UPS: Adding Weight, Cutting Hours, Pensions

A week into the Teamster strike against UPS, I visit the picket line put up by Local 70 outside the big UPS hub on Pardee Drive, a mile or so from Oakland Airport. It’s a sunny Sunday afternoon and there are some 15 to 20 pickets as I talk, mostly to Robert Alameda and Craig Gonsalves, full-time drivers who have put in 35 years between them with UPS.

Morale is good, though these people are getting help from the Teamsters of only $55 a week. Thus far, no scabs have crossed this particular line, nor any other in the Bay Area. Nationally, the figure being mentioned by union people is that the strike is 95% solid and the public, Alameda and Gonsalves reckon, is sympathetic. This is a big card for the Teamsters. Here is no distant struggle by unknown folk in somewhere like Decatur, Ill. This one is, so to speak, in the family. Everyone knows those hard-working folks in brown.

At the Pardee hub, they tell me, 60% of the work force is part-time, mostly earning $8 to $12 an hour, taking home maybe $100 a week. James Wilson tells me he’s been with UPS for 17 years and still is denied full-time status, even though he works 45 hours a week. This means UPS is paying into his pension only half what a full-timer would get. Wilson says he hurt his foot so badly on a piece of defective UPS machinery some years ago that he can’t make it as a full-time truck driver, and UPS won’t bend and give him full-time status in his job in accounts.

In this hub, 95% of the work force is male and about 70% white. There are some 280 full-time truck drivers earning about $20 an hour. At the UPS building closer to the airport, handling air freight, everyone is part-time.

Everyone on the Local 70 line is adamant about the outrageous nature of the package offered by UPS. They laugh at suggestions in the press that Teamsters President Ron Carey called the strike to bolster his personal position. There’s no way, they say, that Carey and the International could have swallowed the contract. UPS wants to force workers into its own inferior health plan. It also wants to run its own pension plan. Teamsters could not carry their pensions into other jobs and in a UPS managed plan might not see their benefits raised a cent in a decade. After all, the starting UPS part-time wage base has stayed the same for 15 years.

Furthermore, the company wants to increase subcontracting on the big feeder trucks that haul freight from one UPS building to another. Right now, this is the best full-time union job. If it goes to subcontracting, there will be even less opportunity for part-timers to advance. The company also is trying to make it compulsory for drivers to cross other union picket lines and to dump the old grievance procedure whereby a worker stays on the job until the grievance issue is settled.

There’s much scorn about UPS’s claim that the company is offering more full-time jobs beyond replacing full-timers who are retiring. In fact, Gonsalves says, the company is demanding the right to use part-timers for delivering any package with a guaranteed time commitment, as is already the case with airborne packages. Thus the full-time drivers could lose their last stronghold, delivery of ground packages.

Almost every striker I spoke with had been hurt on the job at some time or another. In 1996, the injury rate, according to UPS, was 33.8 per 100 workers. Not surprising when you reckon that a sorter might have to move six tons in a three-hour shift, for maybe $30. Alameda said that on an industrial route, a driver might have to deal with three or four “packages” each weighing 150 pounds, the new limit announced by UPS in February 1994. UPS had failed to mention the pending change during the contract talks of 1993. A one-day strike over the new limit called on Feb. 7, 1994, by Carey did force UPS to allow workers to refuse to lift the extra-heavy packages by themselves. Supposedly they can ask for assistance. A female driver on the picket line snorted, telling me that if she requested help every time she was faced with something beyond her personal physical capacity--70 pounds--she’d be fired. She has depended on help from the customers.

A company suddenly more than doubles its weight limits while simultaneously spraying Congress with money (UPS runs the nation’s largest political action committee) to undermine workplace safety laws, while holding base part-time pay at $8 an hour for the past 15 years. UPS profits surged to $943.3 million in 1994. Last year, UPS had an after-tax profit of $1.1 billion.

It’s not hard to figure the rights and wrongs of this one. If you have questions, find a picket line and ask those strikers. They’ll be happy to lay it all out for you.