Brittainy Newman/AP Photo
UPS workers “practice picket” at Teamsters Local 804, outside of a UPS facility on July 6, 2023, in Brooklyn, New York.
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.
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.
