I just voted to authorize a strike at UPS. Now I don’t think one will actually happen.

United Parcel Service has a history with organized labor that extends all the way back to 1916. That’s when UPS founder Jim Casey invited the International Brotherhood of Teamsters to unionize his workforce.

You read that correctly. UPS has a union because it wanted a union, from almost the very beginning. Even now, on its website and other public relations platforms the company touts its century-long relationship with the Teamsters as mutually beneficial, and a unionized workforce as a unique advantage in a competitive, dynamic industry.

Still, over the past hundred-plus years UPS Teamsters have regularly found the need to strike the company. When Casey showed up at a gathering of striking workers in 1946, he gave the following address (in its entirety):

We’ve had strikes before. We’ve won ’em when we’ve been right, we’ve lost ’em when we’ve been wrong.

James Casey, quoted by Philip Hamburger, ‘Ah, Packages!’ New Yorker, May 10, 1947

That 1946 strike was in New York City. It lasted for 51 days.

For the first 60 or so years strikes at UPS were local or regional actions. There was no national collective bargaining agreement until 1979. The dozens of current supplemental agreements between UPS and particular Teamsters locals and regional councils are a vestige of that bygone era.

Many of these smaller-scale strikes lasted for several weeks or even months. In a series of articles about the labor history of UPS I found mention of other lengthy work stoppages, including the following:

• Seven weeks, New York City, 1962;
• Twelve weeks, Philadelphia, 1967;
• Nine weeks, New York City, 1968;
• Thirteen weeks, ‘East Coast,’ 1976.

Contrast these protracted walkouts to a ‘mere’ fifteen days for the most recent UPS strike, nationwide, in 1997.

Based on my reading of the history, strikes seem to punctuate a cycle that has played out at UPS about every 25-30 years. There were moments of labor militancy in the 1940s, the 1960s-1970s, and the 1990s.

Right now feels like just such a moment. And the pattern suggests that we’re due for another strike when the current UPS-Teamsters contract expires next month.

Indeed, Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien was talking strike when he ran for that office in 2021. He was talking strike when the current UPS contract campaign kicked off in August 2022. And he was talking strike when the national contract negotiations got underway in April 2023.

Then, on Monday, June 5th, President O’Brien was talking strike when he called for a vote to authorize a strike.

This is not a vote to strike. Instead, it’s a vote by UPS Teamsters to authorize the national negotiating committee to call a strike if Teamster demands are not met. A pre-emptive strike authorization is a power-move; it fortifies the union’s position at the bargaining table.

The company had anticipated this vote. And it already knew the outcome. It publicly predicted the results in order to manage stakeholder expectations and reassure the public.

Meanwhile, the voting process put the machinery of the union’s organizing operation to the test. It mobilized a national network of thousands of union officials, shop stewards, grassroots activists and rank-and-file members in a very short time frame.

On Wednesday, June 7th, just two days after the vote was first announced, my shop steward reached out to me:

This sort of turnout effort was happening all across my workplace, and all across UPS workplaces all across the country. UPS Teamsters everywhere were catching the vision – not only that a strike was a real possibility, but that it would require a commitment of some cost to them personally – and it was enough to spur them to action.

Voting didn’t start at my UPS facility, a regional hub, until that Friday, June 9th, because representatives from our local Teamsters office had first fanned out to smaller satellite facilities across our region earlier in the week. But they all converged on my job site, as promised.

That day and again on Monday I followed up with as many of my coworkers as I could, whether they were on my list or not. Most told me that they’d already voted, or assured me that they had definite plans to vote.

I didn’t need to worry. I never heard what the exact turnout was, either locally or nationally, but I did hear that turnout from my building was very strong, and that part-time warehouse workers in particular had shown up in force.

This past Friday, June 16th, the Teamsters officially announced what by then had become a foregone conclusion: support for a strike among UPS Teamsters is nearly unanimous. It’s a sign of the times. The pandemic changed everything.

I like to think of myself as a careful and methodical thinker. I’m big on gathering evidence and analyzing data. I take a while to arrive at an opinion, and then I hold to it rather loosely as new information becomes available.

Over time I came to the opinion that a strike was inevitable and unavoidable. Teamster demands, though not unreasonable, seemed audaciously ambitious. National negotiations seemed to stall out of the gates. An unstoppable force would meet an immovable object.

But things started to turn. Teamster leadership held the company accountable for finalizing the supplemental agreements. Then UPS began responding favorably to the non-economic proposals put forward by the union.

At latest count, there are 43 tentative agreements in place without a single concession from workers. The decision to install air conditioning in new delivery vehicles made a splash across the national media landscape, and deservedly so, but it was just the beginning of a long list of changes and improvements the company has agreed to.

The union has yet to see agreement on any of its economic proposals. It’s possible that the company may dig in against higher wages or more full-time opportunities, against eliminating private contractors and subcontractors, or the two-tier system of drivers, or against recognizing Martin Luther King, Jr., Day and Juneteenth as paid holidays. It’s possible. But I doubt it.

The strike authorization vote helped me see that the company knows it’s boxed-in (see what I did there?) A strike of any length would be a crippling financial blow and a public relations fiasco, not to mention a hellscape scenario for the entire economy. And now it knows that its Teamsters will get the deal we want or we will walk out.

The company’s only way forward is to meet its Teamsters where we are. It can claim that it was never an us-versus-them, that it was always looking for a win-win, and that it knew all along that doing right by its people was good for the bottom line.

UPS can put whatever positive spin it wants on it. But we all know that without the credible threat of a strike, the company would not have to listen to any of us.