{"id":1515890,"date":"2024-02-23T06:56:12","date_gmt":"2024-02-23T06:56:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/?p=314225"},"modified":"2024-02-23T06:56:12","modified_gmt":"2024-02-23T06:56:12","slug":"mass-layoff-why-the-teamsters-should-have-struck-ups","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2024\/02\/23\/mass-layoff-why-the-teamsters-should-have-struck-ups\/","title":{"rendered":"Mass Layoff: Why the Teamsters Should Have Struck UPS"},"content":{"rendered":"\"\"<\/a>\n
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Photo by Nelson Ndongala<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

Last summer, 340,000 Teamsters were ready to strike UPS, but the union settled instead. One could argue it made a mistake. \u201cWe\u2019ve changed the game,\u201d the Teamsters announced at the time, because they got some of the life-and-death air-conditioning they demanded in UPS trucks, higher wages, more jobs, part-time rewards, equal pay and a MLK Day holiday among other supposedly \u201cgreat\u201d wins. But ah, what a difference six months makes. Because at the end of January, UPS announced it would eliminate 12,000 full and part-time managerial jobs to help get $1 billion in cost savings. Why? Because revenue shrank.<\/p>\n

UPS hastened to assure the Teamsters that all was well: these luckless workers were not in the union. Though a part-time manager probably doesn\u2019t earn big bucks, getting rid of 12,000 of them helps corporate savings add up. Indeed, given the long-time, anti-union ploy of classifying as many workers as possible as \u201cmanagement,\u201d one wonders how many of these poor part-time managers really should have been in the union. And one also wonders on whom the next round of cuts will fall. Because clearly there will be one, maybe several.<\/p>\n

This mass layoff was entirely predictable, bodes poorly for the future for unionized workers, and should have been vigorously addressed and negotiated with more than the sentence on separation of employment: \u201cUpon discharge the Employer shall pay all money due to the employee during the first (1st<\/sup>) payroll department working day,\u201d or that \u201cNo bargaining unit employee currently performing work in the payroll department will be laid off or suffer a loss of their current payroll type position as a result of this section.\u201d Another mention of circumstances that might involve a reduction of jobs is \u201cIf a technological change creates new work that replaces, enhances or modifies bargaining unit work, bargaining unit employees will perform that new or modified work.\u201d Also \u201cDriver-facing sensors will not be used for any purpose during any phase of a disciplinary process or be the sole basis for disqualifying a driver during the thirty (30) day period.\u201d Regarding employees about to be fired, the contract says they should be kept on until their grievance procedure is finished. It also states that workers who won\u2019t cross a picket line can\u2019t be fired, specifies other instances in which they may not be fired, and those \u2013 a positive drug test \u2013 in which they may and lays out methods to increase hiring. These are the sorts of job termination and expansion issues that the contract addresses in legalese. They are standard boilerplate and indicate that the union did not specifically address mass job cuts. It probably should have.<\/p>\n

But Teamster general president Sean O\u2019Brien was strike-averse and eager to cut a deal. Even critical a\/c in the trucks got short shrift, with only one third of UPS vehicles to have it installed over the five-year agreement. What do the drivers in the other two-thirds of the trucks do in sweltering summer heat? Hope they don\u2019t collapse and die of heat prostration, I guess, the way Estaban Chavez, Jr. did in 2022, expiring in his truck from heat stroke. Meanwhile, part-timers continue living out of their cars as they work multiple jobs, because the two-tier wage structure was not ended.<\/p>\n

So management got its cake and ate it too. First, with the contract it happily shelled out to snag more flexibility with work schedules. Then, half a year later, unhappy with having paid extra, it fires 12,000 \u201cmanagement\u201d employees. All while UPS ceo Carol Tome pulled down $27 million in 2022. With hindsight, Teamster leadership looks a bit foolish, because rank and file workers were ready to strike and that, not stellar union negotiating skills, is what won employees some of their goals. As Truthout wrote July 26: \u201cAny significant gains won by the Teamsters against a reluctant employer will have come about because rank-and-file workers showed the company they were prepared to strike.\u201d<\/p>\n

But worker solidarity was, not to put too fine a point on it, betrayed. \u201cMany of the younger radicals,\u201d Joe Allen wrote in CounterPunch February 1, \u201cthat got jobs on some of the most socially isolating shifts at Big Brown, were left confused and in some cases very demoralized by their experience.\u201d These were the activists from Democratic Socialists of America, who had flocked to UPS, getting hired there in expectation of a strike. To make matters worse, O\u2019Brien very publicly hobnobbed with Donald \u201cTax Cuts for the Rich\u201d Trump at Mar-A-Lago and met with other far-right politicos. Allen blames Teamsters for a Democratic Union for \u201ccleaning up O\u2019Brien\u2019s previous image as a thug, with the broad left media, including Labor Notes, Jacobin and In These Times.\u201d<\/p>\n

UPS director of financial and strategy communications, Brian Hughes, was quoted in the Louisville Courier Journal February 2 that this round of layoffs amounts to \u201cless than three percent of the UPS workforce and does not impact union-represented roles.\u201d The ceo, meanwhile, has pointed out that full-time drivers earn $170,000 on average, thanks to the new contract. To repeat, though UPS has not announced which jobs specifically will vanish, company brass was at pains to emphasize that union workers are not affected. Translation: we\u2019re tossing employees into the unemployment line, but we don\u2019t want the union to notice.<\/p>\n

And yet, the Courier Journal noted, \u201cUPS reported nearly $2.5 billion in profit for the fourth quarter, according to USA Today. However, the fourth-quarter 2023 consolidated revenues of $24. 9 billion were a 7.8 decrease from fourth quarter revenue numbers in 2022.\u201d Management can\u2019t have that, oh no! Earnings must rise each year, relative to the last, or else UPS will cut jobs to make up the difference. \u201cUPS is shooting for 2024 revenues in the range between approximately $92 and $94.5 billion. However, these numbers would still fall far short of the company\u2019s historic 2022 earnings of $100.3 billion.\u201d As Tome announced back then, \u201cOur results in 2022 demonstrate our strategy is working.\u201d So I guess one must conclude that if UPS doesn\u2019t repeat its 2022 high this year, and it probably won\u2019t, more layoffs will come next year. Fun times.<\/p>\n

In fact, future lay-offs are a near certainly, as UPS struggles to match its 2022 revenue bonanza. One wonders about union negotiations with regard to job security, because that, as these latest firings show, is a big issue at UPS, a company that ditches thousands of workers because its revenue fell short of $100 billion. True, the contract won \u201cthe creation of 75,000 new full-time Teamster jobs at UPS and the fulfillment of 22,500 open positions,\u201d according to the Teamster\u2019s press release on the contract, but nothing specifically appears to address protections against job cuts. This is always a dicey contract demand, because management doesn\u2019t want to lose its grip on the absolute power to fire, but if these 12,000 lay-offs are an omen, maybe the Teamsters should have addressed it.<\/p>\n

In these times, with companies more focused than ever on investor profits, stock buybacks, top brass compensation and stock dividends, it is wise for unions to be proactive about job security. Even if it means going out on strike. After all, strikes work. Why else did the railroad industry turn to president Joe \u201cPhony Lunch Bucket\u201d Biden to break a trainman strike, the focus of which for workers was job conditions? Precarity is a job condition, like overwork or being on call multiple days in a row. It is arguably the condition that enables all other on-the-job abuses. Remember, Biden was only too happy to sweep all workplace condition demands off the table for railroad employees. But he couldn\u2019t do so for UPS, because there\u2019s no federal involvement in the company. Turns out he didn\u2019t need to, because the union decided not to press the issue.<\/p>\n

Unions ignore precarity and working conditions at their peril. Teamsters head O\u2019Brien\u2019s laser focus on pay to the exclusion, say, of getting a\/c in ALL the trucks speaks volumes about union leadership\u2019s lack of touch with day-to-day labor. If O\u2019Brien had to drive an un-air-conditioned vehicle for days on end in 100-plus degree weather, air-conditioning would have been a non-negotiable demand. If he lived in terror of losing his job, like some unfortunate part-time \u201cmanager,\u201d you can bet precarity would have been an issue too. A genuinely good contract would have addressed these matters.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, over at the United Auto Workers, leader Shawn Fain led a successful strike and guess what? Contrary to management predictions, the sky didn\u2019t fall in \u2013 even though one worker demand was the right to strike over plant closures and one key achievement was saving jobs at a factory in Belvedere, Illinois, previously slated for closure. This is a worthy union goal, and the UAW proved it attainable. Maybe next time, after who knows how many rounds of layoffs, the Teamsters will pursue it, too.<\/p>\n

The post Mass Layoff: Why the Teamsters Should Have Struck UPS<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last summer, 340,000 Teamsters were ready to strike UPS, but the union settled instead. One could argue it made a mistake. \u201cWe\u2019ve changed the game,\u201d the Teamsters announced at the time, because they got some of the life-and-death air-conditioning they demanded in UPS trucks, higher wages, more jobs, part-time rewards, equal pay and a MLK More<\/a><\/p>\n

The post Mass Layoff: Why the Teamsters Should Have Struck UPS<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":380,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,1150],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1515890"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/380"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1515890"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1515890\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1515891,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1515890\/revisions\/1515891"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1515890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1515890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1515890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}