August 19 - Teamsters Fight and Win at UPS

On this day in Labor History the year was 1997.  That was the day that a strike by the Teamsters Union against UPS ended with a victory for the union.  The strike had started fifteen days earlier. More than 180,000 UPS workers participated in the action. It was the first nationwide strike by UPS workers.   At the time UPS delivered eighty percent of all the packages in the United States.  The company known for its signature brown trucks delivered twelve million packages a day.  The key issue of the strike was that the company increasingly relied on part-time workers.  The insecurities of part time work were growing not just at UPS, but for workers in industries all across the country. The strike settlement came with the union winning its core issues.  The company agreed to convert 10,000 part-time jobs to full-time positions over the course of the next five years. The victory was significant for the US labor movement.   The 1980s and 1990s saw new attacks on labor unions and working people, starting with President Ronald Regan’s breaking of the air traffic controllers’ union strike in 1981.  The UPS victory in a national strike with broad rank-and-file support encouraged working people beyond the Teamsters Union.   Announcing the settlement of the strike, ABC news anchor Peter Jennings declared, “It’s been the most dramatic confrontation between industry and organized labor in two decades.” Teamsters President Ron Carey said, “It is what this country needs, decent jobs, a chance for the dream, a chance to purchase a home, a chance to bring your children up properly, a chance to send them to college. Enough is enough and it’s about time that people start fighting back on this.”