Whatever else their strike accomplishes, the Teamsters have tapped into mounting worries about the quality of job creation - part or full time, with benefits or without, on staff or off - in the re-engineered 1990s. UPS managers had to face the prospect that the public will side with the strikers in a dispute that, like the tightest ship in the shipping business, touches every block in every city. In Georgia - no pro-union hotbed - it wasn’t just passing truckers who tooted their horns in support of the picketers. Most drivers of family sedans did, too. ““This time, the core issues resonate with the anxieties of average Americans,’’ says University of California labor expert Harley Shaiken. ““What’s on the bargaining table gets discussed at the dinner table, too.''
All ships aren’t rising in the U.S. workplace. Since 1989, the economy has grown by 18 percent, and corporate profits have doubled to $760 billion. In the same years, wages and benefits have gone up 2.8 percent. But even that meager growth hasn’t been evenly distributed. At many companies - and UPS is a good example - an upper tier of ““core’’ workers enjoys the best pay, benefits and wage hikes. Below them is the second tier, an amalgam of part-time or temporary help that costs much less but enables the company to remain flexible and competitive (chart). The Teamsters want UPS to narrow the gap between those two worlds, partly by pay hikes, partly by creating more full-time jobs than the 11,000 it’s offering by 2002. Fully 80 percent of UPS hires since 1993 have been part-timers, mostly sorters and loaders out of the public eye.
Even so, few companies look as egalitarian. Every member of UPS’s 12-member executive board started as an entry-level employee - and, ironically, a Teamster. Chairman and CEO James P. Kelly joined as a driver in 1964. Now he commands the world’s biggest employee-owned company ($21 billion in revenue) and resents the idea that UPS takes advantage of low-ranking employees. ““It’s hype,’’ he tells NEWSWEEK. ““That issue exists in our society, but not at UPS.’’ UPS has never turned full-timers into part-timers, and everyone receives full health benefits. Its reliance on part-timers stems largely from its 1988 entry into overnight air delivery - requiring short but intense bursts of sorting. The strike, Kelly says, is really about who will manage UPS’s $1.6 billion in annual pension payments - UPS or the Teamsters. The rest, he suggests, is smoke.
There is, nonetheless, some fire. Part-timers at UPS start at $8 per hour, unchanged since 1982. On the picket line in Atlanta last week, sorter-driver Anthony Campbell, 28, posed a stark contrast to Phil Stocks. Campbell rents a one-bedroom apartment after eight years as a UPS ““part-timer’’ who puts in more than 40 hours a week. He has years to go before he gets a shot at a full-time slot. Some economists worry that if cutting-edge service companies like UPS create mostly low-income jobs, America’s social fabric will be frayed. ““This strike is useful for society if it creates a forum where business’s legitimate need for flexibility can be balanced against the future’s need for high-quality jobs,’’ argues the Massachusetts Institute of Tech- nology’s Thomas Kochan. At the weekend, talks broke down between UPS execs and the Teamsters. The forum for the time being was closed.
Of UPS’s 308,030 domestic employees, 57% are part-time workers; 6,600 of the part-timers work more than 30 hours a week. How they compare with full-timers:
Full-time Staff Part-time staff No. of Employees 131,900 No. of employees 176,130 Union members 68% Union members 84% Avg. hourly wage $19.95 Avg. hourly wage $11.07 Benefits: Health-care coverage, Benefits: Same health-care; including dependent care; pension; holidays, vacation, sick 13 holidays; two weeks vacation days and pension are based after one year of work; sick days on hours worked in a calendar year Source: UPS
