UPS' Deal With the Teamsters Leaves Workers Behind | Opinion

Last week, Newsweek published a commentary on the new UPS contract by Teamster and UPS employee Jill Dunson. In it she refers to an "Intellectual-Industrial Complex," which according to Dunson, consists not of the mainstream media, which generally supports the deal, but primarily myself and the World Socialist Web Site for which I write, because of our coverage opposing it.

It's important to note that while Newsweek described Dunson as simply a part-time pre-loader at UPS, she is a member of the bargaining committee that produced the contract. As such, she has a vested interest in the contract's passage beyond what a rank-and-file employee might have.

The reason that many workers are opposed to the deal between the world's largest shipping company and the 330,000 employees the contract covers is not that they are supposedly being manipulated by "armchair activists." It's because the new contract falls short of their demands.

The reasons for this have been amply documented in interviews with UPS workers on the World Social Web Site. They include: The $21 starting wage for new hires is less than the $25 that part-time wage workers had demanded as a bare minimum; the $7.50 general wage increase, spread out over five years, will likely not keep pace with inflation for drivers, and will not even apply to new part-timers; the deal to add air conditioning in new delivery trucks will leave many drivers in old trucks without AC for years; and the company's pension contributions will be frozen in many areas of the country to offset modest increases in others.

Dunson accuses me and the WSWS of "[calling] on workers to do away with their unions." This is a total mischaracterization of our position, which is well-known to UPS workers. We encourage the rank-and-file members of the Teamsters to organize themselves in rank-and-file committees to fight to transfer power from the Teamsters bureaucracy, which has sold them out repeatedly for decades, to the shop floor.

Dunson's own starting pay of less than $20 per hour is the product of these sellouts. It is about half of what part-timers made in the late 1970s, adjusted for inflation (a part-timer started out at $7.75 an hour in 1978). She also says that "during the pandemic, we were the ones risking our lives to deliver packages to their doorsteps." But that was not because workers wanted to risk their lives for UPS, but because the Teamsters officials refused to stop work or do anything to seriously protect the health of its members.

The WSWS identifies with and encourages rank-and-file opposition from UPS workers, which is very widespread—as any glance at social media will attest—but which finds little to no expression in the media. Everything we write is the product of discussion and collaboration with UPS workers themselves. Dunson's article, on the other hand, simply repeats the old arguments of the bureaucracy (and, one must add, of management), which treats every challenge from below as the work of "outside agitators."

Dunson ends her piece with by declaring, "UPSers are capable of making our own decisions and wise enough to spot when our struggles are being exploited. We're not interested in any activist fixations on a proletarian revolution." We are proud of our socialist politics, and workers are growing receptive to it. We are against Wall Street, pro-corporate politicians and those who insist on the "right" of corporations to profit. The union bureaucrats, on the other hand, have spent decades enforcing pro-corporate contracts and defending inequality. This is why we identify with and encourage the independent initiative of the rank-and-file themselves.

Tom Hall is a writer for the World Socialist Web Site based in Detroit.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.