It’s been an eventful several weeks for both UPS and the Teamsters union as the two entities have been embroiled in a showdown over contract negotiations, with the current contract set to expire by the end of the month, now only a handful of days away.
As we reported last week, Teamsters President Sean O’Brien held a press conference on Saturday, July 1, to address the public on the state of the confrontation, immediately after which UPS agreed to return to the bargaining table where negotiations resumed, and in fact a few agreements were reached on policy changes regarding employees being called into work on their off days, observance of Martin Luther King Day, and more… only to have the negotiations dissolve once again less than four days later, in the early hours of Wednesday, July 5, after disagreements arose over compensation policy and adjustments to working conditions.
Now, nearly a week later, UPS and the Teamsters remain at a standstill. UPS Teamsters United held a webinar yesterday (July 9) to give an update on the situation, during which they claimed that “[m]anagement is trying to pit full-time against part-time, Teamster against Teamster. It won’t work.” The current contract will expire on July 31, which means every remaining day is crucial and critical. Unfortunately, with the company allegedly amping up attempts to sow disunity among workers instead of using what little time remains to reestablish negotiations, a strike now seems inevitable.
In the meantime, while the media focuses on how all of this will affect consumers, and while consumers in-turn keep an eye on the currently empty bargaining table in Washington DC, we at The Valley Labor Report (TVLR) have been talking with the people who will be most directly affected, no matter what happens, by the results of this showdown: rank-and-file UPS workers.
After live reactions to the Teamsters press conference, TVLR hosts Jacob Morrison and Adam Keller immediately opened up the phone lines with an open invitation to UPS Teamsters to call in with their hottakes, wants, needs, hopes, concerns, and criticisms for both the contract negotiations and the situation as a whole. And it didn’t take long for the phone queue to light up.
“We need more transparency in this contract; we want to know what the economic proposals are from our side… we don’t know what [the proposal] is,” said a caller who identified himself as Will, a UPS worker and member of the Teamsters, who called in from an undisclosed location in California. “I think that’s a problem, and I think we should work, as a whole, as activists, to reform these non-disclosure agreements… Because it keeps us in the dark and creates division, and it’s just not helpful.”
Will was not the only UPS Teamster to highlight this issue of transparency (or lack thereof).
“I just wish that, when giving updates to us — the membership — that [they would] be a little more detailed with those updates, be a little more transparent,” said José, a UPS worker and Teamster also from California. José felt frustrated over how proposals and counter-proposals are almost never discussed or even shown to rank-and-file UPS workers, except perhaps in the case of an online leak, such as what happened early in June when a weak economic counter proposal UPS had been preparing to offer the Teamsters leaked online via The Upsurge podcast, prompting Teamsters’ Sean O’Brien to blast the company’s offer on Twitter, calling it a “bullsh*t proposal.”
“All you hear is rumors — ‘oh, they offered this, they offered that,’” José continued. “But we don’t know. And at some point it gets frustrating.”
José explained that, in fact, there is a lot about the whole situation the rank-and-file aren’t told by either UPS or their own union, including key information such as negotiation deadlines. “You can’t be telling us: ‘oh, uh, June 30 is [when] we want a Last, Best, and Final Offer,’ then we wake up June 30 [thinking] ‘okay, we’re gonna get something, because we’re done just playing these games with UPS,’ and then you find out they extended [the deadline] to July 5… You’re like, wait, what happened to ‘June 30 is gonna be when we get the Last, Best, and Final Offer from UPS?’”
As far as what workers want to see in a new contract, UPS Teamsters who called in expressed concerns and support for everything from expanding policies for part-time workers to better benefits to inflation-matching wages. Some were also particularly concerned about how climate issues are creating problems, and will continue to do so, for delivery truck drivers, and they want to see policy adjustments in terms of bettering the vehicles, but also allowances for drivers to take care of themselves in certain emergency situations, especially during heat waves such as what we’ve seen across the country this summer.
“I suffered from heat illness, and it knocked me out for two months,” said Will, who went on to point out how COVID-19 has had lasting consequences for UPS workers who caught it, which was no small number due to their exposure to the virus as the company kept them working straight through the pandemic.
Scientists are still in the very early stages of understanding what exactly the full consequences of COVID-19 are on the body, but they do know there are indeed lasting effects, especially on the respiratory system, which Will particularly expressed concern about, fearing the virus has left people more susceptible to things like heat illness.
According to Will, full-time UPS delivery truck drivers — who often work between 10 and 12 hours — currently have access to a lunch break and two 15-minute breaks, but he feels that this simply isn’t going to be practical amidst record heat waves, and as it stands, workers risk big consequences if management catches them even so much as taking an “unauthorized” short break to hydrate. In fact, UPS treats “unauthorized” breaks as cardinal infractions — terminology the company uses for worker actions they consider to be “worthy of termination.”
Explained Will, speaking from experience: “Once you’ve exhausted your two 15-minute breaks, and it’s 115 degrees out there, and you feel dizzy and your mouth is dry, and you pull over and go to the store and get yourself a bottle of water or some Gatorades or whatever, the manager’s gonna see you right there [and say] ‘Hey! What’s this? Why were you there for 5 minutes? What’s going on?’”
Will’s concern about the consequences of certain emergency situations and how they are treated as so-called cardinal infractions was shared by a UPS Teamster in Dallas, Texas, who chose to remain anonymous when he called in to the show. Specifically, the Dallas Teamster expressed concerns over contractual concessions in UPS’s Southern supplement agreement regarding how “No Call, No Show” absences are disciplined — as the name would imply, the terminology “No Call, No Show” refers to a situation where an employee is not only absent without authorization, but also does not call management to alert them (which, in UPS workplace terminology, is referred to as a “call-in”).
“Three days of the company declaring you ‘No Call, No Show’ is now a cardinal infraction; you come back [to work], they’ll walk you out, they’ll say you’re fired, the union will have to fight for you at panels… [and you’ll] go through an arbitration process, which nobody knows what that’s going to be like,” the Dallas Teamster explained. “This isn’t how it used to work, so this is a definite concession. What we used to have is called a ‘48-hour letter,’ where, if the company claims you to be ‘No Call, No Show,’ they will send a letter to your home to tell you to show back up to work, give you notice, give you time to call your business agent if there’s an emergency or something going on, or if [the company is] lying or whatever… Now you don’t have any of that, now it’s just three days, they declare you ‘No Call…’ and you’re gone.”
The Dallas Teamster explained that one reason why this is problematic is because UPS workers have no system for worker emergencies outside the workplace, no policies that protect them in the event that they are hindered from returning to work or even calling management due to a legitimate emergency. He also said another problem is that workers will be at the mercy of management correctly and accurately filing employee work hours and making sure to log an employee’s call-in in the event of an absence, both of which the Dallas Teamster said have been frequently “messed up” by management at the facilities where he has worked, which doesn’t instill a lot of confidence in workers regarding this policy change.
There are a lot of moving pieces to juggle in this confrontation between the Teamsters and UPS, and a lot is on the line for hundreds of thousands of workers, not to mention the wider economy. No matter how things unfold, we will continue to support the rank-and-file workers and give them a loudspeaker.
For more discussions, opinions, and criticisms from UPS Teamsters on the contract negotiations and showdown, you can find several clips of call-ins to our show on YouTube: