File spoon-archives/aut-op-sy.archive/aut-op-sy_1997/aut-op-sy.9708, message 119


Date: Wed, 20 Aug 1997 22:43:03 +1000
From: sjwright-AT-vaxc.cc.monash.edu.au (Steve Wright)
Subject: AUT: PS Strike Makes New Labour History


More food for thought - how does *this* analysis (one completely uncritical
of the Teamsters machine itself) square with your interpretation(s)?

Steve

______________

Subject: LL:UPS Strike Makes New Labour History
From: <owner-leftlink-AT-vicnet.net.au>
Date: Tue, 19 Aug 1997 13:46:47 +1000 (EST)

Date: Mon, 18 Aug 1997 21:16:27 EDT
From: Seth Wigderson, U Maine Augusta <SETHW-AT-MAINE.MAINE.EDU>
To: Multiple recipients of list H-LABOR <H-LABOR-AT-h-net.msu.edu>
Subject: Re: Lichtenstein, "UPS Strike Makes New Labor History"

Thanx to Nelson Lichtenstein for sending this column. SW
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

From: "Nelson N. Lichtenstein" <nnl3w-AT-faraday.clas.virginia.edu>
Seth:

 Here's an op-ed that I did for Newsday, August 17.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -


UPS Strike Makes New Labor History

by Nelson Lichtenstein,

Newsday, August  17, 1997

THE TEAMSTERS ARE going to win the UPS strike, and when they
do, working Americans will have something to cheer about. The
union's victory will reverberate well beyond the 185,000
workers now on strike.

The strike successfully pressured UPS management into a
new round of marathon negotiations. But more important, it has
roused an old-fashioned thing called "solidarity." The
full-time workers are fighting on behalf of the lower-paid
part-timers, and the union is going all-out to protect the
pensions of unionists not employed by the highly profitable
UPS, who are relying upon a generation-old mulit-employer fund.

The idea that a union can actually win a big strike
over important issues will certainly come as a shock to most
Americans. For nearly two decades, the strike idea has been
synonymous with labor's defeat and demoralization. As a result
work stoppages have practically vanished. Today, there are a
tenth as many as there were in the 1970s; and the UPS walkout
is the largest in almost a quarter century.

But in this trike the workers have a lot going for
them. UPS can't hire scabs - the rank opportunists who now
often go by the polite euphemism of "replacement workers" -
because the nation's unemployment rate is at a quarter-century
low. For most workers in a tight labor market, part-time UPS
jobs pay wages that are nothing to write home about.

The strike remains solid throughout the workforce, and
public sentiment is remarkably favorable toward the UPS workers
- even, reports the Wall Street Journal, among the small
businessmen most adversely affected by shipping problems.
Finally, labor's top leadership is both united and full of
ambition for the first time in many years. Although the
Teamsters union is practically broke, the AFL-CIO has pledged
$10 million a week to the striking UPS employees.

It's a good investment. A transformation in the economy
and a revitalization of the entire labor movement may well lie
within the hands of UPS strikers. By demanding that UPS
transform many of its "part-time" jobs - now comprising 57
percent of all UPS employees - into full-time, high-wage
positions, the Teamsters have already forced managers
throughout the nation's huge service economy to rethink their
"low-road," low-wage strategy toward ever higher profitability.
The stock market, which closed last week with its
second-largest one-day loss ever, is skittish over "wage
inflation" and the prices for Wal-Mart, K-Mart, McDonald's and
Fed-Ex are all going to take a hit when the extent of the
Teamster victory becomes clear. But the health of the economy
will be given a powerful stimulant when companies once again
realize that wages have to rise with their profits and their
sales.

That's why the fight at UPS is so important. Big Brown
is a technologically sophisticated, highly profitable,
service-sector firm. The company serves as something of a
metaphor for the transformation of the American economy in the
1990s. For nearly a quarter century, the management in
companies like UPS has institutionalized job insecurity by
constructing a set of jobs that keep many workers always on the
lookout for other employment or a few more hours' work. It used
to be that such semi-attached workers were truly supplemental
to the full-time workforce. Macy's would add part-timers at
Christmas, Safeway hired a few more baggers on Saturday, the
steel mills recruited college kids in the summer to let the
family men have their vacations.

But for a generation now, hundreds of big companies at
the very core of the economy have made part-time work central
to their personnel strategy: Wal-Mart considers 28 hours the
normal work week for many of its 600,000 workers, Marriott
keeps the hours worked by its immigrant workforce variable,
while McDonald's puts up with a 400-percent turnover rate
rather than hire on a full-time basis.

In the meatpacking industry, where the Omaha and
Chicago-based packinghouses once offered workers the very
highest industrial wages, a managerial revolution in the 1980s
shifted production to the small towns farther West. There, the
industry's leading companies - Con-Agra, Cargill and Iowa Beef
Processors - now offer $8-an-hour jobs to a workforce
increasingly made up of single men from the Far East and Latin
America. The companies prefer this strategy, even when it
generates huge turnover expenses, because it keeps the
workforce young, transient, flexible - and cheap. And until
now, it has seemsed a pretty good union avoidance strategy: If
workers think their jobs are just "throwaways," then why would
they want to fight to make it better?

Managers argue that many part-timers don't want to work
a regular shift. Indeed, plenty of students, retirees and
parents genuinely prefer less than 40 hours' work a week. But
if the Teamsters and other unions chose a bargaining effort
that reflected just the immediate preferences of such workers,
they would be abdicating their duty, not only as a
representative of these workers, but as the architects of a
better society for the rest of us.

Labor history offers us a good example of what's at
stake here. In the early 1930s the typical longshoreman was a
transient day laborer, an unreliable part-timer who often drank
and gambled away his wages in the flophouses and dives that
clustered about the piers and portside warehouses. The shipping
companies hired them each morning at 6, when the longshoremen
"shaped up" around the foreman, who selected his crew for the
day. Managers thought that since the longshoremen were so
unreliable, this was the only practical way to hire them.

But the unions, led by radical reformers such as Harry
Bridges, had another vision. In a series of bitter strike
battles, first on the West Coast and then in the East,
longshore labor won a hiring hall, higher pay and stady work,
thus abolishing the shape-up and transforming the relationship
of the men to their work and their employers. In San Francisco
the stevedores now called themselves the "lords of the dock,"
The bums, drunkards and transients were transformed into a set
of sturdy proletarians who soon bought houses, cars and
vacation packages.

This "decasualization" of longshore work was not a
product of just technological change or a Depression-era
cultural transformation, but arose out of a conscious strategy
pursued by a militant union. And during that same industrial
season of change, labor's organizing work in the garment,
auto, steel, electrical, cannery and tobacco industries also
gave a generation of Americans, many of Eastern European or
African-American heritage, a kind of property right to their
jobs and career-long expectation of an evermore prosperous
future.

The Teamsters union, along with the rest of the labor
movement, now has a similar opportunity to transform the work
lives and social aspirations of millions of heretofore marginal
men and women. If a Teamster victory at UPS demonstrates that
collective struggle can actually transform the fabric of their
worklife, then this strike will have an explosive impact that
the labor movement can use to begin reversing three decades of
decline. History is unfolding before us, and with a capital H.

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