EDITORIAL UPS strike restored some old labor ideas
All of a sudden, it seems, we've had a "good strike," complete
with deserving workers and a public that was, the polls said, generally behind
the strikers. Not only was the United Parcel Service strike generally well
received, it was relatively short -- 15 days.
It's been a long time -- before the air traffic controllers strike
in 1981 -- since we've had a strike with such wide support. In fact the two
strikes, air controllers and UPS, are being used in many analyses as book ends
of a sort in modern labor history.
One represents the determined antilabor mood at the top during the
Reagan-Bush era. The other symbolizes, some say, Clinton's more mellow outlook
and a softening of the public's attitude toward labor. In between was all
manner of goofiness: strikes of rich and famous athletes; the often brutal
practice of downsizing; the outrage of out-of-this-world compensation packages
for corporate biggies, including those who didn't do so well by their
companies; the constant chipping away of full-time jobs and workers' benefits
packages; and the drain of manufacturing jobs as corporations chased the cheap
labor markets of the Third World.
Some are already rhapsodizing about the significance of the
Teamsters' victory to the labor movement, claiming it represents a turning
point, a resurgence of labor's power.
That seems more than a tad optimistic, given the shifts in the
nature of the modern workplace.
One of the more instructive elements of the UPS strike was that
the nature of the work harkened back to earlier ages when, during labor's
zenith in this country, about 35 percent of the American work force was
organized. Today, well below 20 percent belong to unions.
Consistently, those who viewed the strike favorably said in
interviews that they knew their UPS delivery person, that the workers were good
people who worked hard and deserved to get what the union was asking for. The
mood was reminiscent of a time when workers, many from the same neighborhoods,
formed the backbone of the heavy industries that have largely disappeared from
the American scene.
We knew these UPS folks in the brown uniforms and squatty trucks.
We saw them every day, heard their stories and could see their point when they
went out on strike.
One of labor's problems now is putting a face on the mass of
today's hidden laborers.
UPS workers also had an advantage over those workers whose
manufacturing jobs keep moving to other countries. Their work can't be done in
the Third World, unless we the customers move there.
Perhaps the larger benefit from the strike is a certain redemption
of some labor ideas: the right to organize, to collective bargaining and to
strike as a last resort.
The church, of course, has a long history of alignment with the
labor movement here and abroad. Its documents ring with noble language on the
dignity of work and workers' rights.
One of the church's leading labor proponents in the United States,
Msgr. George Higgins, in an interview five years ago, said, "I would think it
is much too early to say the labor movement is finished. There have been all
kinds of books written on that, I know. But if you look back to the Depression
period at the end of the '20s, any number of very prominent economists,
conservative and liberal, predicted the labor movement was finished, that it
had seen the end. Well, five years later, 10 years later, they had 12 million
new members. But nobody predicted it, nobody foresaw it coming."
Whether the UPS settlement will usher in a burst of organizing
activity is questionable. But it may well help to break down the resistance to
unions and to organizing, and that can only be for the good.
Where will the new members come from? Higgins himself was not
certain, but said that in the future labor would have to use new techniques and
organize people who are in nontraditional jobs and workplaces.
As Higgins, known widely as "the labor priest," said, "There's
something scary to me that in a country as big as this and as complicated as
this, people would say we don't need an organization for workers. I think
people should organize, not only to get better wages, but to be represented in
the economy in some way. ... The notion that people should organize, it seems
to me, is basic. I don't think we're ever going to get away from that."
National Catholic Reporter, August 29,
1997
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