Striking Workers Sent On False Errand
It’s hard to tell, from reading the papers or watching the TV news, just exactly what the UPS strike is really about.
Some of the news reports say the strike is mostly the result of a dispute over the use of part-time workers by United Parcel Service. The Teamsters union, which represents the UPS strikers, wants the company to hire more full-time workers.
Other reports suggest that the primary cause of the walkout is an argument over employee pensions: The company wants to take over operation of the pension fund, which is currently controlled by the Teamsters.
Both explanations are valid, as far as they go. But the arguments over part-time work and pension supervision are merely convenient rationales for the work stoppage. The real issue in this labor dispute is the same as it’s been in virtually every strike of recent years: Who gets to run the company - the company’s management or the union?
The unions will always come up with some noble-sounding justification for a strike - “human dignity” is a popular standby - but the bottom line is always the same: The union wants to run the company.
In the case of UPS, all the talk about part-time workers is a smoke screen. The company has plenty of full-time employees, but the nature of the package delivery business demands more extensive use of part-time workers than some other businesses might find necessary. These part timers are well-paid and receive excellent benefits.
UPS isn’t abusing its employees, isn’t exploiting anyone, isn’t cheating anyone. The company is operating in the most efficient manner possible, which it has a perfect right to do in this country’s spectacularly successful system of free enterprise.
And the pensions? Would you believe that under the plan proposed by UPS in its “last, best and final offer,” the striking workers would receive substantially improved pension benefits?
The Teamsters union has refused to let the strikers vote on the UPS offer, of course, because its acceptance would snatch control of the pension funds from the union - and the Teamsters live to control pension funds.
An obvious question arises: Is the union leadership representing the best interests of the UPS employees by fomenting a strike - or is the union manipulating the strikers to promote an agenda that has nothing to do with them?
This is exactly the sort of thing that has made unions increasingly irrelevant to working people in America. The time is gone when unions performed the once-needed function of prevailing upon business to provide respectable working conditions, a living wage, reasonable benefits and fair treatment of workers.
In today’s marketplace, management must provide such enticements to compete for qualified workers. Unions are no longer fighting for their members’ “human dignity”; unions are fighting for their own perpetuation at a time when they have become a hindrance, not a help, to the success of the American worker.
In recent decades, greedy and overreaching unions have surely been as destructive to employment in this country as any downsizing plan devised by management. Unions have driven industries out of town after town, state after state, leaving disillusioned members out of work and out of options.
And now the Teamsters union maneuvers the UPS workers into an unnecessary strike, misleading and misusing its members in a battle for union predominance that was lost long ago. If the union truly cared about the welfare of its members, wouldn’t the leadership at least let the strikers vote on the contract offered by UPS?
Of course. But the strike isn’t about the workers. It’s about the union - the union’s perpetuation and the union’s insistence on telling UPS how to run its business.
The union evidently believes it can bully UPS into capitulating.
Maybe it can. But recent history suggests that when unions win, workers eventually lose.
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