Socialist Action /August 2002
UPS Pact - Is the Truth Being Cooked?
By CHARLES WALKER
From The New York Times of July 17, ("U.P.S. and Teamsters
Reach Deal for a 25% Raise") to the Peoples Weekly World of
July 20, ("Teamsters win big at UPS"), comes word that the Teamsters'
tentative contract with United Parcel Service (UPS) announced on July 16
is a winner for the workers.
But did the usually differing papers contact all the relevant sources,
or just rely on the press releases from the corporate and union negotiators?
That question comes to mind, because there's no mention in the two papers
of the contract's worth, as estimated by UPS workers in general or those
UPS workers who belong to the Teamsters for a Democratic Union, a Teamsters
caucus that at times has rallied UPS majorities against proposed national
agreements.
Given time constraints, perhaps the two papers should be excused for
not sending their journalists out to UPS hubs to get the ranks' opinion.
In any event the ranks won't see the full agreement for weeks yet. And even
then, they may not actually see the text that's read to them at union meetings.
However, there's no good journalistic excuse for not contacting TDU to
get the caucus' estimate of the details that have been revealed; though
the public information, which is all the ranks know, doesn't include the
actual language that would be binding on the 230,000-strong sector of the
UPS workforce that's part of the Teamsters Union.
If the papers had contacted TDU, as the press often does for "balance"
in their Teamsters reports, they would have gotten a far different slant
on things than the angle provided by the corporation and the union.
UPS, reported The Times, "acknowledged that the contract
might be generous, but said it was affordable and would help the company
grow by assuring customers that there would be no work stoppage for at least
six years."
Not disagreeing, the Teamsters indicated that "the accord would
be a model for millions of other union members." Further they said
(without contradiction from UPS) that "the pact would cost U.P.S. an
additional $9 billion over six years."
It was at that point that The Times might have "balanced"
the official union/company view with TDU's view that the scanty information
released just didn't add up, certainly not to $9 billion. Actually, TDU
said that underlying the public reports was some "mystery math."
Instead of TDU's opinion, The Times quoted Harley Shaiken, "a
labor expert at the University of California." "This appears to
be a very strong contract," Shaiken said, "particularly with what
else is happening in labor."
Perhaps Shaiken will turn out to be right, but unless he has inside information
that the ranks don't have, his opinion seems no better than an "uneducated
guess," no doubt relying on the same Teamsters and UPS statements available
to the press.
Is it really worth $9 billion?
In all fairness to The Times, the paper did quote a Wall Street
analyst, whose take on the deal seemed to be that whatever the actual number
of billions of new labor costs for UPS, the pact "will be only slightly
more inflationary than their contract that's about to expire." If so,
no wonder that UPS said that the tentative pact "enables UPS to remain
strong in a very competitive industry, with the added stability of a six-year
contract" (San Francisco Chronicle, July 17).
While there's no debate that the contract is for an unprecedented six
years, there is debate about the labor costs of the pact. Is it worth $9
billion, as repeated on July 17 by Greg Tarpinian, of the Labor Research
Association, a public backer of Teamsters President James P. Hoffa? Tarpinian
adds that the claimed new labor costs are "close to UPS' total profits
in the last five years."
The problem with Tarpinian's claim is that it's not based on independent
double-checking of the union and the company's figures. We know that because
the union and the company have yet to release the pact's detailed language.
TDU says that the tentative agreement is not worth $9 billion, or double
the gains in the 1977 contract, reached after the first national Teamsters
strike against UPS in their 80-year history. The caucus says that after
factoring in the extra contract year, the rate of inflation and the growth
of the workforce by 25 percent the deal will cost UPS about "$4.7 billion,
roughly half as much as Hoffa's 'Mystery Math' figure."
However, anyone who has ever negotiated a contract knows that costing
out a contract is a tricky business. The variables can trip up projections,
especially when economic conditions are likely to change noticeably over
a six-year period. That's just another reason for reporters and their papers,
as well as academic experts, to dig into the actual language and numbers
before rendering what should be an informed judgment.
What about part-timers?
As readers might remember, the 1997 strike against UPS was largely about
the situation of part-time workers, virtually without much of a chance to
get a full-time job, or reach the higher levels of the contract's multi-tiered
pay scale. The new pact, Hoffa says, closes the pay gap between part-time
and full-time UPS workers.
But TDU says that's not true. TDU says that UPS estimates that the present
average wage of part-timers is $10, while the average pay of full-timers
is about $23, a $13 dollar gap. TDU says the gap will grow to about $16.20
under the proposed pact. That's because the part-timers average will only
increase to about $11.20 in 2008, while the full-time rate will increase
to $28.
Since the Teamsters share of the UPS workforce is in its majority made
of part-timers, what happens with the part-timers' wages is a major issue
with the tens of thousands of minority and female workers who are a very
large part of the part-time workforce.
TDU gets some support for its calculations from Business Week
(July 17), which says that despite the new wage increases, "the high
turnover rate of part-timers means that their average wage will still lag
behind full-timers' by the end of the contract."
Further, says the journal, the "new six-year deal with the Teamsters
shows that, in a stumbling economy, employers again have the upper hand."
President Hoffa claims the tentative agreement is superior to the 1997
pact. Actually, he's right and he's wrong. For example, the 1997 strike
forced UPS to agree to open up 10,000 full-time jobs for part-timers over
a five-year period. Hoffa, too, got UPS to make the same concession, but
spread over six-years.
Where Hoffa did make a breakthrough is getting UPS to end subcontracting-out
of certain job categories (mostly clerical jobs, it's reported). The result
could add nearly ten thousand new members to the union. However, it's not
clear that the changeover would result in more full-time job openings for
part-timers.
Aside from the self-serving evaluations of the proposed deal, the question
that still needs to be answered is, given the relationship of forces, did
either side leave anything on the table that it was big enough to carry
away? Very often it takes a strike or a lockout to answer that question.
This time, however, the answer may lie in the fact that unlike 1997, the
Teamsters Union made no attempt to prepare and mobilize its members for
a possible strike.
However, the union did raise members' dues by 25 percent, partly justifying
the increase by the need to build a strike fund. Still, it seems likely
that the UPS negotiators took the lack of membership mobilization into account.
Since UPS indicated that it feared a repeat of the 1997 strike, the union
might well have gained its worst-off members-the UPS part-timers-a much-improved
deal, if it seemed ready to hold the corporation's feet to the fire.
There was a specter at the negotiating sessions, not seen of course,
but palpably present. That specter was former Teamsters President Ron Carey,
who was ousted from the Teamsters Union by government appointees in the
wake of the widely lauded 1997 UPS strike.
The Times reported that Hoffa "boasted that he did better
than Mr. Carey by persuading the company to let nearly 10,000 nonunion workers
become Teamsters." Hoffa's boasting may have led The Times reporter
to conclude: "The negotiations also represented Hoffa's biggest leadership
test as he tried to win sizable concessions that topped the previous contract
negotiated by his predecessor and bitter rival, Ron Carey."
Socialist Action /August 2002 |