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. *-*-* -*-*-* -*-*-* -*-*-* -*-*-*-*-*-*-* -*-*-* -*-*-* -*-*-* -*-*-* * LEFTLINK - sponsored by Melbourne's New International Bookshop * * http://www.alexia.net.au/~www/mhutton/ * * Address to post messages to Leftlink: Leftlink-AT-vicnet.net.au * * Address to join or leave Leftlink: majordomo-AT-vicnet.net.au * * To join Leftlink write: subscribe leftlink your-email-address * * To leave Leftlink write: unsubscribe leftlink your-email-address * *-*-* -*-*-* -*-*-* -*-*-* -*-*-*-*-*-*-* -*-*-* -*-*-* -*-*-* -*-*-* --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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