Date: Wed, 13 Aug 1997 09:21:10 -0400
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: M-I: Robert Fitch on the UPS strike


Solidarity, for a Change

Something New in the '90s: UPS Versus Corporate America 

by Robert Fitch

America is no longer a striking country. In the '90s, strikes have fallen
to one-tenth the level of the '70s. Since then, median wages for
nonsupervisory workers have been falling steadily, about 1 per cent a year.
But we're still almost dead last in the International Labor Militance
League. Last year, union-conscious French workers went out on strike 53
times as often as American workers. The supposedly docile Japanese, the
order-obsessed Germans, and Canadians employed by U.S. corporations just
across the border, all go on strike at rates that would cause massive
cardiac infarctions at The Wall Street Journal.Just when it seemed as if
the nationwide mass strike against corporate America might go the way of
other obsolete social rituals, 185,000 Teamsters walked off their jobs.
Under the leadership of the former UPS deliveryman Ron Carey, the union
managed to shut down nearly 90 per cent of the company's package centers
and truck depots. And in the first week, with local strike discipline
holding well, Detroit-based Teamster activist Ken Paff exulted, "We've won
the opening round."

This is a hard edge to have gained--a vast improvement over the '94 UPS
fiasco when three-quarters of the locals ignored Carey's call for a one-day
protest strike. But Big Brown is not going to be easily rolled, even if all
the Teamster locals are solidly behind the strike this time. And, as Paff
points out, "half the locals are dying to see Carey fail."

Striking UPS is not like taking on some mom-and-pop freight company. UPS's
336,000 employees--including the 185,000 Teamster members--add up to more
than GE, Intel, and Microsoft combined. Last year's $1.1 billion in profits
not only make up two-thirds of all the profits earned in the delivery
business, but the company's rate of profit towers 40 per cent above the
industry average.

To be profitable each year, the company carefully controls the pace of over
a billion hours of donkey labor. It can guarantee its customers next-day
delivery because it knows that $50,000-a-year drivers will be on the road
delivering packages, not on the picket line obstructing their arrival.

For UPS's entire 90-year history, the company never had to face an
effective national shutdown. So how did that most un-'90s of American
outcomes--a strike--happen at UPS, of all places?

Both supporters and adversaries agree that the credit or the blame lies
with president Ron Carey. Critics have portrayed the strike as an effort to
focus attention away from mounting evidence of fraud in Carey's narrow
16,000-vote victory last October. Carey supporters deny he's simply
reacting to circumstances. They see his decision to take the workers out
not as a defensive strike over demands for pension givebacks, but as an
historic take-back effort to benefit $8-an-hour part-time workers, who now
make up over 60 per cent of the UPS workforce.

Even given the best of intentions, what's Carey's strategy for winning?
With the members rejecting by 3 to 1 his 1994 referendum to raise dues to
increase strike pay, how can the union get by the second week of the
shutdown? That's when the checks must start going out every week to 185,000
members. According to the most recent Labor Department report, the
Teamsters had only $5.2 million in cash. "We'll do whatever's necessary,"
says Teamster spokesperson Nancy Stella. But how is Carey going to reach
out to the members, past local leaders who seek his ouster, to maintain
strike unity? What's his plan?

And who is Carey, really? He's as complex and contradictory as the 1.4
millionmember union he leads:

EThere is the Carey who bragged he'd lived nearly his whole adult life in a
two-family house in Kew Gardens. And there's the Carey who turned out to
own six more houses, including a $340,000 beachfront condo in Florida.

EThere's the militant fighter against UPS, who, in 1974, after seeing a
close friend serving as a picket captain run down and killed by a UPS
driver, responded by personally blocking UPS trucks with his own car. But
then there's the Carey who's been negotiating with the company while
earning $2 million worth of UPS stock he says he inherited from his father.

EThere's the Carey who led the longest national trucking strike in history
in 1994 to block the use of part-timers. And the Carey who the same year
negotiated the UPS contract that's allowed 38,000 part-time workers out of
43,000 new hires.

Carey's contradictions matter not just because he heads the union fighting
what may be the defining labor struggle of the decade. Those contradictions
also express the core dilemma of the New Labor movement. How well conceived
is the crusade for low-income workers? Can the battle be won piecemeal--on
a contract-by-contract basis? Is there more to it than just spin?

Clinton pollster Stan Greenberg has explained to his labor-leader clients
that to get public support they need to retool the famous Samuel Gompers
slogan "More." It's hard for $8-an-hour Jill to fight for "more" for
$18-an-hour Jack. So now the slogan is "More for Jack and Jill." But all
across the postindustrial American landscape, the system is predicated on
Jill getting less than Jack.

Companies like UPS don't increase productivity the old-fashioned way. They
don't replace labor with high-tech capital. To compete, UPS has no choice
but to force workers to work harder and pay them less. Postindustrial
management divides the workforce into elite and subaltern tiers: two groups
of workers who get different wages for doing the same work. So what can
unions do to fight it?

Here are three possibilities: (1) Attack the profit system itself -- launch
a movement to ban unequal pay for part-timers. (2) Do what the German metal
workers did two years ago -- organize a national strike to reduce the work
week. (3) If national strikes and initiatives seem daunting, unions could
attempt to convince their members that "the strong must help the weak."
That is, persuade Jack to restrain his wage demands in order to help Jill.

Right now, there's no sense that either Carey or Sweeney are considering
any of these alternatives. Both simply reaffirm the Democratic Party line:
the labor market can make everyone a winner. Bosses just need to grasp
their true interests in working cooperatively with organized labor.

UPS is unlikely to take Carey's advice. The company doesn't want to unify
its labor force around high pay. They intend to keep on dividing it by the
tried-and-true tier method. That's why they're offering full-timers
$3000-a-month pensions--up from $1250 a month.

To win this strike against Big Brown with a busted treasury, Carey can't
just make sure that picket lines are up. He has to let the strikers move
out from the picket lines and connect with the communities across the
country where they have natural allies. If he does, he'll be remembered
alongside Joe Hill, whose "Don't Mourn, Organize" spirit continues to
inspire. If he doesn't, he'll rank closer to Stanley Hill, the AFSCME
District Council 37 director whose "Don't organize, let's have lunch" ethos
was in evidence again last week when he reneged on the union's promise to
unionize Work Experience Programs. Whether the strike weapon continues to
rust in the hands of American workers or is sharpened and becomes a threat
once again depends a lot on which Carey shows up.

(Village Voice, Aug. 19)



     --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---