Teamsters Talk Tough After UPS Contract Victory: ‘Amazon Better Pay Attention’

Glenn Taylor
·4 min read
19

The five-year, $30 million contract agreement for UPS workers unionized under the Teamsters is now official, putting the threat of a 340,000-employee strike to bed once and for all.

An overwhelming majority (86.3 percent) of the Teamsters employees voted in favor of ratifying the collective bargaining agreement, which the union says was the highest contract vote in UPS history.

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Under the agreement, UPS will pay new part-time workers $21 an hour. Starting part-time hourly wages today are $16.20. Existing workers would get a raise of $7.50 an hour over the life of the contract, including a $2.75-per-hour pay bump this year.

Over the next five years, the average full-time UPS delivery driver will receive up to $170,000 per year in salary and benefits, up from the previous $145,000 annual figure.

“Our members just ratified the most lucrative agreement the Teamsters have ever negotiated at UPS. This contract will improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of workers,” said Teamsters general president Sean O’Brien in a statement. “Teamsters have set a new standard and raised the bar for pay, benefits and working conditions in the package delivery industry. This is the template for how workers should be paid and protected nationwide, and nonunion companies like Amazon better pay attention.”

O’Brien’s brash attitude and rhetoric thrust the UPS negotiations into the public eyes, and escalated an already contentious relationship with now-bankrupt Yellow Corp., which blamed the union for its downfall.

Amazon, however, is one of America’s largest logistics and distribution networks and the largest online retailer, generating $134.4 billion in revenue in the second quarter on net income of $6.7 billion.

The Teamsters put the juggernaut in its crosshairs in 2021 when members voted to launch a dedicated Amazon division. The union has since recruited 84 contract delivery workers who say their company was wrongly terminated by the e-commerce giant, and have generated attention by picketing fulfillment centers across the U.S.

Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research and a senior lecturer at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, said the UPS labor negotiations and ensuing deal are only going to put Amazon in a tougher spot.

“Amazon workers can look to this contract and see many things that they could only get with a union,” Bronfenbrenner told Sourcing Journal. “Protections for part-timers. Health and safety protections with the air conditioning in the trucks. Getting rid of two-tier wage scales. Those kinds of victories only happen with the power of a large union in a very strategic campaign.”

Currently, only one Amazon warehouse in the U.S. has voted to join a union. Workers at the “JFK8” warehouse in Staten Island voted last April to be represented by the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), a grassroots group of current and former employees led by terminated employee-turned-labor organizer Christian Smalls.

The union has yet to reach a contract with the tech titan, since Amazon doesn’t recognize the victory despite the national Labor Relations Board (NLRB) certifying the win.

For a union to get a new contract, a labor battle would need to hit Amazon’s pocketbook hard, Bronfenbrenner said.

“What is it that makes Amazon recognize a union? So far, winning an election with 5,000 workers doesn’t do it,” Bronfenbrenner said. “Organizing workers across the country? What if they still refuse to recognize and they still refuse the bargain? Then it would require a strike. Whether it’s a strike, whether it’s getting investors to pull out, whether it’s pressuring unionized suppliers from other parts of the world, whatever it is, Amazon’s not going to recognize the union unless it’s really going to cost them not to do it. Just public opinion doesn’t do it for Amazon.”

While the ALU was defeated in a subsequent unionization election at another Staten Island facility, Bronfenbrenner said the first victory, alongside the unionization efforts in Bessemer, Ala. and those at hundreds of Starbucks locations, are empowering workers nationwide to organize—and paving the way for the Teamsters to seize the pro-labor zeitgeist.

“The Teamsters will be able to launch an organizing campaign in Amazon, in part because of those earlier efforts,” Bronfenbrenner said. “The difference is, they have the resources to run a national campaign. They can build on the UPS victory, with the incredible goodwill for the UPS workers that the public has. And the sense among unorganized workers is: ‘Wow, you can do this. You can actually win and you can win big, and I think that that will inspire [them] for each of these victories.’”

Pro-union sentiment has gained momentum across the U.S., with 71 percent of people in the U.S. approving of labor unions in 2022, according to Gallup. This was the highest Gallup has recorded on this topic since 1965, and up from the 48 percent low-point in 2009.

Bronfenbrenner said today’s climate parallels that of the 1997 UPS strike, when pro-union sentiment shot up from 60 percent that year to 66 percent in the two years after—the highest it had been since 1967.

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