So are a lot of Americans. The country has rudely awakened to the enormous role the United Parcel Service plays in its national life. Indeed, it is so ubiquitous that many people confuse this private company with the Postal Service. Everybody, it seems, knows the Men in Brown. Their nerdy-retro vans ply every urban and suburban byway. They are a national conveyor belt that delivers 80 percent of the packages and parcels we so routinely zip hither and thither. By some estimates, that means UPS touches some 5 percent of the country’s gross national product. Small wonder, then, that with 185,000 Teamsters on strike and UPS all but closed down, chaos rules. Mail-order retailers have seen their business drop by 10 to 15 percent; and small businesses, with fewer alternatives at their disposal than the big boys, are taking the worst hits. Economists warn that the strike could knock 20 percent off the nation’s growth rate flit persists into next month.
Will the federal government intervene? In a delicious irony, conservative politicians and business groups, who normally worship at the shrine of the free market, have urged the Clinton administration to step in. For their part, liberals sanctimoniously insist that it should not. The liberals are likely to prevail. Top Clintonites say the president can’t and won’t use the blunderbuss weapon of the Taft-Hartley Act, the Truman-era law that grants the president “emergency” strikebreaking powers. But a new player may get involved. That’s none other, NEWSWEEK has learned, than Alan Greenspan. Late last week the Federal Reserve board asked UPS for its analysis of the strike’s economic impact. The company speedily dispatched a report, and UPS officials even briefed economists at the Fed. They, in turn, will brief Greenspan, presumably in preparation for this week’s Fed meeting on short-term-interest rates. For Mark Steffen, head of a small Iowa computer company, those machinations may come a bit too late. He’s had to dispatch employees to drive as far as 400 miles to suppliers. This may be UPS’s worst nightmare, for Steffen, like a growing chorus of other customers, steadfastly vows: “We’re not going back to UPS,” no matter when the walkout ends.
But the UPS strike is about more than cargo and boxes. Whether or not it dragson, the walkout marks a watershed for the beleaguered labor movement, which has staked its prestige on this walkout. That’s why AFL-CIO chief John Sweeney announced last week that he’d bankroll the Teamsters strike with a $10 million infusion of cash and the promise of more to come. Beyond union politics, the strike will affect millions of Americans, even those who have never shipped a package or joined a local, for it goes to the heart of large national questions. Will wages finally begin to go up, as the Dow and productivity have risen? If so, would that trigger a new round of inflation or spark a Wall Street crash? no moot point, in light of last week’s massive sell-off following good news about prices. Does it signal a new era of conflict between labor and management, and on which side will people stand?
Even before a settlement, the strike revealed a seismic shift in the national consciousness. Among the most interesting aspects of the strike is this surprising fact: for the first time in decades, a majority of Americans are allying with labor against management. A poll late last week by Gallup/CNN reported that 55 percent of those surveyed support the once despised Teamsters in their fight to win more higher-paying full-time jobs and better pension benefits. Just 27 percent backed UPS. This marks a change from the nadir of 1981, when Ronald Reagan pounded striking airline controllers into the ground-and the public cheered. Why the shift? Labor experts point to public frustration over years of corporate downsizing, stagnant real incomes and an economic boom that too often seems to benefit management muckety-mucks without trickling down to rank-and-filers. That notion found resonance last week among the strikers. Management has been eating away at worker rights in this country for years, says Mark Orvis, a UPS driver manning thepicket lines in Milwaukee: “It’s really frustrating working for a company that brags about the ability of its work force,” says Orvis, “but when contract time rolls around it feels like you’re nobody.”
Despite such harsh rhetoric, though, the issues are less clear-cut than either side claims. Consider the supposed core of the dispute: part-time versus full-time jobs. Over the last four years, UPS has created 46,000 new jobs, of which 38,000 are parttime. The union claims that 18,000 of the company’s part-timers put in 35 hours or more a week, and that 10,000 of them should be offered full-time employment with correspondingly higher pay and benefits. That sounds reasonable enough. Yet UPS claims that as many as two thirds of its part-timers work less than full days because they prefer it that way. They may have other jobs, or other demands on their lives. To accuse UPS of exploiting part-timers purely to keep costs low, as the union does, distorts the debate. But with UPS’s nearly $1 billion in profits, it’s hard to buy the company’s claims that it’s too strapped to offer better pay to its part-timers and more opportunities for full-time work to those who want them.
The disagreement over pensions is equally fraught with hypocrisy. The Teamsters want UPS to keep shoveling money into the union’s so-called multi-employer fund, a pool of retirement money that comes from 31 companies where members are employed. UPS, however, wants to withdraw from the plan and set up its own retirement fund, covering part-time as well as full-time UPS workers. The company says benefits would rise as much as 50 percent per worker, for the same cost. Some pension analysts suggest that UPSers would probably be better off financially under management’s plan. But Teamsters at other companies might face a less secure future without UPS’s sizable contributions to their common retirement fund. And who’s to say, 20 years from now, that UPS will be the powerhouse it is today? Strikers in Milwaukee don’t seem to have much faith. Will the money be there? “You’re not sure what’s going to happen,” muses 16-year UPS veteran Jeff Berns. Clearly, if UPS were to pull out of the Teamsters’ pension pool, the union’s overall finances could genuinely be damaged-especially if other companies were to follow UPS’s example. In this sense, the dispute is not so much over issues in which one side has a legitimate claim, explains Cornell University’s Michael Belzer, as it is over something more intrinsic. “The union,” he says, “feels it is in a struggle for its very survival.”
It may be. And there’s a real question about whether the Teamsters can stay together. Management is obviously trying to divide them, partly by touting the apparent benefits of its pension proposal. UPS claims that 10,000 employees have crossed picket lines and gone back to work, up from an estimated 4,000 during the strike’s first week. Union leaders say the actual number is half that large. The strike in the little town of Washington, Pa., has taken an especially interesting turn. As some UPS workers boycott their employers, others are picketing their own local union headquarters. The reason: they want workers at UPS to vote on the company’s offer-which the Teamsters have refused to allow them to do.
The stakes for the Teamsters are not only large but very personal, too. The “brotherhood” was, for years, beset by utter corruption and mob influence. The current head of the union, Ron Carey, ran as a self-styled reformer vowing to restore the union’s good name-and its financial stability after years of decline. Now he’s facing his biggest test in a drama worthy of a screenplay. Carey himself was a UPS driver, and he is still fending off assaults from his recently defeated, but hardly vanquished, rival, James Hoffa, the son of Jimmy Hoffa, the legendary Teamsters boss whose mysterious disappearance in 1975 remains the stuffof legend. Carey has framed the issue as “good jobs for America.” Skeptics see it differently, however. They view the UPS strike as little more than a power struggle between Carey and the younger Hoffa. Either way, the UPS strike will make Carey a titan or crush him.
The standoff continues. UPS chairman James Kelly late last week labeled the results “disappointing.” At a Washington, D.C., hotel, both sides continued talking through the weekend but reported little progress. Meanwhile, a national conversation had begun about whether Americans now deserve higher wages after years ofsoaring profits and a rising Dow. It’s perhaps telling that UPS pilots are talking about a December walkout. The Teamster-UPS strike has yet to answer those grand questions about what we earn but at some point it surely will. For the moment, though, it’s a national migraine. But many Americans are worried less about whether UPS will break the union, or vice versa: it’s whether the two of them, fighting it out, will bust us.
