Good, labor needs teeth again.
Always nice to see this constant wave of labor strikes, organizing and action
Agreed. Do you think it would help the cause if we all ordered as many as we can of the smallest cheapest things that we can get UPS delivered? Put the pressure on by flooding them with orders they can’t meet if there’s a strike?
No, the best thing to do is listen to teamsters leadership and if they ask for a boycott stop using them until the deal goes through.
But how many consumers are listening? 1% maybe? If that 1% boycotts they don’t notice a thing. If that 1% orders 500 times the shit they usually do, they will notice.
By all means an interesting idea but the issue is ups corporate is going to do a few things with this hypothetical. In the short term they get more money (which could A) go to the strike fund or B) is going to be hard for a enough people to matter to get together and give even if temporary)
Then corpos are going to see this increase in demand and see 2 things, something to propagand on and have an inflated number of “lost revenue”. It’s also possible they’ll see this as the public doesn’t care about the strike or workers rights
And even if you get refunded the money because they can’t deliver then you have to go through UPS “support” or through your cc company. Both are not guaranteed to work and you could just end up giving them money for nothing or for a extra slow package you didn’t need.
If you have the funds to do this then donate it to the strike fund you’ll be doing a lot better for price to action.
If you have the funds to do this then donate it to the strike fund you’ll be doing a lot better for price to action.
I agree with this.
UPS is doing this because they know teamsters only have about 2-3 weeks worth of funds to pay striking workers. Giving UPS more business makes absolutely no sense. Give it the the union if you want to help them. But bare in mind that teamster leaders, like the UPS leadership are the kind of people that own multiple houses as well. Once you’ve paid the union dues, they could give less of a shit about you. This is from someone that knows lots of people who work for UPS.
The whole point though is that you hound them for these deliveries while the strike is occuring.
Refusing to negotiate, especially when the finish line is in sight, creates significant unease among employees and customers and threatens to disrupt the U.S. economy. Only our non-union competitors benefit from the Teamsters’ actions.
We’re proud of what we’ve put forward in these negotiations, which deliver wins for our people. The Teamsters should return to the table to finalize this deal.
“We break our backs working for this company. UPS needs to recognize our sacrifices not just with empty words, calling us ‘essential workers,’ but by putting the pay, benefits, and protections we deserve into a contract,” said Cesar Castro, a part-time UPS Teamster with Local 396 in Los Angeles and a member of the Teamsters National Negotiating Committee. “Every UPS Teamster expects this by July 5 or we will be ready to strike.”
UPS recorded $100 billion in revenue and over $13 billion in profits last year alone.
Makes you wonder who UPS PR means when they say “our people”. Negotiation to acceptable terms is the responsibility of the company, not the workers. That is part of the basic requirements of running a corporation.
Refusing to negotiate
Refusing to take a pittance offer is not the same as refusing to negotiate. UPS made 13 BILLION in profit - not revenues - last year. Stiffing your employees is unacceptable.
I like how the interviewee remarked on his concerns for the younger union members.
I imagine the Teamsters are too large and too savvy to go for a new contract that creates a two-tier system of new members with a crappier package than senior members. They should know that would be a death spiral for union membership.
You’d think that, but that’s exactly what they did last negotiation. One major issues on the table is to reverse that.
Divide and conquer has worked with a lot of other unions.
“Strike needed to correct low labor prices and lack of AC during climate meltdown.” real headline
On one hand, they do deliver my medicine. On the other, WHY do they not have AC? If I miss my meds I am sending bad vibes to management.
Also, why does your medicine not have ac? Many medicines are heat sensitive.
The trucks are thin sheet metal, brown absorbs the sunlight, and putting A/C in the cabs is all but useless.
They’re going to try & implement better heat controls for the cargo area, fans to blow out hot air & such. That’s more important than A/C; the cargo can reach temps well in excess of 130°F. You can bake cookies back there, yes, people have done it to demonstrate.
Once the new contract takes effect, all trucks sold must be A/C capable (lol) & very very hot centers will get more assistance first. All older trucks will be required to be retrofitted with 2 fans in the cab. That is a far cheaper, EASIER, more effective, and more common sense approach than A/C in delivery trucks.
Sounds to me like it’s time to retire current delivery trucks and start getting trucks that actually CAN have a/c then. If they actually are making that much profit and with climate change its what needs to be done.
I agree with all my heart. But that is much easier said than done. I’ll give you a few things to chew on, related to that… (I love subjects like this)
The trucks can, and will, have A/C in them. The thing is by design running the A/C will not be effective at all, it would be like trying to heat your home in winter with a blowdryer & all your windows open.
Designing a delivery truck to hold cold air even in just the cab, as I understand with today’s known tech, would require sealing up the cab. The doors are often open…well, that will have to change. Maybe you don’t have side doors at all, and enter the cargo hold & a side door for every single stop. There are some rental trucks & oddballs like that currently. This design drastically slows down the delivery process. Navigating the truck is more wear & tear on the driver’s body; the design isn’t nearly as ergonomic. But let’s say we can improve that…the vehicle chassis would probably weigh more with insulation. Greater manufacturing cost per truck, not very green. With all the stops, turning on & turning off the vehicle, one might want to find the most efficient way to keep the A/C running continuously via battery or fuel. So that’s yet another additional cost, additional drain, to factor in to a longer work day in an clumsy, expensive delivery truck with a limited service life.
…as you can see, this scenario is getting incredibly drawn out, expensive, contrived. And it might not even be very effective!
Instead of obsessing over A/C, I think it’s better to reframe & identify the real problem. The problem isn’t that the weather outside, or truck cab, is hot. Not per se. No, the problem is that [external factors] cause the drivers to overheat. If you can find alternative methods to cool down the driver’s body & prevent overheating, the problem is solved.
Google UPS cool solutions & you’ll find such methods. I’ve mentioned elsewhere that trucks will have 2 fans installed. Now that’s so simple, and it will help a lot. Especially if it’s wicking sweat/water off of skin, that evaporative effect.
If you want to get really fancy with the concept, there are a few designs out in the wild for a “cooling vest”. Have an ice chest or reserve of cold water, pump that water through a worn vest. It rapidly cools core body temperature. Now that’s a reasonably priced piece of equipment, very realistic, I’m sure you can visualize it in your head with little issue. You can build it with off the shelf parts. Now if one of you guys builds a rough & tough pro version for delivery truck drivers/blue collar workers in general? Athletes? Idk, ambulances & first aid? I fucking guarantee you’ll be rich & be able to sell a good number on contracts.
Good. Especially this time of year when the drivers are literally roasting in their trucks and big brown refuses to put in ac.
People have literally died due to lack of AC in the trucks. Should have updated them long ago
Good for them… Degenerates in charge don’t understand anything less than hurt profits, so let’s hurt their profits.
larger businesses will easily pivot to another package carrier/delivery service but small businesses will be screwed - it’s smaller businesses that the strike will hurt. I suspect that many will have to shutter if the strike lasts more than a few weeks.
Larger businesses have negotiated, discounted, exclusive contracts
And it’ll be no one’s fault except for UPS.
I feel bad for the loaders and sorters. Kinda shitty they’re forced to strike when everything was only ever about the delivery drivers.
Edit: My friend is a loader. Not one peep from union about any of their issues. They’re all about the drivers. She’s worried about her finances during the strike. Teamsters is gigantic. It’s one big business battling another big business and only the peons are going to hurt. Oh and AC and stuff like that was the easy negotiation that everyone agreed to. The impasse is about pay and only driver pay. Big surprise.
Good
So, Biden and Congress are going to step in again and break this strike like they did with train workers, right? They’re both logistics unions that will (apparently) cripple supply chains if they go on strike.
If they say there’s no legal mechanism for that: they have a template and it already passed constitutional tests - the same teeth the Railroad Labor Act has can just as easily be applied to UPS/FedEx/DHL via a new law.
If Biden and Congress aren’t consistent with their logic on this it just proves how deep in the railroad baron pockets they really are.
Except that the Biden Administration kept working with the railroad unions for months after the strike to pressure the railroad companies to give them sick leave, resulting in the railroad companies caving and giving the unions everything they wanted this spring. Union leaders are on record saying they couldn’t have gotten it done without the Administration’s help.
But progress doesn’t sell as well in the papers as doom and despair, so almost no one knows about it.
Oh shit, thanks for this.
Thanks for the additional context. I never heard anything about this. You can’t say the Biden Labor department has been idle. They have also been very present with the Longshoremen negotiations on the west coast recently. I wish they were even more pro-worker but this just goes to show that elections matter.
So…in other words…justice delayed is not justice denied? The workers just need to shut up and live with bad contracts - we just need to trust they’ll do the right thing?
The result was:
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Labor got crushed - effectively the government did their negotiating for them. Why pay dues to a union that can’t even strike and can’t even negotiate by itself?
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Railroads made absolute fortunes
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A pittance was doled out since they had so much bad PR due to all the train derailments
Personally, I think it’s hypocritical the government tells two groups with the same criticality to supply chains two different things. For one group, it’s a threat to the nation and our financial survival, so they can’t go on strike. For the other group, silence.
But is it as critical if FedEx, USPS, and the others exist? Railroads to on strike, there is no one else. UPS goes on strike, Amazon just ships with FedEx.
It is quite critical, but as you suggested, somewhat able to be mitigated. Nobody cares about Amazon & their crapola. UPS ships a lot of high value, high priority medical shipments. Other shipments of high value or importance. Heavy shipments just below freight, more often UPS than FedEx. Amazon & their Prime shipping service is a joke, but they have deep pockets so they can do what they want for as long as they want.
UPS does a lot of the across country shipping for USPS; most people don’t know that. Look at that bubble sleeve in your mailbox. There’s a good chance it says UPS SurePost. So those shipments will be impacted as well.
UPS is king, UPS tends to be the best. Yes, alternatives & workarounds exist. But they’re far from ideal & are no substitute.
To be blunt, did you read either of the articles I linked? Because none of your bullet points are correct in any way, shape, or form.
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Repealing the FLSA is not going to happen. Not even a limited appeal to do what you described. No way in all fucking hell you’d get 66 Senators to agree to it, and the likes of Bernie would do a full, talking filibuster to stop it from happening. Not that he’d need to, because it just wouldn’t happen. All the GOP would stand against it (because, you know, a Dem is doing it) and most of the Dems would be against it.
You may as well be worried that Biden is going to pass a Constitutional amendment making him president-for-life for all the political likelihood this idea has.
Also, it would require Biden to act so wildly out of character I’d start being worried about whether he recently had a TBI.
USPS looking at this to finally be profitable!
… Unless you actually work there cuz that’ll suck
“United States Postal Service”
It’s not meant to be profitable. It is a service. As in: not a product. A service performed by your government. Subsidized by taxes because that’s how it works. That’s why it’s (almost) always the cheapest option when you need to ship or deliver.
Also, it WAS profitable, for the vast majority of its history. It only stopped being profitable something like 8-10 years ago, when Congress mandated that (IIRC) pensions had to be funded 70 years in advance.
It sometimes seems like there’s nothing good in this country congress won’t eventually destroy. The USPS was, and is, mostly an excellent organization. Only sabotage will bring it down.
Republicans are doing most of the destruction, not Congress as a whole.
I mean, it would be nice if ALL government pensions had to be funded decades in advance. Singling out the USPS was some blatant bullshit though.
Why? It would mean a massive pool of money just begging for some cockroach from Goldman Sachs to come around and dump it into mortgage backed securities.
More people are retiring than are replacing them in the work force for one thing. Having pensions paid decades in advance means (in my mind) it smooths out somewhat instead of crashing.
More people are retiring than are replacing them in the work force for one thing.
I find it more useful to solve problems vs trying to solve secondary effects. If the workforce of the USPS is not expanding then pay the remaining workers more. If you take the same percentage out of their pay you should be able to balance out the retirees. Why shouldn’t it be that way? If a worker today can get ten times as much done as a worker of some point in the past then pay that worker ten times as more.
Now you don’t have to worry about government money empires that lead to the crazy market conditions that caused the 08 crash.
It took me a while to figure out what you were saying. I think that could work up to a point where automation becomes affordable and replaces workers. To continue the thought, I suppose then we would have to pay the remaining workers ever-increasing wages until the only workers left are ones we can’t yet afford to automate.
I like that idea but I doubt anyone has the appetite to take that to the natural conclusion, i.e. the CEOs and decision makers would also be automated at some point (my guess is near the beginning).
USPS does not receive any taxpayer subsidies.
That’s the power of government corporations!
It only counts if a rich person got richer
The USPS would be profitable if they didn’t have to beg Congress to raise the price of stamps and weren’t forced to fund pension liabilities for people who won’t retire for 30 years.
I consider myself a news junkie, and I’d never even heard of this until right now. God, do I wish good news like this actually got the airtime it deserved!
I think a part of it comes from who Biden is. When I voted for Biden I hoped for three things
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Clown show to be over
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Small problems in government getting fixed
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At least one big improvement.
So far he has given us two. His administration has been quitely making things run better in government and doing it in such a way as to not attract attention. You can’t really expect the news to dedicate a segment to pension reform when they have been at the all you can eat fest of blood in the water and -gates of 2016-2020. Even now Google news in private browsing mode shows me more results about the two frontrunners of the GOP nomination (16 months before the election) then it does of the man literally in the White House.
It’s a bit sad that he doesn’t have the best odds of winning relection, mostly because of the total lack of showmanship. I wanted a dedicated civil servant and I got one, but only for 4 years.
It’s a bit sad that he doesn’t have the best odds of winning relection
Agreed with the rest of your comment, but gotta disagree with this line. All signs seem to indicate that the general election will be a Biden / former guy rematch. And Biden’s already beaten him once.
To be clear, not saying victory is guaranteed or even likely, it’s going to be a long, hard slog between here and election day. But I wouldn’t count Biden out just yet, not by any means.
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If the Economist ran a frontpage story saying smoking was bad for you I would run out, buy a pack, and chain-smoke them.
They are worse than stuck clock syndrome.
Republicans fucked with the accounting in the PAEA to make it seem like it’s failing so they can privatize it… USPS actually makes money hand over fist.
This article is about UPS(United Parcel Service) and not the USPS(United States Postal Service). UPS is a publically traded company.
The implication is that the disruption to UPS’s service will drive business to the USPS.
USPS usually handles the last mile. Guess what big company handles the other miles for them.
Guess what big company has no obligation to deliver to anyone ever? You know who does have that obligation? No matter where in the country you live? The U.S. Postal Service.
What I’m saying is the strike will not be a boon for USPS as much as people seem to think. On the one hand they have government officials trying to get rid of it, on the other, to cut costs, they’ve offloaded a lot of their shipping to other companies like UPS, FedEx, etc. They’re going to feel the effects of the strike in a negative way. I agree with the guy quoted in the article that the other shipping companies like FedEx and DHL will be the ones getting the increased business. and they don’t have a union.
DHL = 🤡
