On an average day, US corporation United Parcel Service (UPS) moves the equivalent of 6% of US and 2% of global GDP! A strike by its heavily unionised US workforce – 330,000 International Brotherhood of Teamsters members out of half a million workers – would have been an event of global significance.
Members of the Teamsters just voted to ratify a new contract at UPS. The union made big gains – but in opting not to strike over demands beyond wages, the Teamsters may have passed up a transformative opportunity for the labor movement.
The tentative agreement poses the need for a rank-and-file rebellion by workers against the union apparatus, not the reform of the bureaucracy from within by a non-existent “progressive” faction. The pseudo-left is deploying into two lines of defense against this.
The 340,000 Teamsters union members at United Parcel Service have spent the past year preparing to strike when their contract expires Aug.1, but they probably won’t need to employ the strike weapon this go-around. “We demanded the best contract in the history of UPS, and we got it,” Teamsters President…