“We’ve Changed the Game”: Teamsters Win Historic UPS Contract

https://teamster.org/2023/07/weve-changed-the-game-teamsters-win-historic-ups-contract/

by caned • 3 years ago

202 173 3 years ago

mydriasis• 3 years ago

This is awesome news and a great addition to the trend of power coming back to the workers that I feel like I'm noticing lately. Super exciting: if you're a laborer, you should feel inspired by this. Collective bargaining is a seriously powerful tool.

ryandrake2• 3 years ago

Excellent news indeed. Looking at the list of bullet points in the article, I challenge anyone to say, with a straight face, that each individual UPS worker negotiating on his/her own would have been able to achieve even half of them, let alone all of them. Well done. Hopefully you are right about a trend.

jancsika• 3 years ago

Hm, I can almost see the standard HN response here. I'm thinking specifically of the non-programming posts of a regular HN'er programmer[1]. Something like:

Unions work on their own behalf and distort the market. Both in terms of the needs of individual workers and the efficiency of the company to deliver products/services. This negatively affects the company, and if the trend spreads ends up making the entire U.S. economy less competitive.

I would then follow you down a rabbit hole where I post 2-3 sentence glib retorts.

Digression: I could have done a lot better in the days before they locked down the vast majority of ChatGPT's capabilities. I know because I got it to impersonate both Dang and myself, at which it excelled; it also did a very good job of explaining style of any given user's writing here on HN.

1: Fun 2nd digression: the account I'm satirizing originally used a throwaway account for all of the zealous free-market flame posts. Dang ended up called out the pattern, asking the user to "stop using this account" to start low-effort flame wars. Rather than stop, the user instead opted to do their overzealous free-market trolling from their normal account. Problem solved, apparently! :)

atleastoptimal• 3 years ago

Whenever I think of the Teamsters I think of Scorsese gangster movies which are basically just the Teamsters cinematic universe.

renewiltord2• 3 years ago

Haha, well warranted, I think. Sean O'Brien succeeded James Hoffa - son of the infamous Jimmy Hoffa. So the mob connections are not too far away there.

_jal• 3 years ago

When you think of CEOs, do you think of Les Grossman?

metadat• 3 years ago

https://www.dexerto.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=3840,quality=75,...

boppo1• 3 years ago

Please expand on why you think the teamsters are essentially irish and italian mafia.

renewiltord2• 3 years ago

Tony Pro was national vice president of the Teamsters while caporegime in the Genovese family. And there was Jimmy Hoffa, of course. They were quite heavily involved in organized crime at the time, with their top leaders being literally in the Mafia.

They frequently show up in films covering the time. So it doesn't seem outlandish. Hoffa is the one that built it into a powerhouse. It's unsurprising that he remains the known face of the union. A Hoffa ran it for a third of its entire age.

abfan1127• 3 years ago

Is there any other independent analysis of this agreement? It all sounds good, but its also the teamster website. when is UPS's next earnings call?

delecti• 3 years ago

August 8th seems to be the next Earnings Call. https://investors.ups.com/news-events/ir-calendar

JumpCrisscross10• 3 years ago

This looks like a fair deal.

$2.75/hour immediate bump and +$7.50/hour over the next five years; $21/hour floor for part-time workers; eliminating 22.4s, which Bloomberg describes as "a class of drivers who earned less" [1]; air conditioning in new vehicles; MLK Day as a paid holiday; and the "creation of 7,500 new full-time Teamster jobs at UPS and the fulfillment of 22,500 open positions."

Well done to both sides for getting in a room and cutting a deal.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-25/ups-teams...

m4632• 3 years ago

As long as amazon drivers get the same sort of benefits.

I wonder if this will just make amazon's transition from ups -> amazon vehicles faster?

or are amazon workers already paid well?

EDIT: to clarify:

sorry, I thought several steps ahead without connecting the dots.

I think this is a good deal. I like UPS too.

But I worry that UPS makes an enormous amount of its revenue from amazon, and it will make UPS more expensive.

An analogy might be us manufacturing jobs treating their employees right while china is cheaper without worrying about employees. And then all the jobs migrate to china. The answer would be - china treats employees right.

JumpCrisscross10• 3 years ago

As long as amazon drivers get the same sort of benefits

How does the fairness of this deal depend on negotiations between Amazon and its drivers?

jrockway2• 3 years ago

I can't imagine that Amazon pays any workers well. (They wash their hands because the delivery folks are independent contractors.)

I would imagine that people drive for an Amazon affiliate for a couple years with the goal of being hired by UPS for the higher pay and better benefits. The result is that Amazon will always have a lower quality of service than UPS. (I am sure HN hates UPS, but every driver I've interacted with has been super friendly, and they can sneak packages into buildings like they're ninjas. At the end of the day, you get what you pay for, and honey attracts more flies than vinegar. https://xkcd.com/357/)

toomuchtodo• 3 years ago

Have you done anything to help Amazon drivers unionize? What’s stopping you? (Not rhetorical, genuine questions)

(I provide logistical and financial support to the Starbucks workers union, for example: https://sbworkersunited.org/)

artsytrashcan6• 3 years ago

I don't think so. The air conditioning bit was a big point*, and it doesn't look like they've moved at all since June. The deal says they'll put AC in vehicles purchased from 2024 forward, but no retrofits except for a "heat shield" for the cabin. Unless UPS plans to replace its fleet in 2024 (it does not), it will be years before the vast majority of drivers have AC. More are going to die.

*because multiple deliverymen have died of heat-related illness while on the job, and it's otherwise a major long-term health concern

JumpCrisscross10• 3 years ago

Unless UPS plans to replace its fleet in 2024 (it does not), it will be years before the vast majority of drivers have AC

This is what makes it a fair deal. Give and take. A maximalist position from labour would demand UPS churn or retrofit its entire fleet overnight. That's obviously not feasible, even if it makes for great PR.

no retrofits except for a "heat shield" for the cabin

Maybe I'm reading "all cars get two fans and air induction vents in the cargo compartments" incorrectly?

dymk5• 3 years ago

I agree that it's not a strong win. But from this:

All cars get two fans and air induction vents in the cargo compartments.

It sounds like all existing vehicles at least get a retrofit to have fans / air in the back?

tyrfing6• 3 years ago

Air conditioning was fairly easy for both parties to agree on, due to a very successful PR campaign that the company wants to bury. Something like an accelerated schedule to retrofit current vehicles would be expensive to negotiate and result in sacrifices elsewhere.

Cabin AC won't fix cargo areas hitting 140s, and most drivers wouldn't agree to lose $5/hr for AC today or something like that. The heat shield is for the cargo compartment, along with improved air intakes / ventilation and possibly other mitigations - they get absurdly hot and have minimal airflow.

dymk5• 3 years ago

https://archive.is/cyWUm <- for bloomberg blurb

voisin3• 3 years ago

I’d love to see unions start agitating for climate change initiatives to counteract investor demands for profit at all cost. Union members as low and medium income individuals will be disproportionately impacted by climate change.

10u152• 3 years ago

In this case, people making $21 an hour are not worried about climate change. They're worried about putting food on the table, making rent etc. Climate change is a problem for the elites/big corps/government. The idea of making it a problem for the lowest in society - who are also generally the lowest co2 emitters - is unfair.

gruez6• 3 years ago

This won't work because climate change mitigation is a prisoners dilemma. You could negotiate for $x to be spent on climate change mitigation, or for $x to be spent on your ingroup (ie. union). In the former case, the benefits are spread across all 8 billion people on earth, whereas in the latter case the benefits will only be spread among your ingroup (tens of thousands of people?). Sure, a ounce of prevention might be worth more than a pound of cure, but at these scales (ie. 8 billion vs tens of thousands), it's basically guaranteed that the numbers won't work out. They can certainly try to negotiate for climate change mitigation, but doing so will be economically irrational and will basically be an act of altruism.

costanzaDynasty• 3 years ago

That’s how unions work at blogs. In the real world, in Teamster type jobs it’s usually about how can they move jobs and pay around to look like they gave you more than scraps. How do I know? I was a Teamsters through many contracts.

lowmagnet• 3 years ago

Those 25,000 + 7,500 jobs will probably make it harder for Amazon to hire drivers in some areas.

johnohara• 3 years ago

"The creation of 7,500 new full-time Teamster jobs at UPS and the fulfillment of 22,500 open positions, establishing more opportunities through the life of the agreement for part-timers to transition to full-time work."

"How ya' doin'? This is my brother Jimmie, my cousin Jimmie, and his son Jimmie. Nice place ya got here. Mind if we take a look around?"

darth_avocado• 3 years ago

This is great news for workers in America in general. I know HN doesn’t like unions, but this shows that unions do work when they are motivated in working for the people they represent. More than Sean O’Brien, this victory was made possible by TDU’s rank and file members not giving in when UPS tried to shortchange them.

learplant• 3 years ago

Taking your word for it regarding HN not liking unions. Why is that if you know? What's the alternative for a UPS worker to get fair pay and fair working conditions?

JumpCrisscross10• 3 years ago

Taking your word for it regarding HN not liking unions

Don't. HN is far from a monolith on this issue.

To the degree I've seen even a semblance of consensus, it's in animosity towards public-sector unions and gentle support for blue-collar private-sector unions. Where it turns to total anarchy is when we debate unionizing tech workers. (They tend to be fun reads.)

dymk5• 3 years ago

HN (generally) doesn't like unions because we're highly paid software engineers who think we're better at negotiation one-on-one than in a group.

Ericson23145• 3 years ago

HN has a mix of opinions but there are a lot of "temporarily embarrassed ~~millionaire~~ billionaire" wannabe entrepreneurs. People that think of themselves as employers not employees, etc.

tech_ken• 3 years ago

Two answers:

* In the US there's a narrative that unions add layers to bureaucracy to a process that should (from an IMO limited "pro free market" position) efficiently settle on an optimal solution all by itself. Many people just by default accept this argument, and to be entirely fair US unions definitely got complacent in the last few decades.

* Many HN commenters are affluent tech workers or entrepeneurs, and some are bosses or capital owners themselves. People in this first group kind of "won" the economy, and in the second group actively benefit from workers negotiating 1-on-1. Group (1) has a tendency to not relate well or understand the position of the typical union constituency, Group (2) has financial motivation to push back against it.

billiam• 3 years ago

It's true it's not a monolith, but the loudest voices here have been against all union,s not just public sector ones. But do you hear that today? Silence. It's the sound of former well-paid engineers and other tech workers of the techbro-libertarian bent realizing that the worker rights they've spent years decrying actually matter. Could this be because they finally realize that despite their notion that they are in the ownership class with their options and investments, their jobs have more in common with a UPS driver than with management and the superrich who own the companies where they work?

z3t4• 3 years ago

Many HN readers don't want to be paid more.

danielmarkbruce• 3 years ago

One position is that there are not only two parties involved in a person's employment situation. The alternative is they go work another company.

Another position is that unions destroy companies by forcing a cost structure which dooms the company to fail.

Lots of people think one or both plus other things.

duxup2• 3 years ago

They work when applied to jobs that fit what American unions do well.

On the other hand teachers union, I don’t know what they have done. That is still a thankless job, poor pay for most of the career, dwindling benefits, and even situations where teachers have physical security issues.

nxm• 3 years ago

They’ve removed the ability to fire the bad ones (hurting students in the process), and hence preventing the good ones from getting paid better

EMM_386• 3 years ago

This is great news for workers in America in general.

It really is.

Workers in certain industries have been pushed to the absolute breaking point. This is exactly what unions were meant to solve.

You can only take so much before you get pushback.

This is good for the US. Unions built the middle class in prior generations.

I used to be a commercial pilot and a federal ATC. Unions were an option.

stainablesteel• 3 years ago

unions for private companies are fine imo, unions in government funded roles only cause problems :/

hackeraccount• 3 years ago

I don't dislike unions anymore then I dislike any monopoly.

More seriously, I don't have a problem with Unions - except when they start to get propped up by the government. I don't have a problem with UPS cutting a deal with the teamsters. If the government steps in and sets the deal or the government steps in and says that all shippers have to use the teamsters - that's when I have problems.

silisili3• 3 years ago

This is really awesome, one of the few jobs that now seem to be keeping up with inflation.

20 years ago I remember they paid everyone $8.50 an hour starting out, but had awesome perks like free college and housing assistance. Slowly they of course eroded the perks away, so the least they could do is pay more.

Kudos Teamsters.

throw9away6• 3 years ago

How much less spending power do employees have now as compared to 2020? That’s the real question… If it’s less than a 30% adjustment they will just come out less behind.

the_only_law• 3 years ago

I was talking to someone who’s partner works at UPS doing IT stuff. Apparently their contingency plan was to force people like him to additionally work the striking roles for no additional pay under the threat of firing.

sidewndr46• 3 years ago

This is how Caterpillar handled the assembly line employees strike. My understanding is they never really rehired union labor.

vGPU7• 3 years ago

More than half of Cat’s labor is outsourced outside of the US, and they just got caught using slave labor in china not long ago.

If we kept manufacturing inside of the US, they wouldn’t be able to abuse their workforce like that.

runako5• 3 years ago

I interned at AT&T a while back. At the time, they required all "management" employees to prepare for their alternative roles in case CWA called a strike. The IT group I was in had people training to do field installs and maintenance as I recall. Interns in the group were considered "management" employees. Weird times.

ImaCake• 3 years ago

If that’s true then UPS management is not very smart. Thanks to changing demographics there is now a permanent worker shortage which has allowed these strikes to succeed. You can’t threaten to fire people when they know they can get hired by the next company. The workers will just call your bluff.

Mountain_Skies3• 3 years ago

I worked with UPS's top management in an outside consulting role unrelated to labor issues around the time of their first contract negotiations after the strike of the 90s. Avoiding another strike was their number one priority even if they had to put out a strong public face of something different. Workers have fared well each time the contract has come up and I believe the 90s strike had far more impact on the company's management culture than most, even the union, realizes. The folks I worked with seemed to believe another strike would be perhaps not fatal but damaging enough to put the company on a path towards death. It was to be avoided at all costs.

favorited• 3 years ago

This is what happened last time. Managers and office workers were sent out on delivery runs, usually doubled up since they're not going to be as efficient.

nonethewiser2• 3 years ago

I was at UPS IT and my manager regularly did deliveries. In that case it had nothing to do with unions.

zecaurubu• 3 years ago

That's also the contingency plan for the national postal service in Brazil (ECT/Correios) - a state-owned company. My father, an instructor, had to drive a van around the town to deliver express packages during strikes. The strangest thing about these situations was that old employees (a few were 80+) were also assigned to package delivery duties and some of them would end up getting lost. This was before cellphones were widespread, so Dad and his colleagues would go searching for the missing employees after lunchtime and bring them back to the office.

lockhouse5• 3 years ago

Great news for the Teamsters, but how much more inflation is this likely to cause?

UPS has to pay for all of this somehow, which means we have to pay for it.

CPLX4• 3 years ago

You sure it’s going to be us instead of shaving half a percent of the Bezos budget for rocketry or something?

lockhouse5• 3 years ago

99% sure it’s going to be us.

The elites don’t usually do pay cuts.

prh8• 3 years ago

UPS has had record profits lately. Inflation is due to corporate profit record breaking not employee wages.

lockhouse5• 3 years ago

If you think UPS won’t charge customers more to cover these costs you’re not paying attention.

silisili3• 3 years ago

No inflation necessary.

Quick math. UPS has 532,000 employees. Let's assume they all work full time(they don't), and all get a $2.75 raise -

2.75 * 40 * 52 = $5,720 per employee

5720 * 532000 = $3,043,040,000

UPS profits 2022: $13,900,000,000

So, a quarter or so of profits.

einpoklum6• 3 years ago

The relevant population of workers is 340,000 ; and they don't all work a full-time job. On the other hand, you did not calculate the annuities depending on the hourly rate. Still, probably a lot less than your result. Not to mention how this will probably lock-in UPS workers for a number of years.

artsytrashcan6• 3 years ago

This is spin on a bad agreement. I hope the workers reject it and push for more.

dymk5• 3 years ago

What do you think would be achievable that they haven't negotiated for already?

einpoklum6• 3 years ago

Probably everything...

Remember that you're getting the press releases from the union leadership which needs to justify calling off the strike, plus the pro-corporate news media.

grumple• 3 years ago

Wage increases for full-timers will keep UPS Teamsters the highest paid delivery drivers in the nation, improving their average top rate to $49 per hour.

Seems pretty good. I may take a break from tech and drive for a while.

Mountain_Skies3• 3 years ago

You need a lot of seniority to get that rate.

SaintSeiya84• 3 years ago

That's why Unions work, and so many lobbyists has ingrained in the US society that they are bad. Take that.

the_optimist• 3 years ago

Well, we do have teachers’ unions, police, firefighter unions, steelworker unions (not so much anymore, failed to adapt and killed the industry). Who’s taking what?

drannex• 3 years ago

Congrats!

Unions work, unionize!

Ericson23145• 3 years ago

Full employment works people. Go read https://www.employamerica.org/ for some excellent analysis of the macroeconomics.

And let's be clear, this is good for tech. Tight labor markets -> automation is actually needed. All the "above the API" / "below the API" scaremongering from the 2010s we should not see as the inevitable nature of things, but rather as a direct consequence from shitty economic policies during the Obama years.

moneywoes2• 3 years ago

I don’t follow, how does this decision affect tech

satvikpendem• 3 years ago

Labor solidarity means that companies will look to automate more, thereby accelerating technological progress. This argument is known as (particularly, automation based) accelerationism.

Ericson23145• 3 years ago

Not direct causation either way, but shared root causes.

Labor in short supply -> stronger unions -> better deals for workers

Labor in short supply -> more consumption -> more demand -> automation to increase output more valuable

Labor in short supply -> automation to reduse labor needed more valuable

runako5• 3 years ago

"Wage increases for full-timers will keep UPS Teamsters the highest paid delivery drivers in the nation, improving their average top rate to $49 per hour."

One has to wonder what tech workers could achieve through collective bargaining.

einpoklum6• 3 years ago

Don't worry, that number is a total misrepresentation.

Having said that - tech workers could achieve a whole lot through collective _struggle_ (of which bargaining is just a part):

* They could prevent mass government surveillance

* They could force companies to share their patents and other "intellectual property" with the rest of society, for the benefit of everyone.

* They could link up with other workers in areas such as the SF bay to force the government and tech companies to finance construction of public housing and limit rent.

* They could mobilize and lead struggles for getting corporate money out of politics (well, at least the direct kind of money in politics).

... and of course take care of their own interests in the form of participation in company decision-making, protection against arbitrary terminations, equitable pay scales, less excessive work hours etc.

runako5• 3 years ago

Don't worry, that number is a total misrepresentation.

I was hoping for more details on the agreement, and it seems you have them. Could you please share the data that leads to this conclusion?

Thanks!

JumpCrisscross10• 3 years ago

improving their average top rate

What is this.

runako5• 3 years ago

A compensation number that overlaps neatly with posted ranges for full-stack engineers located in San Francisco.

twoodfin3• 3 years ago

Presumably every UPS driver receives a range of rates based on their schedule and other factors (e.g. holidays, overtime).

So the average top rate would be the average of the top end rate amongst all drivers.

kylehotchkiss• 3 years ago

This is great for UPS! I am always happy when retailers choose them to send packages to me. They never get lost. But what often and increasingly happens to me instead is that they make OnTrac deliver my package to save $.15 cents and then my package gets thrown into a hole in the mail room instead of treated with a once of care. I hope UPS funds these changes via not making their executives richer instead of raising prices across the board.

einpoklum6• 3 years ago

These agreements are a form of collusion by the teamsters bureaucracy to break the upcoming strike and save the employers' asses.

They write: "UPS came dangerously close to putting itself on strike, but we kept firm on our demands."

those two pieces of the sentence don't match that well, do they? If the union kept firm, then the strike would have happened. It should read: "UPS came dangerously close to putting itself on strike, but we gave up on the workers' demands."

The corrupt union leadership knows that with a strike, there would be even more rank-and-file pressure against a sellout deal, especially if workers organize for collective disruptions while striking.

The Teamsters leadership has just done something very similar at Yellow, a few years ago, see coverage here:

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/07/25/yell-j25.html

Seanambers• 3 years ago

Good for them. Real work, deserves real pay.

chasd00• 3 years ago

If that's the deal the workers got imagine the deal the teamster boss's got!

buffington• 3 years ago

I don't know enough about teamster bosses to imagine. Can you give the rest of us an idea of what you're implying?

someonehere• 3 years ago

One has to wonder if UPS caved in because they can pass the cost of the agreement on to customers rather than cutting back on executive pay and perks.

It’s a victory for the workers, but at a cost to those that need to ship or receive things when we’re already seeing wages not keeping with inflation.

vGPU7• 3 years ago

To expand on my previous comment: we literally have more job openings than unemployed people, per the latest BLS statistics. And this is a situation that has stayed constant for months.

So what happens when demand for workers is higher than the available supply?

“We’ve Changed the Game”: Teamsters Win Historic UPS Contract

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