A Teamsters strike at UPS could be weeks away, the first UPS strike since 185,000 workers walked out in 1997, and the biggest work stoppage of the 21st century, involving some 340,000 workers.
“I am not involved in negotiations,” said Gregory Wheet, President of Teamsters Local 627 in Peoria, “but what I’m hearing is the bargaining unit is sick and tired of the workload that they have to endure.
“Workers have had enough of taking it on the chin,” he continued. “If the workers at UPS have to strike, it would have big implications nationwide, when you consider everything that they deliver each day.”
UPS delivers about 24 million items a day, 6% of the country’s Gross Domestic Product, UPS says — and millions more than before COVID. That’s boosted UPS’ yearly profits to about three times what they were before the pandemic — $8.6 billion in shareholder dividends and stock buybacks on $100 billion in revenues last year alone. Economists forecast $8.4 billion more this year.
UPS Teamsters will negotiate on company pressure to make x-amount of stops a day, working conditions in trucks that can be sweltering or freezing, forced overtime and split shifts, better pay for part-timers, and dropping UPS’ two-tier wage system creating inferior pay, benefits and hours for a class of workers.
Sean O’Brien, the new international president, said, “The days of concessions and walking all over our members are over,” O’Brien said. “We’re going into these negotiations with a clear message to UPS that we’re not going past August 1.”
News Guild stages one-day strike at two dozen newspapers owned by Gannett papers, demanding the big chain bargain in good faith for new contracts and that it put money back into restoring drastically cut local coverage. From coast to coast, hundreds of journalists participated, including at the Arizona Republic, the Austin American-Statesman, and the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, complaining that corporate leaders have gutted newsrooms and sacrificed local coverage to enrich top executives and service a huge debt undertaken when GateHouse bought Gannett — $1.2 billion still outstanding, reported Gannett, which owns USA Today and about 200 other daily papers.
“The number of Gannett employees has really gone down,” said Shannon Duffy, Business Representative with the United Media Guild in St. Louis, whose units include five Gannett newspapers in Illinois, including the Peoria Journal Star and Pekin Daily Times.
“Of course, that hasn’t stopped them from paying hefty bonuses to their top management,” he added.
Gannett CEO Michael Reed’s total compensation for 2021 was $7.7 million, according to corporate reports.
The Guild at the Journal Star used to represent more than 110 workers in the newsroom and circulation.
“We have 12 or 13 members left at the Journal Star (all in the newsroom — when it was still called GateHouse, they outsourced Circulation), and we’re down to just two in Pekin,” Duffy said. “There’s 10 or so in Springfield and a similar number in Rockford.”
Gannett’s share price has fallen about 70% since the GateHouse merger, the New York Times reported.
Supreme Court weakens right to strike. By an 8-1 vote, the right-wing majority U.S. Supreme Court in June curbed workers’ right to strike by letting companies sue unions whenever they want in state courts for damage strikers supposedly cause, even if the National Labor Relations Board is already handling the dispute.
Under the law, strikes are legal under the National Labor Relations Act unless there is deliberate property damage, violence or both.
The decision in “Glacier Northwest v. Teamsters Local 174” upset the lone dissenter in the ruling, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. She said the decision “places a significant burden on the employees’ exercise of their statutory right to strike, unjustifiably undermining Congress’s intent. Workers are not indentured servants, bound to continue laboring until any planned work stoppage would be as painless as possible for their master.”
In The Nation magazine, justice correspondent Elie Mystal wrote, “All strikes cause economic harm to the employer. That is literally the point.”
More than 11,000 unionized movie and TV writers went on strike in early May, shutting down new production by Hollywood studios and networks, and audiences are noticing. The first industry-wide strike in 15 years by the Writers Guilds of America, East and West came after weeks of negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), and the AFL-CIO is calling for support, saying, “Writers are facing the most comprehensive assault on compensation and working conditions they have seen in a generation. The studios have taken advantage of the transition to streaming to underpay entertainment industry workers in every area of work —including writers.
“Like too many working people across our economy, as corporate profits grow, pay is not keeping up,” the labor federation said. “As corporate profits grow, TV and film writers’ pay is just not keeping up.
In Chicago, Ali Barthwell, a 34-year-old writer at HBO’s “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,” said “It is just unconscionable that they are able to turn out hand-over-fist record profit, and nothing would be possible without writers,” she continued. “When the power of the laborer has gone down, they have to be able to take some of that power back, and a strike is the way to do it.”
Meanwhile, the Screen Actors Guild/American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) authorized a strike.SAG-AFTRA represents about 160,000 actors, journalists, dancers, singers and other workers, and its current agreement AMPTP was set to expire June 30.