Arrow-right Camera
The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Seems To Be Drama Without A Villain

Robert Reno Newsday

The United Parcel Service of America Inc. ought to be is, in fact a nearly perfect model of an exceedingly well-managed company that rose to immense profitability and market share by being a good corporate citizen and treating its work force right.

And the Teamsters union ought to be and is a reasonably good model of a trade union that shook off its mob-strangled past so it might lead American labor to new heights of enlightened achievement and responsible representation.

So maybe we should cheer for both sides. Maybe this strike is a better example of good labor relations than we realize. I suspect it is.

Certainly, UPS can’t very well threaten to move to Mexico, outsource to China or convert its trucks to robotically driven machines. And the Teamsters, if they play this right, ought to make a deal that covers them with glory. It’s exactly what Franklin Delano Roosevelt had in mind when he signed the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, sanctifying the right to organize and to strike.

But you have to suspect that UPS management has made one of its rare mistakes - and a big one - by deciding to take this strike, which has already cost the company $300 million by most estimates.

First, management couldn’t have picked a worse point in the business cycle. Jobs are plentiful. The unemployment rate is the lowest it has been in 20 years. There are actual labor shortages in many regions. The workers, for the most part well-paid and exceedingly employable, have an excellent chance to find other jobs to get them through a long strike.

And UPS has created a terrible image problem for itself. Everybody likes the UPS driver. Last year, the company earned $1.1 billion. It’s a labor-intensive outfit that desperately depends on the loyalty and performance of its work force. People can still get packages through the Postal Service, so the public is less likely to resent the inconvenience the strikers are causing.

Anyway, stupidly as it may have behaved in this case, UPS just doesn’t fit your usual idea of a greedy corporate ogre. How can it?

It’s owned by its employees. It has quietly given tons of money over the years to various good causes, including the Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In the past two years, 52,000 Teamsters, the very ones striking, have become shareholders. UPS isn’t threatening to hire replacement workers the way every other big company seems to do when faced with a strike.

UPS is practically a socialist conspiracy, a rebuke to all those management experts in the airline industry who claim that employee ownership of big corporations can never be made to work. It hasn’t downsized or done any of those dreadful things that give big companies a bad name. It even keeps its brown trucks spotless.

Yet here it is, locked in a struggle with its workers.

I suppose this all says something very profound about the present state of the workplace in corporate America, but I’m not sure what it is.

xxxx