Anthony Behar/Sipa USA via AP Images
A UPS delivery driver loads his truck in New York’s Flatiron District, June 15, 2023.
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.
