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Why the Victory at UPS Matters
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-- Nathan Newman
With last night's labor contract deal between UPS and the Teamsters agreed
to, it appears that the Teamsters have scored a massive win against
corporate America. Along with keeping control of their pension fund and
winning increases for retirees, the Teamsters have won what appears to be
a nearly 40% increase in wages for the average part-time worker and the
creation of over 10,000 new full-time positions. In a time when many
unions have had to fight to the death for modest gains or to just hold
onto what they already have, this unprecendented gain for UPS workers is
an inspiring win for UPS workers.
But it is more than that. It was won with massive public support and the
full backing of the AFL-CIO and, in its meaning for the future of labor
and the progressive movement, it will likely be remembered as a crucial
turning point for an upswing in activism and success.
Why is the win at UPS so important?
Start with the settlement itself. In a time when pensions are
disappearing or companies are turning pensions into corporate piggybanks,
the Teamsters have reaffirmed the principle of strong, worker-controlled
pensions that are portable between jobs within an industry. In a time
when part-time work is a tool for disempowering workers, the Teamsters
have struck the first successful collective assault against corporation's
abusive use of part-time work. In a time when average wages have fallen
for twenty years, the Teamsters have won an unprecedented increase in
wages.
In all of this, they have signalled that lowered wages and benefits are
not an "inevitable" aspect of the global economy but a result, at least
partly, of corporate power and that such corporate power can be resisted
and even defeated through collective action backed by a unified labor and
community alliance. In a world where the message has been that the only
way to avoid being screwed was to cut your own deal, scam your own
individual training, fight for your own raise as others fell behind, the
UPS deal is now there as a shining example that a whole workforce can rise
together and see improvement in working conditions achieved through their
own collective strength.
Let's be clear. Everyone loves a winner and labor in now a winner through
this action. The credibility of labor struggle as a method to fighting
corporate power has been relegitimized. The fact that this struggle
served lower-income and part-time workers has also relegitimized labor as
a champion not just of elite manufacturing workers, pilots and baseball
players (a recent media image) but of ordinary workers who everyone can
easily identify with. The faces of the strikers were often mothers
deciding whether they could afford Fruit Loops on their strike pay and
everyone will be cheering that that mother or other struggling families
will now have a pay increase and a shot at converting two or three
part-time jobs into a solid full-time job at UPS.
It is an image of labor that can be taken to workplaces and communities
across the country by organizers saying, you could be that mother or that
father improving your lot if you will only stand up with your fellow
workers and form a union. You can win and you can gain. That is a
message we have needed, especially after years of failed strikes in
Deacateur, Detroit and earlier Hormel and PATCO. The UPS win is the new
meaning of a revitalzed labor movement that will fight together for
victory, With 55% of the population siding with the UPS strikers, it
signals a new opportunity for labor to marshall public support and
sympathy not just as the underdogs but as effective champions to challenge
corporate power.
Which is where the strike win gets its other significance, which is in the
internal meaning for Labor.
Start with Carey as leader of the Teamsters. As a rank-and-file leader,
Carey had fought for decades against a corrupt Teamster leadership that
signed go-along contracts that created the two-tier wage and part-time
labor system at UPS in the first place. It was only the struggle for
rank-and-file democracy within the Teamsters (led by left activists in
Teamsters for a Democratic Union) that eventually catapulted Carey into
leadership when the opportunity came in 1991. Against the odds and
against internal corruption and the mob, Ron Carey and his TDU allies
wrested back control of the largest private sector union in the country.
With the federal government overseers draining money from the union as a
terrific rate, Carey had to expend other resources cleaning up corrupt
locals and dealing with the vestigal resistance of old-line locals living
off the fat of members dues. Carey sold off the private jets and slashed
his own salary but out of the struggle to reform the union, the Teamsters
had emerged seemingly hobbled with an empty bank account. With the
election for Teamster President held last year, Carey faced the son of the
legendary Jimmy Hoffa who attacked Carey for weaknesses in the union
created by Hoffa Junior's own allies, but the attack was almost enough to
win a majority. That would have been a tragedy of incredible proportions
as the old-line hacks and corrupt deals would have reasserted themselves
across the union. Carey emerged the winner but he also emerged tarred as
allies and consultants desperately cut corners with a few large,
embarassing illegal campaign contributions to the Carey effort undermining
the legitimacy of his win. The contributions were returned but the damage
to Carey's standing as an honest reformer had been done.
So this is the situation Carey faced in this strike: an empty strike fund,
his own leadership under a cloud, and facing one of the largest employers
in the country backed by flush bank accounts and a $1 billion in profits
the year before. Before the strike started, there were a number of pundit
analyses that the Teamsters were doomed if they went on strike since their
internal collapse or financial exhaustion of their strike fund would
quickly kill them off.
But Carey defied the odds or, rather, the rank-and-file did as they voted
overwhelmingly to strike and when they did, a microscopic number would
cross the picket lines. With the stakes so high, Carey's opponents could
not afford to be seen as soft or helping management, so support for the
strike was loud and vociferous from all quarters of the union. But the
key was rank-and-file resolve, a decision after two decades of corporate
attacks to just say "no." And the result was yesterday's victory and a
victory for militant reform elements not just in the Teamsters but across
the union movement.
Carey has proven that honest leadership committed to militant united union
action can win for workers what old-line "business unionists" could not--
a decent contract and a shot at the American Dream for average workers.
And by winning this strike, Carey himself has assured that his own
leadership position will remain solid and he can further clean up the
union and expand organizing.
But Carey could not have won alone. A crucial part of the the win against
UPS was the annoucement by AFL-CIO leader John Sweeney that, since the
Teamsters strike fund was empty, other AFL-CIO unions would loan the
Teamsters whatever funds were needed for however long it took. Sweeney's
declaration that "The UPS strike is our strike. Their struggle is our
struggle" was a message to UPS management that they were not fighting
180,000 UPS workers but the combined will of millions of AFL-CIO unionists
who would use every tool necessary to support the UPS strikers.
This UPS strike was really the first big challenge of Sweeney's Presidency
of the AFL-CIO. After narrowly being elected to head the AFL-CIO in 1995
by union leaders at the 1995 AFL-CIO convention, he had focused initially
on reorienting the finances of the labor federation towards organizing and
had launched the federation's 1996 electoral campaign, one that sought to
raise the issues of low pay and falling standards of living for workers.
Partly due to that campaign, an increase in the minimum wage and the
Kennedy-Kassebaum health care bill were passed.
But on the labor front, Sweeney had generated a lot of noise and fanfare
but, while a new energy surged through the ranks of labor, the concrete
results had not been large. A major strike at Boeing had been won and the
UAW had made some inroads with the auto companies, but this seemed to have
little direct connection to Sweeney. The new AFL-CIO leadership made
token mobilizations around inherited struggles in Decateur and the Detroit
Newspaper strike, but seemed unable or unwilling to meet the expectations
of rank-and-file activists to create a united response in support of such
key labor struggles.
In that sense, the UPS strike was the first big challenge that Sweeney
would face where he could blame no one else, where the responsibility for
full labor support was with him from day one.
And in his support of the UPS strike, in his bringing together of labor
heads to back the Teamsters with the full resources of the labor movement,
Sweeney showed what a radical change had been made from the previous
legacy of Lane Kirland who had left unions to fend for themselves, had sat
back and watched PATCO crushed and strike after strike that followed
defeated in their isolation. Instead, we had the message that a united
labor movement would support strikes by any of their members.
For doubting unions that needed resolve (or pressure) to shift internal
union budgets away from do-nothing labor bureaucrats to Sweeney's
priorities of organizing, organizing and organizing, this strike has
strengthened both Sweeney's prestige and the prestige of the ideas and
ideals that forced the historic election of Sweeney and his leadership
team in 1995.
And the link between Sweeney and Carey go further. When Sweeney was
elected in 1995, Carey's Teamsters were the deciding votes. Without
question, if Carey had not been elected head of the Teamsters in 1991,
Sweeney would not have been elected head of the AFL-CIO in 1995. And
without both elections, the victory at UPS would have been impossible
since the rank-and-file wouldn't have even been given the chance to fight
together for this victory. This is important not so much because Carey
and Sweeney as individuals mattered but because they represented the
aspirations and struggles of rank-and-file unionists and activists who
had struggled for decades to revitalize the labor movement. And these
individual leaders became the vehicles for bring that change.
If the UPS strike is the turning point for labor, it is a thin, fragile
line that led from defeat to revival - a thread that easily could have
been broken and the destruction of the modern labor movement a real
possibility.
That possibility still exists, of course. The UPS strike was just one
victory and unions today represent just over 10% of private sector
employees, down from nearly 35% of employees in the 1950s. That low
level of representation rivals the depths reached in the early part of the
Depression before the CIO began its massive organizing drive.
If the UPS strike is to represent a turning point, it will have to be
followed by massive organizing wins, from the Strawberry workers of
California to the Apple pickers of Washington State to the textile workers
of the South to hospital workers in the Northeast.
The lesson of the UPS strike, however, is that none of those strikes are
isolated, that each struggle is our struggle, that militancy and
determination can overcome corporate power if workers are united, if they
mobilize community support, and if they link the interests of unionized
workers to the aspirations of the 90% of workers who are not in a union
but might like to be if they see union gains as gains for all working
people.
Much internal reform is still needed in both the AFL-CIO and the
Teamsters, but the victory at UPS shows how far we have come.
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