Will There be a National Strike at UPS?
Talk of a national strike at United Parcel Service (UPS) is a welcome change from the two decades of retreat under the Teamsters’ former General President James P. Hoffa. There has only been one national strike in UPS’s history, in 1997, under the leadership of the union’s first democratically elected leader, Ron Carey.
A national strike is long overdue. Rank-and-file UPS Teamsters have paid a catastrophic price for a compliant leadership–Teamsters leader James Hoffa’s ratification in October in 2018 of a contract that members voted down.
Strike talk has been in the air for nearly two years, so few will be ill-prepared if a strike appears imminent. The Teamsters will be holding strike authorization votes across the country next year. We should expect members to vote overwhelmingly in favor. All of the parties interested in preventing a national strike are in the initial stages of mobilizing their forces, including UPS, the Biden administration, and major retail giants reliant on UPS’s delivery network.
The close political relationship between the Teamsters—along with the major trade union federation, the AFL-CIO—and the Biden administration is likely to weaken, if not outright undermine, any move toward a national strike at UPS, despite the bluster coming from union officials. Fred Zuckerman, General Secretary-Treasurer of the Teamsters, recently said, “We want to go to UPS and kick the shit out of them.” Yet, Teamsters officials welcomed the intervention of the Biden administration in the rail negotiations that produced a weak and unpopular tentative agreement.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/10/27/will-there-be-a-national-strike-at-ups/