File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9708, message 316


Date: Mon, 25 Aug 1997 12:40:31 -0400
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: M-I: Yearlong Effort Key to Success for Teamsters


August 25, 1997

Yearlong Effort Key to Success for Teamsters

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

Early on a brisk March morning, 150 brown-suited drivers and loaders
huddled outside the United Parcel Service terminal just off Interstate 80
in New Jersey, chanting: "It's our contract. We'll fight for it." 

Though it was four months before their contract expired, four months before
a strike deadline, these workers in Saddle Brook, like those at rallies in
30 other cities around the country that morning, were already gung-ho
volunteers in the Teamsters' efforts to mobilize members to stand up to UPS
-- and to stand firm in a strike, if it came to that. 

The rallies received scant attention, but they turned out to be part of an
unusual -- and unusually sophisticated -- mobilization effort that was
pivotal in the Teamsters' winning most of what they sought in their 15-day
strike against UPS. It was labor's biggest victory in years, and it came in
the nation's biggest strike in more than a decade. 

The Teamsters' yearlong mobilization included scores of rallies at UPS
sites as well as other major efforts, like sending questionnaires to
185,000 Teamsters asking what they wanted from the UPS negotiations and
collecting 100,000 signatures backing the union's demands. But the union
did not neglect minor details: at one point, it distributed 50,000 whistles
for use at the rallies. 

By the time the July 31 strike deadline approached, the Teamsters had
turned their UPS membership into a well-oiled juggernaut that the company's
leaders underestimated. In dozens of interviews with UPS, union and federal
officials, the union's mobilization and the company's misreading of it
emerge as the keys to the Teamsters' victory. 

UPS executives acknowledged several major miscalculations: they did not
think there would be a walkout, and they thought the workers were too
divided to sustain a strike. One UPS official acknowledged that the company
thought it could win the showdown by getting tens of thousands of Teamsters
to cross the picket lines. 

But those hopes were dashed by the union's efforts. Explaining the
mobilization strategy, Ron Carey, the Teamsters' president, said: "First,
you have to get organized. You have to have something that brings you
together. When you are organized, you then create the leverage you need." 

Company officials asserted that the Teamsters' plans demonstrated that
Carey was always intent on calling a strike, rather than settling, to
bolster himself politically. They say he wanted to rally his members behind
him because he knew a federal official might order a rerun of the vote in
which he was re-elected as Teamsters' president last year. In an interview
on Friday, the day the federal election overseer did overturn his victory
because of illegal contributions, Carey denied that he had ordered the
strike for personal political reasons. "That's all bull being spun out by
the company," he said. 

Months of Mobilizing 

     t the Teamsters' convention in Philadelphia 13 months ago, the
heavyweight event was the face-off between Carey's forces      and those of
his election opponent, James P. Hoffa. Tucked in a booth belonging to the
union's Parcel & Small Package Division, Rand Wilson was preoccupied with
another, distant battle. 

He was buttonholing dozens of UPS shop stewards and stuffing their pockets
with a booklet called "Countdown to the Contract." It contained a
month-by-month calendar until the July 31 strike deadline and gave myriad
tips on how to escalate pressure on the company and build a communications
network to keep workers informed and involved. 

Ten months ago, Wilson worked with Carey and Ken Hall, director of the
Teamsters' parcel division, to draft the survey that asked UPS workers what
priority should be placed on creating more full-time jobs and what was more
important, wage increases or improved pensions. 

The survey found that 90 percent of the part-time workers said creating
more full-time jobs was very important. That became a bargaining priority
because three-fifths of UPS workers are part-timers. 

On March 7, four days before the company and union began negotiating, the
Teamsters flew two representatives from each of the 206 UPS locals to
Chicago for a rally. Soon after, rallies began around the nation. On March
10 there were rallies at 10 UPS sites, and on March 25, there were 30.
There were even more in April, May and June. 

All shop stewards received a seven-minute video about the UPS negotiations.
The union also gave out tens of thousands of "It's Our Contract. We'll
Fight For It" stickers for workers to wear. 

In mid-July, with the negotiations going nowhere, UPS workers voted 95
percent to 5 percent to authorize a strike. 

Wilson, who coordinated the mobilization, said after the strike ended that
the effort had several purposes. "We believe that the best way to avoid a
strike is to show the unity of members," he said. "We hope the company will
be more serious about negotiating. In the event of a strike, the advantage
is people are well-informed and prepared to do what is necessary to win." 

The Teamsters Walk 

     s so often happens in bargaining, UPS and the Teamsters faulted each
other for making little progress between March 11,      when negotiations
began in Washington, and the July 31 deadline. 

The early strategy, both sides say, was to take the three dozen outstanding
issues and have them whittled to three or four shortly before the deadline.
Then the tightly wound Carey and the company's courtly chairman, James P.
Kelly, would thrash out the final issues and proclaim a settlement. 

But shortly before the deadline, a raft of differences remained over pay,
subcontracting, safety and other issues. The two sides grappled over the
company's demand to create a UPS-only pension plan, a move the union feared
would endanger its multi-employer plans. The company balked at the
Teamsters' demand to make 10,000 part-time jobs full-time. 

When the talks deadlocked early on Thursday, July 31, the two sides
telephoned John Calhoun Wells, director of the Federal Mediation and
Conciliation Service, who was working in the Midwest. He jumped on a plane
for Washington. 

"I received a call that it looked like a train wreck was possible," Wells
said in an interview. 

At 6 p.m. he met with the Teamsters' 50-person bargaining team and 20 UPS
representatives, but then he invited the chief negotiators to meet with him
in his office. Making little progress, he asked the union to extend its
midnight strike deadline, and Carey obliged. 

On July 30, the company had presented what it called its "final offer," but
the union rejected it. On August 2, the Teamsters presented a new proposal,
but UPS rebuffed it. 

The talks resumed in Wells' office at 6 p.m. on Sunday, Aug. 3. In
interviews, several company officials said UPS executives indicated in that
session that they might move well beyond their "final" offer. Kelly said he
had expected Teamster leaders to begin serious give-and-that at that meeting. 

But after four hours, Carey walked out and announced the strike for 12:01
a.m. on Monday, Aug. 4. 

Describing the Sunday talks, Sternad, the UPS spokesman, said, "We made
offers on a contract that looked remarkably similar to the one that
Teamsters ultimately accepted." He said that UPS even suggested it would
withdraw its pension demand. 

"It didn't become apparent till very late in the game that a strike was
planned, that it was going to happen regardless," he said. "It was indeed
premeditated." 

Carey strongly denies that account, insisting that the company offered
nothing firm beyond its July 30 offer and nothing close to what the union
ultimately accepted. He also denied that UPS had signaled it would withdraw
its pension demand. 

"If anyone should be accused of forcing a strike, it's UPS," he said. "When
we were faced with fish or cut bait, which was Thursday night, I agreed to
go further. We went the extra mile." 

A Public War 

     trikes, like wars, are fought on many levels -- sustaining the
fighters' morale, propagandizing to court public opinion, working
nonstop on logistics and probing one's opponent for weaknesses. 

To keep its members informed, the union updated its World Wide Web site
every few hours, faxed bulletins to Teamster locals and set up a toll-free
hot line for strikers. The Teamsters strained to make sure that full-timers
and part-timers backed the walkout, and each other. The union convinced
many full-timers that UPS's pension proposal would endanger their pensions,
a contention the company ridiculed. The union also repeatedly told
full-timers that the surge in part-timers endangered their own job
security. For their part, the part-timers backed the full-timers' demands
because many hoped to become full-time one day. 

Every chance Carey got, he hammered the part-time issue, knowing that it
resonated with a public upset with stagnant wages and corporate downsizing.
"America wants to move people from welfare to work," he said, "but with
these low-wage part time jobs, UPS is doing just the opposite." 

Teamster leaders knew that public support was crucial to buoy the strikers'
morale and to pressure UPS. The strikers gave out pro-Teamster score cards
at baseball games and visited UPS customers to explain the strike. 

At company headquarters in Atlanta, UPS's generals had several strategies
of their own. To neutralize the Teamsters' public relations, the company
staged its own blitz, which included ads in more than a dozen newspapers,
defending the company's pension proposals and the quality of its part-time
jobs. 

Company officials acknowledge they thought they could win the strike by
pressuring Carey to let the rank and file vote on the company's "final"
offer -- a vote the company was confident it would win. In advertisements,
television appearances and letters to its workers and to Congress, UPS
called Carey undemocratic for blocking a vote. . 

In another strategy, the company pressed President Clinton to seek an
injunction under the Taft-Hartley Act to stop the strike. UPS asked its
many customers who were being hurt by the strike to flood the White House
with letters, going so far as to provide them with sample letters. 

In the strike's first week, there was far more activity away from the
bargaining table than at it. Wells persuaded the two sides to resume talks
on Aug. 7. The talks meandered for two days, and finally Kelly walked out
on Saturday, Aug. 9. 

"The position of the Teamsters continues to be unrealistic," he said.
"Their position does not allow us to compete." 

The Endgame 

     hat Saturday afternoon, Wells and Labor Secretary Alexis Herman met at
the White House with John Podesta, the      president's deputy chief of
staff. Fearing that the strike would hurt the economy, the administration
decided to upgrade its role and move Ms. Herman to center stage. On Monday,
she met separately with Carey and David Murray, the company's chief
negotiator. 

Back in Atlanta, UPS officials saw that things were not going their way.
President Clinton indicated he would not invoke Taft-Hartley. Carey refused
to allow a vote on the company's prestrike offer. The company was getting
clobbered in public opinion polls, strikers' morale remained strong and
other unions pledged millions of dollars to pay for strike benefits. And
only a few thousand strikers crossed the picket line. 

"The company thought the full-timers and part-timers wouldn't stick
together and a lot of people would start crossing the picket line," said
Wayne Fernicola, secretary-treasurer of a New Jersey local. "That really
took the steam out of their sails." 

After talking repeatedly with Ms. Herman and Wells on Tuesday and
Wednesday, the two sides resumed negotiations on Thursday at the
Hyatt-Regency hotel. They talked from 9 a.m. Thursday to 3 a.m. Friday, and
then from 8 a.m. Friday until 5:30 a.m. Saturday. Talks resumed at 8 a.m.
Saturday and went until 2:30 Sunday morning. 

Wells said he told the bargainers on Friday: "Do you both want to have a
fight to the death? You can demonstrate to the world that you're
sufficiently powerful that you can destroy each other. 

"I talked about two scorpions in a bottle." 

According to Wells, the negotiators' positions began to thaw on Saturday. 

Hall, the union's chief negotiator, said a breakthrough came on Sunday when
the company suggested it might withdraw its pension demand. Urged by his
advisers to help seal a deal, Clinton weighed in on Sunday, telling the
negotiators to redouble their efforts. 

Early on Monday afternoon, the negotiators said, the overall package
emerged as they began wholesale swapping of demands. The company abandoned
its pension proposal and accepted the union's demand to make 10,000
part-time jobs full-time, but in five years, not in four as the Teamsters
had demanded. The union's main concession was to accept a five-year
agreement, instead of a four-year accord. 

Trumpeting the agreement as a watershed victory for American labor, Carey
said, "In virtually every area, this agreement is much, much better than
the last offer before the strike." 

Though UPS officials said they had a multibillion-dollar war chest to
withstand a strike, they said they made major concessions because they
feared a prolonged walkout would cause them to lose permanent market share
to lower-wage, nonunion competitors. Company officials acknowledged that
unless they waited months, they were not going to get a Taft-Hartley
injunction.

"There was no strategy to outlast the Teamsters," said Sternad, the UPS
spokesman. "The strategy was to get back to work. It was devastating our
business and our customers." 

Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company




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