UPS Strike: All for One and One for All

The current work stoppage at United Parcel Service has the look and feel of an old-time labor battle. Burly Teamsters tussle with cops on picket lines. Trucks are briefly blocked, scabs are cursed, strikers are arrested and some fall injured on the ground. A lot of customers don’t get their deliveries on time or at all. Business leaders call for a Taft-Hartley injunction against the strike.

Behind such scenes from another era, the issues at stake couldn’t be more au courant. By taking a stand in favor of pension security and against part-timing, 190,000 UPS drivers and package handlers are bucking nationwide trends. The outcome of their fight could determine whether many other people--college teachers, computer technicians, retail sales workers or health care professionals--ever get decent full-time jobs or traditional pensions. Or whether they’ll have to keep scrambling for part-time, temporary and contract work that doesn’t provide normal fringe benefits.

Like lots of employers, UPS wants to change its pension coverage to reduce its benefit costs. In the name of “flexibility,” it seeks to hire even more part-timers--turning the 40% of its employees who still have good-paying, full-time jobs into an endangered species. If the company achieves its goals, guaranteed pensions and regular employment in trucking and many other industries will be further eroded. A Teamster victory, on the other hand, may inspire greater resistance to trends that deprive millions of Americans of adequate incomes before and after they retire.

The rhetoric of the two sides reveals much about the clash of values and fundamental choices involved. In true ‘90s fashion, UPS is appealing to individualism, shortsightedness, even greed. To undermine the union, management is telling its full-timers not be concerned about the part-timers’ plight. Why, asks UPS, should a $50,000-a-year driver with many years’ seniority lose money in a strike over the job opportunities or pay of “kids” earning $8 an hour on the midnight-to-4 a.m. package-sorting shift?

Furthermore, why should anyone at UPS want to be in the same retirement plan with other Teamsters, particularly those employed by “the competition”? Forget about them and their pensions, says the company. Just think about your own benefits, which could be so much better if workers abandoned the Teamster-sponsored funds that pool employer contributions industrywide in favor of a UPS-only plan.

The Teamsters respond in what has become almost a foreign tongue in America: the language of solidarity, social responsibility and collective security. Under new reform-minded leaders, the union is finally objecting to three-tier wage scales that divide even old and new part-timers at UPS. Unlike his predecessors, President Ron Carey refused to treat the second-largest contract talks in the country--only General Motors bargaining is bigger--like a special-interest game played out of sight from members and the public. From the very beginning, Carey has insisted that whole communities are hurt by management’s strategy of converting full-time positions into “half jobs” with few benefits.

Likewise, the Teamsters say that it’s not just their multiemployer pension trusts that face challenges today; it’s any kind of “defined benefit” plan that commits employers to a guaranteed payout for all eligible retirees. A major objective of firms that already have single-company funds is replacing them with “defined contribution” plans such as 401(k) accounts. These shift more of the cost burden to employees and saddle them with the individual risk and responsibility of making investment decisions. If Teamsters accepted UPS’ pension proposal, it wouldn’t be long before they’d be hearing the same siren song that’s playing now: Don’t mix your money up with the next guy’s; look out for your own personal retirement savings; forget about the group.

Forgetting about the group, whether it’s all the wage earners within the same company, industry or class, is exactly how labor in this country helped dig its own grave. The Teamster strike is more than an encouraging sign of revival. It’s a reassertion of collectivist values that corporate America has tried its best to discredit and bury in recent debates about health care and social security, as well as on the future of private pensions. The standard-bearer in this fight may not, in the past, have been a paragon of social unionism. But the Teamster banner today is one worth rallying around for everyone’s sake.