UPS, a Brown Machine That Eats Workers

Inch by inch, day by day, America is becoming a nation of casual laborers, earning not enough to live on, with no job security, no benefits and no future. This array of part-timers is most familiar to us in agriculture, where for decades underpaid farm workers have survived only by combining their meager wage with food stamps and medical benefits from the government.

But the army and its wounded are spread across the country, and for every person you see carrying one of those “will work for food” signs there are a thousand others with that same sign tattooed on their souls.

This week we’ve been watching negotiations come down to the wire between United Parcel Service and the Teamsters Union, and in truth what is on display here is a struggle over the basic tilt of the American economy.

UPS claims that it runs the tightest ship in the whole shipping business and every one knows the quality of those brown-uniformed men and women, the envy of other employers and the delight of those who use UPS. We are all accustomed to seeing the brown truck pull up and an intelligent, efficient driver hop out on the double with a good attitude and a can-do demeanor.

What we don’t see is that for every 100 full-time, $20-an-hour drivers, there are 150 or more $8-an-hour employees working three hours each in the middle of the night, scrimping together a part-time life, with part-time food, part-time self-respect, no-time medical or vacation or retirement or future. And every day the ratchet clicks again as, with every extension of service, UPS swells its part-time component.

The UPS contract being battled over this summer is the largest private labor contract in America. It is rivaled only by the General Motors contract and covers about 200,000 workers. Only the U.S. Postal Service has more employees. But today, only 80,000 of those workers are the full-time, $20-an-hour UPSers we see and know. The rest are part of the invisible army, working at night in the vast, cavernous air hubs where $24 is all you get for three hours toil on the sorting belt.

These workers aren’t handling mail or widgets but a stream of packages that can weigh up to 150 pounds each. When UPS raised its weight limits, it made no alterations in the sorting and delivery systems; it merely changed its “rules” and let the workers figure out how to deal with the new situation.

When UPS began to build its air hub system about 30 years ago, it was using only college students for the part-time jobs, and indeed required these workers to provide proof that they were still going to college. It was the thin end of a very long wedge. Today you can go to UPS’ Louisville, Ky., hub, a converted military airfield, and see 5,000 part-timers and only a sprinkling of full-time employees. It’s the same story at Ontario, in San Bernardino County: 1,000 part-timers and only a handful of regular jobs.

As recently as the late 1980s, the ratio of part-timers to full-timers was about 50-50. If this proportion was still in force, there would be 20,000 more $20-an-hour jobs.

The good jobs weren’t lost to NAFTA or to more efficient Chinese drivers in Taiwan or Shanghai. They were lost to greed. UPS is a management-owned company with no public sales of stock, with the managers organized into a pyramid scheme that sucks most of the profits up and ever upward into the pockets at the top.

The last serious resistance to this trend was in the late 1970s, but in those days the Teamsters Union was running its own pyramid scheme, with union dues siphoned up into the vast array of Hoffa hangers-on and parasites who had accumulated and inherited multiple salaries for do-nothing jobs. Today, however, there is a Teamster leadership trying to do the best by its members.

Why are those 80,000 full-time UPS drivers who have the good jobs willing to take the risk of going on strike for their 120,000 fellow workers? They certainly see that they are losing ground in this booming domestic economy.

These days, business is feeling good. “Paradise Found: The Best of All Possible Economies,” crowed a recent Merrill Lynch report. In June, Fortune said that the U.S. economy is “stronger than it’s ever been.” But in large part it’s strength derived from draining the strength of that invisible part-time army and giving it little in return. That’s why the union’s two most crucial demands in the current UPS negotiations are: no more shrinkage of full-time jobs, no more subcontracting of these jobs out to other truckers. No more paeans to the golden moment of the American economy when often the best you can get is $24 for working three hours in the dead of night.