While Amazon workers were celebrating the company’s pledge to hike their minimum wage pay to $15 an hour last week, unionized UPS workers were busy voting against a collectively bargained five-year contract with a starting pay of only $13 an hour.
By Friday, 54 percent of the 92,604 UPS workers had voted against the contract. Many were not only unsatisfied with a lower starting pay than nonunion Amazon, but also with the proposal’s creation of a new underclass of lesser-paid drivers who work weekends.
Despite this, their union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), ratified the largest private-sector contract in the US – covering 243,000 UPS workers – over members’ wishes that they return to the bargaining table and hammer out a better deal.
The union’s own constitution triggered the proposal’s ratification because less than half of eligible union members actually cast ballots. When turnout is under that threshold, at least two-thirds of members must vote against an agreement to reject a final offer. This is known as the “two-thirds rule.”
“Only 44.3 percent of members voted and 54.2 percent opposed the agreement – triggering the constitutional provision,” the union said. “Thus, the National Master Agreement has been ratified.”
“The fact that they’re moving to ratify the contract over a ‘no’ vote is a huge betrayal to the members, and I think it’s very damaging to the labor movement as a whole,” said David Levin, an organizer with Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), a reform caucus within the larger union, which has more than 10,000 members nationally. “There’s a lot of attacks against the labor movement, from right-to-work, etc., and it’s a terrible time to be sending workers the message that union leaders can just ignore and override the voices of the members.” He worries ratification could weaken the IBT’s long-term viability in right-to-work states, where contracts between employers and unions are prohibited from making union dues a condition of employment. But if union leaders railroad the agreement over the will of the members, they may begin to wonder why they should pay dues in the first place.
The recently ratified contract enshrines “hybrid drivers” as a new job category. These drivers both start and cap out at lower hourly pay rates, but can be forced to work overtime unlike full-time drivers, who are protected. Longtime UPS drivers worry the company will, over time, shift the bulk of its work onto the backs of lower-paid, second tier part-timers who can be more easily exploited.
UPS workers point out that even Amazon’s independent contractors, who deliver from their own vehicles, will now be making a higher starting wage, at least initially. (The new UPS agreement does raise the starting pay rate over time, reaching $15 by 2021.) In the last four years, UPS has generated more than $16.2 billion in net profit and is forecasting another $6 billion this year.
UPS driver Brian Perrier is running for president of Local 767, where 57.5 percent of members voted against the contract. “We don’t feel like we’re being represented as true Teamsters. We feel like not only the IBT but at the local level too, is just too soft on management. We’re not getting good contract enforcement, and they’re way behind on grievances,” Perrier said. “They just blow all of their members off.”
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