UPS

The company offers old-fashioned middle-class jobs and is enjoying record profits. So why is a strike looming?

They’re not paid the way that our Teamsters are paid.” If the Teamsters prevail, securing a stronger contract for UPS workers, the agreement could prove to be a powerful recruiting tool for the labor movement—and a crucial asset in the Teamsters’ quest to unionize Amazon workers. O’Brien, the Teamsters’ general president, has said, “We’re going to take that contract, and we’re going to show the Amazon workers what you get when you join the greatest organization in the world.” The Teamsters had a strong presence in the Bay Area, and Casey invited the union to represent his workers. On the earnings call, Tomé noted, “Our workforce is very different than a lot of the workforce that you hear [about] in the media every day that are trying to be organized. Sometimes he would dream that he was standing next to the belt, and “the packages are just coming, the volume is just increasing by the second, and packages are just all over the place.” The parcels start toppling off the belt and spilling onto the floor. Amit Mehrotra, a managing director and the head of transportation and shipping research at Deutsche Bank, told me, “We’ve been in an environment in the last two or three years that anybody with spare capacity in a Honda Civic could become a competitor to UPS or FedEx.” Before his workday ends, he has to deliver—or attempt to deliver—each of the hundred and forty parcels in the back of his package car. In fact, the company’s contract with the Teamsters is the largest private-sector collective-bargaining agreement in North America, and its unionized workforce has been growing—between 2018 and 2021, UPS added more than fifty thousand Teamsters-represented jobs. He estimates that he would load “a little over a thousand” parcels in a shift. UPS drivers deliver more than five billion parcels a year in the U.S.—an astonishing number that reflects, in part, our national addiction to online shopping. Today, a UPS package-car driver starts at twenty-one dollars an hour; a driver with four years on the job can make about forty-two dollars an hour, with the average driver earning ninety-five thousand dollars a year. He later jokes that, when he’s on his route, “I feel like I’m running for office, like I’m on the podium and I’m waving with both hands.”