly pointed out that union members were 'voting' against UPS by honouring the picket line by a margin of more than 95 percent. Clinton, meanwhile, despite daily requests from UPS and other business interests to intervene in the strike, was openly unenthusiastic about the prospect of doing so. He would have had to invoke vicious anti-labour legislation last used by President Carter to end a month long national miners' strike in 1978. This would have placed him decidedly in management's camp and would have been wildly unpopular. In fact, in a mid-August Gallup poll, 75 percent of the respondents said that Clinton should not intervene to stop the strike.
Two weeks into the strike, UPS was running at less than 10 percent of its normal capacity, and claimed to be losing $50 million per day with its mainly managerial scab workforce. Ron Carey called for a day of action in support of the strikers, declaring, 'This strike will not be won at the negotiating table but on the picket line.' But the Teamsters' union was slow to translate these words into action.
In fact, the union kept picket line activity to a minimumwith a deliberate policy to let management driven trucks pass through. And union members around the country complained of a lack of information of any kind from the union officials. It has been so long since the union leaders have defended a picket line that even those who wanted to fight seemed to have forgotten how to mobilise the rank and file into action, if they ever knew. The union machinery operated like a rusty engine that hasn't run in decades and is only now beginning to slowly creak forward.
Nevertheless, isolated instances of rank and file activism showed the potential which exists. Some workers adopted the flying picket tactics of the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters' strike. In Chicago flying pickets shut down operations at skyscrapers such as the Sears Tower and the Amoco Buildingdrawing out all the buildings' janitors and other union workers until management agreed to refuse to accept any packages from UPS scabs. And picket lines in Somerville, Massachusetts, and Warwick, Rhode Island, erupted into confrontations with police, as hundreds of workers tried to stop trucks from crossing the picket line.
If UPS had attempted to resume its ground operations with a scab workforce, more confrontations were likely.
The solidarity shown by other groups of trade unionists also represented a sharp shift from the isolation of strikes over the last two decades. Union members from a variety of occupations visited the picket lines regularly. In New York, more than 1,000 members of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) joined the picket line on 7 August, chanting, 'Big Brown, shut it down!' When strikers thanked the CWA workers, one replied, 'Nothank you. You're fighting for all of us.' And the pilots from the Independent Pilots Association (IPA) who fly UPS's fleet of planesand whose own union contract has been in limbo since last Decemberhonoured the Teamsters' picket lines throughout the strike. 'This airline is closed until you give us the okay to return,' vowed UPS pilot Rich Henry at a support rally. The Teamsters have already pledged to honour the pilots if they go on strike later this autumn.
After the strike ended, newspapers were filled with pictures of cheering strikers celebrating their victory. The company agreed to most of the union's demands: higher wages (amounting to 7 percent a year for part timers), the creation of 10,000 new full time jobs (the company had offered only 1,000), a 50 percent rise in retirement pensionswhich the Teamsters' union, not the company as UPS wanted, will continue to run. While the union clearly set its sights too lowmuch more could have been won with stronger picket linesthe Teamsters' strike marked the first major strike victory since before Ronald Reagan broke the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organisation (PATCO) in 1981. And it has therefore raised the confidence of working class people to fight back, while pointing the way forward for the labour movment as a whole.
'It ends the PATCO syndrome. A 16 year period in which a strike was synonymous with defeat and demoralisation is over,' argued labour historian Nelson Lichtenstein. 'I can assure you that right now discussions are going on in executive offices in Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Federal Express about how to rethink their labour strategy.' From the workers' viewpoint, the lessons of solidarity are summed up by Robert Ridley, an Austin, Texas, UPS driver, who said, 'This was labour against Corporate America'. And labour won.