![]() ![]() UPS workers voted 97 percent in favor of strike authorization earlier this month. In what could be the most important labor fight in a generation, over 340,000 UPS Teamsters are poised to launch the largest single-company strike in US history in August. And the unfinished battle for part-timers at the company has been rekindled. Hoffa, son of legendary (and legendarily corrupt) Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa.īut today, militancy has once again risen in the union under Sean O’Brien, elected general president of the union in 2021, again with the help of groups like TDU. ![]() ![]() But shortly afterward, Carey and his reform-minded, militant leadership was chased out of the union by the old guard on trumped-up (and later dismissed) charges, and the corrupt, antidemocratic unionism of the old guard soon returned in the form of President James P. The strike was a resounding victory: the union won a commitment from the company to create ten thousand full-time jobs by combining twenty-thousand part-time positions. With the support of reform-minded forces like the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), Carey won the presidency of the international Teamsters union in 1991, taking over the union after federal anti-corruption measures produced the union’s first-ever direct democratic election after the contract expired in 1997, 185,000 UPS workers hit the picket line nationwide, declaring that “Part-Time America Won’t Work.” The company steamrolled ahead in its expansion of part-time work, building a package empire on the back of a workforce that, by the mid-1990s, was 60 percent part-time workers.īy the 1990s, UPS workers looked to halt the backsliding. ![]() The company permanently cut part-timers’ starting pay nationwide by 25 percent, down to $8 an hour, which would be raised only fifty cents over the next thirty years. In 1982, the national Teamsters union agreed to a “two-tier” system that divided the pay of part-time and full-time UPS workers. But in the final agreement, Local 804 successfully slowed, though they could not completely stop, the proliferation of part-time work in UPS facilities. By the end of the bitter walkout, a Teamster from a nearby New Jersey local had plowed their truck through 804’s picket line, killing one of Carey’s closest friends, and the federal government was called in to mediate a settlement. Led by their charismatic, thirty-eight-year-old local president Ron Carey, Local 804 members hit the picket line after contract negotiations broke down. UPS wanted to expand the practice, but workers saw the demand for what it was: an existential threat to their good-paying, full-time union jobs. A decade earlier, UPS had begun laying off full-time package sorters in its distribution warehouses and hiring part-time workers, who were paid roughly the same wage but lacked fringe benefits like pensions or vacation days, as their replacements. In late August 1974, thousands of Teamsters Local 804 members in New York went on strike against their employer, United Parcel Service (UPS), for the third time in six years. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |