Teamsters Strike Against UPS

 
 
 
 
The recent strike against United Parcel Service conducted by the Teamsters was seen as both disruptive and successful. It was disruptive to the national shipping patterns and so to business in general, yet the public supported the strikers over the company by a wide margin. This might have changed had the strike continued any longer than it did, but the Teamsters, as led by president Ron Carey, managed to make good use of public sentiment to pressure UPS to settle the strike. From the first, the Teamsters had the high ground given the nature of the dispute and the fact that the public was also concerned about the issue of part-time work and the way companies were using part-time workers to avoid paying full price for full-time employees in the same jobs.

The differences between the two sides at the beginning of the bargaining situation were clear and showed that each had different interests. The Teamsters were able to frame the strike in terms of money and fairness, and the fact that UPS was a rich and powerful company allowed the Teamsters to depict themselves as the underdog. Different theorists describe this sort of situation in different terms. Lewicki, Litterer, Minton, and Saunders (1994) refer to distributive bargaining as a competitive, or win-lose, bargaining approach:

In a distributive bargaining situation, the goals of one party are usually in fundamental and direct conflict with the goals of the other party. Resources are fixed and limited, a


     
 
 
 
    

 

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ning team to walk out of the negotiations on May 13, not to return until June 3 (Bernstein, 1997, 88). In addition to the public-relations spin put on the strike by the Teamsters, the strike's timing contributed to the public support for the strikers. The strike started on August 4 at a time when there was a dearth of news at the end of the summer. The strike was a new subject for news articles and editorials. The workers were sympathetic because they were people many Americans halfknew, since the friendly UPS delivery man (or woman) appears all across America in homes, shops, and offices. The main issue involved, the insecurity of parttime work, is one that strikes a chord with many Americans. The strike would end late on August 18th before people had grown seriously fed up with it. This is why the public remained on the side of the workers. The strike involved almost 190,000 workers, making it the biggest in some time. The union movement had long been divided and ineffectual, but in this case it succeeded in hanging together. Management caved in on several of the strikers' demands, notably on pensions, parttime pay, and the conversion of parttime jobs into fulltime ones (Labour's summer victory, 1997). MAJOR PLAY

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