![]() ![]() ![]() UPS can afford to do better - especially now. “It’s a militaristic style of discipline.” “They want to give a heavy slap on the wrist, take time away from people, money away,” said delivery driver Darryl Pace of Local 413 in Columbus, Ohio. Supervisors exert tyrannical control - posting schedules late, screwing up payroll, threatening to fire you, or just standing there staring at you for twenty minutes while you race to unload a trailer at the mandated speed of one thousand packages an hour. She often urges members to request a team lift if a package weighs more than seventy pounds - their right under the union contract - “but some people would rather just deal with the heavy box than with a supervisor yelling at them.” So preloaders are heaving 150-pound boxes in sweltering heat without enough fans. The inside workforce is overwhelmingly part-timers, who are guaranteed just three and a half hours a shift, though not for lack of work. ![]() ![]() “Supervisors are constantly telling us to speed up and get everything off the conveyor belt,” said preloader Jenny Bekenstein, a shop steward at a Los Angeles hub. “UPS is a numbers company.” Supervisors get their bonuses based on keeping work hours down. Supervisors send part-timers home and finish the work themselves - even though Teamsters will grieve it and UPS will pay out triple-time penalties. He stays for the Teamster-negotiated health insurance and pension, but he needs his second job because of the short hours and low wages: “I can’t pay my rent on $16.65.”ĬEO Carol Tomé earned $27.6 million in 2021 - 548 times the median UPS worker’s pay. His wage is less than the starting pay at Amazon or Subway, he says. to 9:00 a.m., then delivers food for Instacart in the afternoon, racking up twelve-hour days. Preloader Damian Kungle in Canton, Ohio, works at UPS from 4:00 a.m. Part-time starting pay has crawled up from $8 an hour in 1982 to just $15.50 today, augmented in some areas with “market-rate adjustments.” That’s a hell of a tool to have.” Part-Timers Deserve More “Like, ‘If you don’t want this contract, you’ll go on strike.’ Now it’s the reverse - we’re using it against them. “Before, the company would use the strike against us, to scare us,” said Carlos Silva, a full-timer in Gardena, California. And if they reach a deal by the deadline, this will be the reason why - that UPS knew, Wall Street knew, the workers knew, everybody knew how very ready they were to walk. The profound seriousness of the strike threat, light-years from the dynamic in 2018 bargaining, is why the Teamsters have won so much already. “If UPS chooses to strike themselves because they’re greedy and they’re loyal to Wall Street, not Main Street, they will throw this country into a recession,” Teamsters president Sean O’Brien told a crowd at Local 282 in Long Island on July 15. And the 3,300 UPS pilots, represented by an independent union, have pledged that they will not cross Teamster strike lines. Competitors could only absorb a fraction of its twenty million daily packages. It’s not just about the brown shirt and truck.” “A Hell of a Tool”īloomberg estimates that a strike would cost UPS $170 million a day. “The major sticking points are more money and a better quality of life” for part-timers, Forero said. Front and center is the union’s demand to raise the pay of the part-timers who do most of the unseen work in warehouses - sorting, loading, and unloading parcels at a backbreaking pace while supervisors scrutinize and hassle them. The union bargaining team had dispersed to members’ home locals after talks broke down July 5, for practice picketing that has put on display just how ready to strike UPSers are.Īlready the Teamsters have won tentative agreements to end two-tier pay and forced sixth-day work for drivers, install air conditioning in new delivery trucks, make Martin Luther King Jr Day a paid holiday, eliminate driver-facing surveillance cameras, and curtail the subcontracting of feeder work.īut negotiations are stalled on the top economic issues. Customers along her route stop her to say, “I hope your negotiations go well.” The hosts are talking about it on Hot 97, the city’s top hip-hop station.Ī deal could still avert a strike - as we went to press, the Teamsters announced that UPS had reached out to resume negotiations. “People are actually paying attention,” said delivery driver Kioma Forero, a Local 804 shop steward in New York City. It would be the largest strike at a private employer in decades. The clock is ticking on the August 1 strike deadline of 340,000 UPS Teamsters. ![]()
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