Tuesday, May 23, 2023

UPS, Teamsters labor negotiations

WASHINGTON - Living in New York City, working full time and without a car, Jessica Ray and her husband rely on deliveries of food and just about everything. It's meant more free time with their young son, rather than standing in line for toilet paper. 

There are millions of families like the Rays who have swapped store visits for doorstep deliveries, meaning that contentious labor negotiations underway at UPS could become more disruptive than it did in 1997, when a scrappy upstart called Amazon.com became a public company. 

UPS delivers millions more packages every day than it did just five years ago and its 350,000 unionized workers, represented by the Teamsters, still seethe about a contract they feel the union forced on them in 2018. 

Teamsters' President Sean O'Brien told a gathering of workers that the union was “going into these negotiations with a clear message to UPS that we’re not going past Aug. 1.” It would be the first work stoppage since a walkout by 185,000 workers crippled the company a quarter century ago. (The AP 05/23/23) UPS strike looms in a world grown reliant on everything delivered everywhere all the time | AP News

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