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This Monday, negotiations began between Teamsters and the package giant UPS for a new national contract. The formal exchange of proposals was in preparation for July, when the national master UPS contract will expire. Teamsters general president James P. Hoffa — son of the infamous Jimmy Hoffa Sr — refused to release the union’s official contract proposals to general membership before presenting them to the company. Up until January 22, members had no idea what was in the proposals. Teamsters United (TU), the reform campaign working to dislodge Hoffa’s old guard from the union leadership, called this a “brownout.” For the 250,000 rank-and-file Teamsters affected, this contract fight is an opportunity to turn the tide on years of concessions and win a better workplace. But Hoffa is afraid that activating member militancy might diminish his own power — hence the brownout. TU, on the other hand, has embraced that militancy. In 2016, their candidate Fred Zuckerman, leader of Teamsters Local 89, where UPS’s massive Worldport distribution center is based, nearly unseated Hoffa, who remained in office thanks to a mere six thousand votes in a 1.4 million member union. Their challenge was motivated by Hoffa’s decision, six years ago, to ram a deeply unpopular contract loaded with concessions down members’ throats, as well as his lack of opposition to UPS’s widespread subcontracting of Teamster work. Zuckerman and TU recognize that to win a good contract this time, they have to fight both the boss and their conservative union leadership. That’s why, in the runup to January 22, they held an organizing call with nearly fifteen hundred rank-and-file Teamsters. Zuckerman used the opportunity to tell participants that this time — unlike in the last round of negotiations — rank-and-file Teamsters “have the strength to vote down” any national contract that’s not to their liking. He also gave Hoffa a warning: “A storm is coming.”

Still Big Brown Despite Amazon’s explosive growth, UPS is still the top dog of package delivery in the United States. With nearly 250,000 unionized workers in its package division and another 13,000 in its freight division, UPS is the largest private-sector employer in the country, a position once held by General Motors. “This [the national contract covering the package division] is the largest labor contract in the country. It’s a pace-setting for other Teamster contracts, and could be for the whole labor movement,” Ken Paff, a TDU national organizer, told me recently. UPS, nicknamed “Big Brown” in the 1970s for the distinctive chocolate brown that colors its trucks and uniforms, hasn’t suffered a significant loss in decades. The historic Teamster strike of 1997, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the long Great Recession all failed to put a dent in its profit margins. Though its fourth-quarter 2017 profits aren’t available yet, at the end of its spring quarter it was already reporting $1.16 billion in profits. Online shopping has drowned all the logistics giants in packages while making their profits balloon. On December 21 alone, UPS’s mammoth Worldport facility in Louisville, Kentucky processed 5.7 million packages, setting a new record. DHL, FedEx’s “Superhub” in Memphis, and Amazon’s air operations based at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky airport all experienced record volume as well. To handle the holiday rush, UPS pushed its hub workers and package-delivery drivers beyond human endurance. Drivers were slammed with a seventy-hour workweek and one hub worker was crushed to death in Atlanta. It was a miserable working Christmas for UPS workers across the country, exacerbated by brutally cold temperatures in parts of the United States and catastrophic fires in southern California. The misery didn’t end with Christmas. The Christmas shopping season (or “peak” in the UPS world) extends well beyond December 25. “While the day after Christmas used to be reserved for long return lines at department stores, the growth of e-commerce has changed when and how consumers return gifts,” Alan Gershenhorn, chief commercial officer for UPS, told the Washington Post. People were projected to return $90 billion worth of gifts in the two weeks following Christmas, most of it returned through the same logistics giants that delivered them. The Washington Post, owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, reported: The company [UPS] expects to process 6 million returns this [first] week of January] and a record 1.4 million packages on Wednesday alone, which it has dubbed National Returns Day. Overall, UPS estimates it delivered 750 million packages between Thanksgiving Day and New Year’s Eve, up 6 percent from last year. The U.S. Postal Service, meanwhile, says online returns grew 26 percent during the last two weeks of 2017, and that it expects that growth to continue into January. UPS’s windfall profits are further enriched by free money from President Donald Trump, via his historic tax giveaway to the rich. UPS CEO David Abney, who made $13.4 million in 2016, released a statement before Christmas: UPS strongly believes the lower corporate tax rate will expand U.S. GDP, which increases our customers’ businesses activities. With the additional resources from tax reform UPS will expand and accelerate investments in our people, technology, transportation fleets, facilities and value-generating customer services, which will further stimulate job creation. Abney’s promise to invest in “our people” is an empty one. While campaigning for corporate tax cuts last year, Abney was also boosting plans to further automate UPS jobs. According The Young Turks (TYT) journalist Steve Horn, Abney does not appear to have suggested wages will go up at UPS. He told the Business Roundtable, “We’re in a reinvestment cycle here at UPS in the US, and [as] part of this tax reform, we’d like to bring some of those foreign earnings back and invest them into our network here.” One investment both companies are making is in increased automation. “UPS has outlined plans,” according to Horn, “to invest more than half a billion dollars in automating processing at three major hubs.” Those three hubs are located in Atlanta, Georgia; Jacksonville, Florida; and Columbus, Ohio. UPS was granted a patent in 2014 that will eliminate “valuable time consumed everyday as transportation personnel contact dispatchers or others regarding their arrival and departure to such as hubs.” In a search of patent applications at the U.S. Patent and Trademark office, Horn identified at least twenty-one patent applications for automated scanning, processing, or delivery.