To hear Teamsters officials talk about it, the union’s strike against United Parcel Service of America is about principle: protecting all American workers from greedy employers who would replace well-paid, full-time employees with poorly paid, part-time workers in order to stuff their own pockets with exorbitant profits.
The union has taken that tack, in part, because it’s hard to make the pay and benefits of UPS employees look bad enough to warrant a national strike that cripples package delivery for everyone. For the record, the Teamsters represent about 185,000 UPS workers, one-third of whom are full-timers earning an average $20 per hour. Part-time union workers earn an average $11 per hour, but they also earn vacation and pension benefits and receive employer-paid health, dental and vision care. And after five years, the average part-timer is making more than $13 an hour.
None of this matters to the Teamsters, though, who claim these part-timers should be working full-time. But has anyone asked the UPS part-time workers what they think? The Teamsters have so far refused to take management’s last offer to their members for a vote. And while, no doubt, some part-time UPS workers would prefer to work more hours, not everyone would.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, slightly more than 19 million Americans worked part-time in non-agricultural industries in July. Of these, more than 15 million worked less than 35 hours per week by choice. According to BLS figures, most part-time workers are either students or parents who work part-time in order to pursue their education or care for their families. Another 700,000 part-time employees cite problems with child care as the primary reason they work less than 35 hours per week.
But these workers don’t claim they work less than full-time because their employers force them to or because they can’t find full-time work. Only 1.7 million workers say they work short hours because part-time jobs were all they could find. Meanwhile, three-fourths of working women say they would prefer part-time rather than full-time work if it were available.
UPS contends that the nature of its industry requires the company to employ part-time workers for many of its jobs, particularly in sorting and routing the 12 million packages it ships daily. The fastest-growing segment of UPS business is the lucrative overnight shipment market. UPS already has to compete with other carriers who employ mostly non-union workers and thus have lower labor costs than UPS. If UPS wants to keep costs down low enough to offer customers a competitive price for its services, it must make the best available use of its resources. Since most overnight packages have to be handled with very quick turn-around in a small window of time each day, UPS says it needs large numbers of people working in 3- to 4-hour shifts each day.
Nonetheless, UPS does make full-time work available to many, if not most, part-time employees who want it. In the last four years, UPS moved some 13,000 part-timers into full-time positions in the company. In addition, the company created another 8,000 new full-time jobs. In all, UPS has created 46,000 jobs over the last four years. The contract it has offered the Teamsters would create an additional 11,000 full-time job opportunities, but so far, the union has said no.
Instead, the Teamsters want to force the company to let the union decide how best to allocate its work force. If the Teamsters succeed, all of us will pay. UPS customers will pay higher prices for no better–and perhaps worse–service. But UPS workers will pay most of all–with their jobs. Even if some part-timers become full-time employees, many others will lose their jobs altogether. And the ones who will suffer most are the majority of part-time workers who choose their shorter hours to spend time with their children or improving their education. The Teamsters union’s dues coffers will get fatter, but workers will have less choice about how they lead their own lives.
