There was a time when it might have been useful to start this story by tracing the journey of a single cardboard box. I would explain that the air fryer or couch or deeply discounted jeans you recently bought online were made and packaged in Asia, then moved by boat and container truck to a warehouse not far from where you live. I would explain that to travel the last few miles from the warehouse to your home, the box would pass through the hands of overnight sorters and loaders and the delivery driver who walks right up to your door. By now, deep as we are into the mail-order way of life, facilitated by Amazon and cemented by the pandemic, all of us already know this. We’re pros at checking the time stamps and location updates for the stuff that we buy online. The system works so well, so much of the time, that it’s easy to forget the bursts of labor required at every turn.
For the past few months, the unionized drivers and warehouse workers at UPS have tried to remind us. Collectively, these three hundred and forty thousand people handle an astonishing one out of every four packages in the U.S.—the equivalent of six per cent of the country’s G.D.P. and enough to have earned UPS fourteen billion dollars in profits last year. The majority of UPS employees belong to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and have been in the process of negotiating a new five-year contract to replace the one that expires on July 31st. The union demanded radical changes: a living wage for part-timers, more full-time positions, the elimination of a two-tier system that disadvantages new hires, an end to forced overtime, and big pay hikes to compensate for the hardships of the pandemic. Many of these issues were settled by early July. Then bargaining broke down, over economic issues, chiefly the one relating to part-timers’ pay. To get UPS back to the table, workers staged practice pickets outside the company’s facilities—“Just Practicing for a Just Contract,” the signs read—and rallied with big-name politicians, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. An actual strike by the largest unionized workforce in the private sector would have been the most significant work stoppage since 1970.
On Tuesday, the two sides resumed talks and, after just a few hours, reached a surprise deal. The Teamsters’ negotiating committee (picture rows of mostly burly men in suits) announced that it had “reached the most historic tentative agreement for workers in the history of UPS.” Carol Tomé, the company’s C.E.O., called it a compromise “win-win-win” and boasted of having retained “the flexibility we need to stay competitive.” But it was hard not to see the agreement primarily as a win for the union. The draft contract included starting pay of twenty-one dollars an hour for part-timers hired after August 1st (up from around sixteen dollars) and raises for current part-timers based on seniority. Package-car drivers would earn a top rate of forty-nine dollars an hour. The old two-tier system for drivers was gone; there were provisions for air-conditioning in new vehicles, paid rest on Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, better ventilation in warehouses, and seven thousand five hundred new full-time jobs. The contract will not take effect unless a majority of union members vote to ratify it next month.
Just hours before the tentative agreement was announced, I met with workers outside the UPS facility on Foster Avenue in Brooklyn. I watched as trailers fed the warehouse with fresh cargo, which was then sorted, scanned, and loaded into the backs of package cars for delivery routes all over the city. Drivers Eugene Braswell, Sean McGovern, and Basil Darling arrived an hour before the start of their day to speak with co-workers about the pending negotiations. All three are shop stewards of Local 804 of the Teamsters, which represents some eight thousand workers across seventeen UPS stations in New York City, Westchester, and Long Island. (My colleague Jennifer Gonnerman recently wrote about Local 804 for The New Yorker.) They are also members of Teamsters for a Democratic Union, an activist group that has pushed the national union to be more militant and inclusive. McGovern had been hired by UPS during the pandemic and, thanks to the two-tier wage scale, was making twenty dollars less per hour than many of his co-workers; he was also on a different route every day. Darling worried that part-timers were essentially “living below minimum wage” when you factored in inflation. Braswell, who joined UPS in 1989, didn’t expect any breakthroughs from the company. “You don’t want to get members’ hopes up,” he said.
Dozens of drivers passed us by on their way into the facility, and the three men seemed to know most of them by name. The warehouse workers coming off their shifts and going in the opposite direction, toward the subway station, were less familiar. No brown uniforms, no shared space, no overlapping hours. Warehouse workers at UPS are generally part time and often labor in the middle of the night, on truncated shifts, five days a week. At a recent membership meeting of Local 804, I spoke with Esther Curry, a chief shop steward for preloaders who has been part time in the Foster Avenue building for the past fifteen years. She wanted to be full time, but “I don’t have the seniority,” she told me. Though her schedule fluctuates from week to week, she usually works from around 3:30 A.M. to 7:00 A.M., with an hour commute each way. Her wages have crept up over time, from under nine dollars an hour to well above twenty. The tentative agreement would mean a pay bump of four dollars and twenty-five cents starting next week. “I will believe it when I see my check,” she said.
Some part-timers, who’d hoped for a starting base wage of twenty-five dollars an hour, felt disappointed by the tentative agreement. On social media, they posted stop-sign emojis to encourage others to vote down the proposal. “If our wages had kept up with inflation, it would be twenty-five dollars today,” Audrey Johnson, a sorter and a member of Local 177 in northern New Jersey, who plans to vote no, told me. “That was a number we could have actually fought for in this contract.” (Fifty-five per cent of UPS employees are part time.) But other workers I spoke with were optimistic—and eager to review the contract language. “It looks like our union pulled it off,” Braswell told me. “Hopefully, the rest of labor sees the victory.” Beyond the individual provisions of the agreement, he interpreted the present moment as a vindication of decades of organizing. The last—and only—time UPS workers went on strike, in 1997, the international president of the Teamsters was Ron Carey, who was known for his progressive organizing style. His successor, James P. Hoffa (yes, that Hoffa family), took a conservative, count-your-chickens approach. In 2018, Hoffa oversaw the negotiations of a contract so lacklustre that the membership voted to reject it. He then invoked a rule from the Teamsters’ constitution to put it into effect anyway. That betrayal, combined with the treacherous overtime of the pandemic, pushed many members to seek reform through Teamsters for a Democratic Union.
In 2021, T.D.U. helped elect a new slate of national leaders. Sean O’Brien, who became president, promised to fix unpopular sections of the Hoffa contract, give more power to rank-and-file members, and invest in new organizing—crucially, at Amazon, whose logistics division poses an increasing threat to UPS. “The Teamsters, for the longest time, have almost been like a shadow organization, staying in the background,” Vinnie Perrone, the president of Local 804, told me. “Now you have a general president that’s out there, on social media, all media, and I think it’s great. I think other unions are feeling empowered.” Earlier this year, the Teamsters unionized drivers with California’s Battle-Tested Strategies, one of thousands of subcontracted “delivery service partners” Amazon relies on to make local deliveries. (They’re the ones in those ubiquitous navy-blue Sprinter vans.) Those workers went on strike this past month.
Lots of pickets are popping up these days—from Hollywood actors and writers to hotel workers and Starbucks baristas. The United Auto Workers union is preparing for a possible strike, in September, of nearly a hundred and fifty thousand members. As Audra Makuch, a labor educator in Massachusetts, told me, “It’s the sexy face of labor and the traditional face of labor at the same time.” Across industries, people are tired, and tired of getting so little of the money accounted for in quarterly earnings reports. Inflation, congressional paralysis, climate change, and the real and symbolic threats of A.I. don’t help. “The strikes are drawing on a broader sense of unrest and instability and uncertainty in our society,” Ahmed White, a professor of labor law at the University of Colorado, told me. “Where are things going to go? Where am I going to be? The current system, the one we’ve had in place for several decades now, isn’t working, and it isn’t something workers are content with.”
Whatever the causes, a “hot labor summer” does appear to be under way. Braswell felt slightly disappointed that UPS Teamsters would not be part of the action. “The reason I would want to strike is, I believe, right now, everything is falling into place,” he said. “The public is supporting us, the politicians, they seem to be on our side, and all the other unions are rallying around us.” On the left of the labor movement, strikes are sometimes treated (a little blithely, given the personal costs) as a good in and of themselves—the ultimate flex of the working class. In logistics, the potential of such a flex is indeed profound. A strike at UPS might very well have stunned, if not paralyzed, the flow of goods in the U.S. and beyond. Striking can humanize a workforce and expand seemingly narrow issues into a social cause. Not striking risks the inverse, as a movement shrinks to contract size. Reformers within the Teamsters will soon begin to vote on their tentative agreement, and they must confront a new challenge: How to keep up the energy of the fight when the fight is over? ♦
