Ten Years Since the UPS Strike: Globalization and Inequality

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=19&ItemID=13332

Ten Years Since the UPS Strike: Globalization and Inequality
by Deepa Kumar

July 19, 2007

What will it take to shine a spotlight on the vast income gap between the very rich and everyone else in the US today, in the way that Michael Moore’s film Sicko exposes the injustices of privatized health care? Ten years ago, on August 4, 1997, when 185,000 UPS workers went out on strike, they made headline news. They forced a discussion of inequality onto the front pages of national newspapers and they tapped into the economic anxiety of the vast majority of Americans, so that the public sided with the Teamsters against UPS by a 2-to-1 margin. The Teamsters then went on to win one of the best contracts ever from UPS and they showed the power that unions have in taking on large, powerful, multinational corporations.

The business class quickly learnt the lessons of the strike. They knew that the strike had opened up all sorts of possibilities for working people to advance their interests. In an article titled “A Wake-up Call for Business: The Teamsters’ win means that workers can no longer be taken for granted,” Business Week drew out the lessons as follows:

More important than the union victory is the way the Teamsters’ campaign captured what seems to be a new mood in America. For the first time in nearly two decades, the public sided with a union, even though its walkout caused major inconveniences. Polls showed the public supported the 185,000 striking workers by a 2-to-1 margin over management. The message: After a six year economic expansion that has created record corporate profits and vast wealth for investors, Americans are questioning why so many of their countrymen aren’t getting a bigger piece of the pie.<1>

It went on to suggest that businesses could no longer take their workers for granted and had to address the sense of discontent that the UPS strike brought to the fore.

An editorial by a union economist in the New York Times argued: "f what historians see when they look back on the early 21st century is a broadly shared prosperity and a more equitable society, they may be able to point to the teamsters' strike at UPS as an event that defined the period."<2>

This was the potential at the time, and it represented a huge opportunity to turn the tide against neoliberal globalization. Yet, today it seems like a distant memory. Ten years after the strike, conditions have only deteriorated for working people in the US. Strikes are at an all time low, and the number of workers in unions continues to shrink.

FULL article at link.