As UPS Deadline Nears, Strike Appears More Likely With No Deal In Place

By Washington Post
Posted on 07/20/23 | News Source: Washington Post

Some 340,000 UPS employees are inching toward a strike that appears increasingly likely, threatening the largest work stoppage in over half a century that could upend a part of the broader package delivery system that Americans have come to depend on.

On Wednesday, UPS and the Teamsters, the union representing UPS workers, announced that after a two-week impasse, they had agreed to resume negotiations next week with time running out before the Aug. 1 deadline.

While the two sides have resolved most of their issues, with UPS agreeing to install air conditioning in vans and eliminate a lower paid class of workers, they remain at odds over pay and benefits for part-time workers who make up more than half of UPS’s workforce.

“I think it’s likely a work stoppage will occur and the key question at this point is how long it will last,” said Alan Amling, a fellow at the University of Tennessee’s Global Supply Chain Institute and a former UPS executive.

As the strike deadline has neared, so-called “practice pickets,” or dress rehearsals for the potential strike, have sprung up outside UPS facilities from Hawaii to New York, with hundreds of Teamsters UPS members in brown work uniforms marching and chanting: “What do we want? Contract!”

A strike at UPS would have far-reaching implications for the U.S. economy, as well as the country’s labor movement. When UPS went on strike in 1997, businesses large and small strained to keep shelves stocked.

But now far more companies, as well as a bigger percentage of Americans’ consumer spending, depend on delivery infrastructure that can get packages across the country within days of purchases. And though its overall market share has dropped, UPS plays a big role in that, with an estimated quarter of the 59 million packages shipped in the United States each day passing through UPS’s brown delivery vans, split equally between homes and businesses.