Every day, Catherine Varner stands outside the United Parcel Service facility at 1400 S. Jefferson St., whiling away the hours she would normally spend loading packages at the building where she has worked for the past 11 months.
She is a Teamster, one of 11,000 members of Local 705 on strike against the delivery company in the Chicago area.
Inside, Patricia Fane–who started working for UPS on the same day, Aug. 28, 1996, making the same pay, $8 an hour–pulls a double shift.
She is a supervisor, although, for the time being, she is a loader, unloader, driver and just about any other kind of worker the company needs.
Both women are welfare recipients, and they stand on opposite sides of the barricades in the country’s largest strike against a single company in 14 years.
Almost 300 UPS employees in Chicago and the outlying suburbs got their jobs through the company’s much-heralded efforts to put people on welfare to work. Now, they make up a small but significant group of workers who are being hit particularly hard by the walkout.
For these employees, many of whom have not worked before or for long at UPS, the strike is a sudden and confusing plunge into one of the more complicated realities of the working world. And it is an unexpected irony that of all the hurdles anticipated in the nation’s experiment with welfare reform, the implications of a strike was scarcely considered.
These workers find themselves on all sides of this labor dispute. Some have crossed the picket lines; others have booed them from outside the gates. Still more have stayed home out of sympathy or fear.
Many, though, may get knocked off their feet financially if the strike continues much longer.
Not only are these workers less likely to have savings to support them and more likely to be their family’s sole source of income, the state’s welfare rules limit the public aid benefits they can receive during a strike.
And, whether they walk the picket lines because their jobs turned sour or they ride the bus to work past jeering crowds, they wonder what has become of the promise of a way off welfare.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” said Varner, a 30-year-old mother of three. “I’m trying to figure that out now.”
As of last month, the Illinois Department of Human Services had placed 290 of its public aid clients in part-time jobs at UPS facilities in the Chicago area, according to Doris Davis, a DHS liaison to UPS.
There may be more workers who got jobs on their own, but UPS does not keep a count of its employees who came from public aid.
Varner and Fane belong to an even more select group. They were among the first people to start working at the Jefferson Street site through a well-publicized program sponsored by the Grand Boulevard Federation, a community collaborative.
As the two women approach their one-year anniversary with the company, they hold widely divergent feelings about working there. The strike has only stretched the gap.
Varner complains that the pay is low, the work dirty and hard, and the hours fewer than she was promised.
Fane, who was promoted to supervisor after six months on the job, says success is more a matter of attitude, that working at UPS has helped restore her battered self-esteem and laid the groundwork for a brighter future for her and her five children.
“It’s exceeded my expectations and a little more,” she said.
All these statements contain truth, and, taken together, they reflect the complicated reality behind the high expectations that have greeted the company’s welfare reform efforts.
Few corporations have received more attention for their welfare-to-work initiatives than UPS, which has been cited as a role model by President Clinton and Gov. Jim Edgar, as well as a number of media outlets.
But working at UPS may not be such an ideal pathway into the workplace as it seems. Indeed, the problems that face welfare-to-work workers reflect the larger issues involved in the strike.
Many part-time workers there log 15 to 17 hours a week. The state’s welfare plan, however, requires people to work at least 20 hours a week to stop the clock ticking on the five-year, lifetime limit on receiving aid.
“Here they are in this premier welfare-to-work program, and they’re not going to get this benefit,” said Rhonda Present, senior policy associate with the Chicago Jobs Council. “It’s wonderful that the state is going to give people time from their clock, but how many people will get jobs that will bring them 20 or more hours?”
There is little opportunity for part-time employees to move into full-time work at UPS. That issue, of course, forms the crux of the strike. The union wants to convert thousands of part-time workers to full-time jobs; the company says it can’t meet the Teamsters’ demands.
Even if the Teamsters win substantial concessions on this point, full-time jobs are more likely to go to workers with seniority, not the recent hires off welfare.
One woman who was placed at UPS quit after six months to take another part-time job. It paid less per hour but gave her enough work to make up the difference.
UPS operates a program to refer workers to part-time jobs at other companies, but the 20-hour work requirement remains a concern, said Greg Washington, executive director of the Grand Boulevard Federation.
There are other concerns too. While buses now run from the city to the company’s sorting facility in west suburban Hodgkins, a number of workers must still take several legs of public transportation to get to work. Some spend as much time traveling to and from their jobs–three hours–as they work in a shift.
As the strike continues, it becomes harder for people on public aid to wait for their jobs, even though company officials say they will hold them open.
Their choices–finding other work, crossing the picket lines or continuing to strike–pose complications peculiar to their situation.
Almost all the welfare-to-work employees at UPS still receive reduced public aid grants through a program that cuts their monthly check by $1 for every $3 they earn.
Under the state’s current welfare guidelines, they will continue to get the reduced grant during the strike. There will be no increase to account for wages lost to the strike, except under “extraordinary circumstances” that will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis.
The UPS workers are required to join the Teamsters after 40 days on the job, and if they work part time, they pay $22 a month in union dues.
After a week on strike, Teamsters become eligible for $55 a week in strike pay from the union’s national office. Local 705 is expected to chip in another $25 to $50 a week. But strikers get the money only if they take their turn on the picket lines.
Not everyone is able or willing to do that.
One woman on public aid, for example, has not been employed long enough to join the union. She could work if she wished, but she has stayed home, she said, out of fear of crossing the picket lines.
Another, who also asked that her name not be used, continues to go to her job at the Hodgkins site, a 45-minute bus ride from her home in Chicago.
The woman, who is 28, is not sure if she belongs to the union, although she has worked at UPS two months, long enough to join.
She admits she feels nervous when she passes the strikers and that her family is worried about her. But she doesn’t want to stop working.
“We need the money,” she said. “It’s a great opportunity for people on public aid. If you don’t take that opportunity, you’re not going to get it again.”
The majority of UPS workers on public aid, according to people on all sides, aren’t walking the picket lines or crossing them.
They’re staying home.
Some, like one employee who has been with the company since last August, just seem confused.
She didn’t know she would get the same amount of public aid as if she were still working. Nor did she feel any particular solidarity with the strikers. She just thought she wasn’t supposed to go to work.
“When they get through striking, I guess they gonna call,” she said.
