Across New York City, UPS workers are increasingly showing that they are ready for a potential strike at the end of the month.
After the Teamsters and UPS broke off negotiations last Wednesday, members of Teamsters Local 804 walked a practice picket line Friday morning outside of the UPS warehouse in Maspeth, Queens, and brought out U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in support of their cause.
The general president of the Teamsters, Sean O’Brien, has said that the negotiations are at a standstill as the union inches ever closer to a strike, which its members overwhelmingly voted to authorize if they don’t come to an agreement by August 1st.
“I don’t think the company takes labor seriously. President O’Brien’s been telling [them] for over a year that we’re not working after August 1st if we don’t have a contract,” said Local 804 President Vincent Perrone. “It takes two or three weeks to ratify it.”
After coming to an agreement on some major health and safety issues like installing air conditioning in UPS vans, major economic hurdles remain in the negotiations.
Perrone said that most of the disagreement centers on part-time workers whose starting pay has a contractual floor of $15.50. The Teamsters have rallied to raise the starting wage rate for all part-timers. UPS has contended that part-time employees earn an average of $20 an hour after 30 days, according to internal metrics.
“When it came down to the last week, and we’re talking about economics, they got alligator arms,” said Perrone. “There’s no universe that we’re gonna accept Teamster jobs that are minimum wage jobs.”
Nationally the majority of UPS’s workforce are part-time workers. In New York City, there’s a roughly 60% majority of full-time workers and 40% part-timers, Perrone estimated, but he said that the entire workforce is ready to stand in solidarity with the part-timers. He also criticized market rate adjustments that selectively boost individual workers’ wages to increase hiring at a certain location or time of the year, but don’t apply evenly to all part-time employees.
When Ocasio-Cortez addressed the workers, she echoed the union’s demand for pay raises for part-time UPS workers.
“We cannot accept a dual standard where part-time workers and full-time workers doing the same labor are getting paid dramatically different wages. We can’t allow for that,” said Ocasio-Cortez.
In an update UPS released the day of the rally, it alleged that it was The Teamsters that stopped negotiations.
“The Teamsters stopped negotiating this week despite strong proposals from the company that build on our industry-leading pay and benefits for our full-time and part-time employees,” the statement read.
President O’Brien refuted that characterization of negotiations.
