“We’ve Changed the Game”: Teamsters Win Historic UPS Contract | Hacker News Reader

“We’ve Changed the Game”: Teamsters Win Historic UPS Contract

teamster.org

202 pointscaned173 comments

This looks like a fair deal.

$2.75/hour immediate bump and +$7.50/hour over the next five years; $21/hour floor for part-time workers; eliminating 22.4s, which Bloomberg describes as "a class of drivers who earned less" [1]; air conditioning in new vehicles; MLK Day as a paid holiday; and the "creation of 7,500 new full-time Teamster jobs at UPS and the fulfillment of 22,500 open positions."

Well done to both sides for getting in a room and cutting a deal.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-25/ups-teams...

As long as amazon drivers get the same sort of benefits.

I wonder if this will just make amazon's transition from ups -> amazon vehicles faster?

or are amazon workers already paid well?

EDIT: to clarify:

sorry, I thought several steps ahead without connecting the dots.

I think this is a good deal. I like UPS too.

But I worry that UPS makes an enormous amount of its revenue from amazon, and it will make UPS more expensive.

An analogy might be us manufacturing jobs treating their employees right while china is cheaper without worrying about employees. And then all the jobs migrate to china. The answer would be - china treats employees right.

> As long as amazon drivers get the same sort of benefits

How does the fairness of this deal depend on negotiations between Amazon and its drivers?

I think it is reference to the durability of the deal

I can't imagine that Amazon pays any workers well. (They wash their hands because the delivery folks are independent contractors.)

I would imagine that people drive for an Amazon affiliate for a couple years with the goal of being hired by UPS for the higher pay and better benefits. The result is that Amazon will always have a lower quality of service than UPS. (I am sure HN hates UPS, but every driver I've interacted with has been super friendly, and they can sneak packages into buildings like they're ninjas. At the end of the day, you get what you pay for, and honey attracts more flies than vinegar. https://xkcd.com/357/)

> delivery folks are independent contractors

Wait what? FedEx was forced to make all their contractors employees:

    On July 8th, 2015 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit adopted the decision of the Kansas Supreme Court in Carlene.M. Craig, et al v. FedEx Ground Package Sys., Inc. This decision holds that FedEx Ground drivers are employees and not independent contractors under the Kansas Wage Payment Act (KWPA). The Seventh Circuit now joins the Ninth Circuit in ruling against FedEx Ground on this issue,. In August 2014, the Ninth Circuit made the same finding in two cases against FedEx under California and Oregon law.

How is Amazon exempt?

I thought Amazon outsourced their delivery to entire companies, and then it's up to that company to obey local labor laws and all that. Could be wrong. There's a lot of Amazon branding all over everything, so maybe it's theirs.

That's exactly how FedEx worked -- the "contractors" were usually small companies of 5-10 delivery trucks and a little more employees. FedEx just provided them access to tracking scanners, training etc.

Didn't persuade the court.

Here in Western NJ, Amazon drivers don’t seem to have any training at all. One took out a statue at the top of our driveway at high speed. They routinely park on dangerous blind curves. They hop out of the drover’s side of their vans right into traffic without looking.

The majority here at least are a menace.

By comparison the UPS folks all seem to be professional drivers as a rule and know what they’re doing.

"One took out a statue at the top of our driveway at high speed."

Maybe he really wanted to get you your package quickly. It's admirable..

Maybe it was an ugly statue.

It was a concrete griffin, about three feet tall. Left wing was sheared off.

If I were someone who owned a house guarded by griffins... I would cast many curses upon a driver of such ilk.

>one took out a statue

Sounds like a typical ups/fedex driver to me. My third mailbox agrees.

Eh, Amazon pays their workers pretty well, if you only base "well" on "dollar amount per hour relative to other unskilled labor jobs". Their conditions are terrible, but the money is far from bad.

Have you done anything to help Amazon drivers unionize? What’s stopping you? (Not rhetorical, genuine questions)

(I provide logistical and financial support to the Starbucks workers union, for example: https://sbworkersunited.org/)

I don't think so. The air conditioning bit was a big point*, and it doesn't look like they've moved at all since June. The deal says they'll put AC in vehicles purchased from 2024 forward, but no retrofits except for a "heat shield" for the cabin. Unless UPS plans to replace its fleet in 2024 (it does not), it will be years before the vast majority of drivers have AC. More are going to die.

*because multiple deliverymen have died of heat-related illness while on the job, and it's otherwise a major long-term health concern

> Unless UPS plans to replace its fleet in 2024 (it does not), it will be years before the vast majority of drivers have AC

This is what makes it a fair deal. Give and take. A maximalist position from labour would demand UPS churn or retrofit its entire fleet overnight. That's obviously not feasible, even if it makes for great PR.

> no retrofits except for a "heat shield" for the cabin

Maybe I'm reading "all cars get two fans and air induction vents in the cargo compartments" incorrectly?

I dont know why you're so heavily downvoted. The second point is entirely correct and your first other than claiming something is not feasible without data to back it up (although i admit it probably isnt feasible), it seems very true and fair.

> other than claiming something is not feasible without data to back it up

Fair enough. UPS operates 125,000 trucks in America [1] with a useful life of 5 to 15 years [2].

So the question is, do you spend hundreds of millions of dollars retrofitting the current fleet, or, spend that money accelerating the purchase of new vehicles, which presumably come with additional perks beyond just air conditioning?

[1] https://www.herbertellis.com/blog/what-happens-when-ups-truc....

[2] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001090727/0...

A fair deal doesn't externalize costs to risking peoples' lives, that's probably where the negativity is coming from.

Compromise in middle grounds assume the two sides have reasonable baselines. Disregard for human life isn't a reasonable baseline. I don't know all the details but I'd argue for some options to allow flex time in driver schedules with non-retrofitted vehicles to stop by somewhere, take a short snack break and cool down, not be so pressured they have no option but to stay in the heat or be fired. That seems like a reasonable middle ground, to me.

I disagree. What would make it fair is that they put air conditioning in vehicles that service areas that have a high probability of being very hot during the summer. UPS should pay a price for neglecting the welfare of its workers for so many years and pay up to put air conditioning in its vehicles.

Give and take does not always mean a fair deal. Some negotiating positions are just plain wrong. If it is infeasible to retrofit vehicles then one has to accept that but this doesn't make it fair.

> What would make it fair is that they put air conditioning in vehicles that service areas that have a high probability of being very hot during the summer

Or pause delivery by ambient-temperature vehicles during the hottest parts of the day. There are a number of solutions which, while not suited to Twitter, can be worked out between adults not drawing red lines for the public's consumption.

Note that we don't have the NMA. We're going off highlights, one bullet point among which reads "safety and health protections, including..."

This entire thread is a brilliant illustration of why compromise cannot be made in public anymore.

I think you didn't read carefully what I wrote. I will state the last sentence again. If it is infeasible to add air conditioning then that is a reality but the compromise is not fair.

My overall point though was that the act of compromising does not make a deal fair. Some compromises are still unfair.

It is not fair in this day and age to require people to drive air conditionless vehicles in hot weather. There may be no other feasible alternative but let's not declare this part of the outcome fair.

> It is not fair in this day and age to require people to drive air conditionless vehicles in hot weather

Why? (Honestly.)

This reminds me of the windowless-apartment debate in New York. Community board members in rent-controlled units complain it's not fair for the poor to have no windows. As a result, the cheapest (legal) apartment was a bells-and-whistles deal. Meanwhile, I (illegally) subletted a windowless room in a full-floor loft for $900/month; even when (years later) I had a window, I put blackout curtains over it. The loft was a fair deal for me. Even if it offended another's sensibilities.

Give and take doesn't make a deal fair. But it indicates both sides have bargaining power. Given a trade-off between more hours, higher pay, a faster roll-out of electric vehicles, and/or more hires, on one hand, and A/C retrofitting, on the other hand, there are valid--even fair--tradeoffs the parties could have made that differ from yours or mine.

> It is not fair in this day and age to require people to drive air conditionless vehicles in hot weather

Why?

Because my sense of what was is fair tells me this is not fair. To you it is fair. So be it.

But it indicates both sides had bargaining power.

It does not indicate this. Consider an extreme example.

Labor: We need a $5 an hour raise. Management: We will give you $0.01 raise.

Labor takes deal because they, in reality, had very little relative bargaining power. But a compromise was made! The act of compromising does not, in and of itself, indicate anything other than that a compromise was agreed upon. It does not indicate fairness, relative bargaining power, or anything else without further information.

My point was to object to original characterization of this being fair since it was a compromise.

I don't know what the tradeoffs were in the UPS bargaining. I do know that requiring someone to drive in an airconditionless vehicle in hot weather is not fair.

> Labor: We need a $5 an hour raise. Management: We will give you $0.01 raise. Labor takes deal because they, in reality, had very little relative bargaining power. But a compromise was made!

Except this doesn't reflect the reality of the deal. Real pay bumps, hiring commitments, a new paid holiday--these aren't minor concessions. There was palpable uncertainty around whether there would be a strike. Teamsters estimates the value of concessions around $30bn; that's 20% of UPS's market cap, delivered to drivers over five years.

Clearly you are not reading what is being written. As stated several times. My objection is your original characterization that the issue of air conditioning was fair because it was a compromise.

Not all compromises are fair. Not all compromises indicate relatively equal bargaining power. Not all compromises....

The point is, you don't know whether it was fair either and you have no idea about the relative negotiating powers of the parties.

Maybe the AC portion of the deal translated directly into wage dollars on the negotiating table. Maybe it was a "pick 3 out of 4 deal".

Your posts are just pointless pedantry about an article where we (as the public) have very incomplete information about the preferences and the negotiating powers of the involved parties.

I don't know I can't even begin to call negociating on long term health fair just wtf. But let's call it pedantry ...

My complaint is that people often times think something is fair because both sides compromised. That thinking is sloppy and incorrect. A deal isn’t fair because it involved compromise. It’s like when people say, “both sides are unhappy with the deal so it means it’s a fair one”. That’s dumb thinking and inaccurate. It might be correct most of the time but not all of the time.

That a compromise was made does not make it fair. The act of compromising in and of itself does not necessarily imply fairness.

I’m not being a pedant. I’m claiming the original reasoning for believing this part of the deal is fair because it involved compromises. I also claim that requiring people to drive all day in hot weather in an air conditionless vehicle is inherently unfair.

>But it indicates both sides had bargaining power.

>It does not indicate this. Consider an extreme example.

>Labor: We need a $5 an hour raise. Management: We will give you $0.01 raise.

Well, no because if they had no bargaining power management could have told them to fuck off, or pay them even less. "Had bargaining power" =/= "had the upper hand"

Pick a dollar amount greater than $0.01 then in my example. Pick the smallest value such that you believe it provides an example of where a compromise is reached but the compromise does not indicate relatively equal bargaining power.

The claim you responded to was "both sides had bargaining power", not "relatively equal bargaining power".

In the original example I gave a compromise was made. Namely the $0.01 increase in pay. I claim one side didn’t really have bargaining power. Do you believe all instances of compromise indicate bargaining power on both sides? I don’t. Sometimes one side budges very little and has way more power than the other. So much so that it’s not accurate to say both sides had bargaining power.

From the site:

> "We’ve hit every goal that UPS Teamster members wanted and asked for with this agreement. It’s a ‘yes’ vote for the most historic contract we’ve ever had.”

While the issue of fairness is subjective, it seems objectively good that the union was able to get what they wanted and asked for. Seems fair to me.

Given that quote, it does indeed seem like a fair deal overall. I was objecting to the characterization that the part of air conditioning had to be fair because there was an agreed upon compromise.

Also, I think its unfair to require people to drive air conditionless vehicles in hot weather.

Except that doesn’t reflect economic reality. See: my local domino’s starts their workers off at 20/hr + tips.

My kid was job hunting. The local coffee shop offered him $5/hr + tips. Guess where he went?

As a result, the coffee shop is now closed, whereas the dominos has my orders waiting for me in under 8 minutes.

Sometimes labor has very little pricing power for their labor. There are many instances of this being true. If you don’t agree with this then please read up on labor history.

Situations can change? Supply and demand are fluid?

I’m shook.

What are you going to tell me next, that the sky is blue?

Then what was the point of the comment you originally made that I responded to? It appeared to be sarcasm and saying that if management only offer $0.01 raise then get a job elsewhere. That sort of simplistic reasoning doesn’t work in all situations. Namely it doesn’t work if labor overall has very little pricing power for the cost of their services.

The sky isn’t always blue. Which is ironic given your response.

Fans are not equivalent of air conditioning, particularly on hot and humid climates where the ability for the human body to conduct evaporative cooling significantly decreases with increasing humidity.

They aren’t. But forced convection still significantly lowers temperatures in metal and glass vehicles and this is enough to make a big difference in risk.

> This is what makes it a fair deal. Give and take

I disagree that give and take alone makes something fair.

The logic reminds me of finding the truth somewhere between the extremes of "the Earth is flat" and "the Earth is an oblate spheroid." We'll just say the Earth is a cube and if both sides are unhappy, we know it's a job well done.

> This is what makes it a fair deal. Give and take. A maximalist position from labour would demand UPS churn or retrofit its entire fleet overnight.

So the "maximalist" labor position is "stop killing any of us" and the compromise "ok, just kill fewer of us" is a good thing?

Meeting in the middle is not always a moral position.

"Fair" does not mean "central, between horrible and tolerable".

>That's obviously not feasible

Your curt dismissal belies that it's actually not just feasible, but a necessity. I would like to see UPS spend the money to replace/retrofit, rather than fighting lawsuits from the relatives of dead or disabled workers, only to have to replace/retrofit anyway.

I agree that it's not a strong win. But from this:

> All cars get two fans and air induction vents in the cargo compartments.

It sounds like all existing vehicles at least get a retrofit to have fans / air in the back?

Air conditioning was fairly easy for both parties to agree on, due to a very successful PR campaign that the company wants to bury. Something like an accelerated schedule to retrofit current vehicles would be expensive to negotiate and result in sacrifices elsewhere.

Cabin AC won't fix cargo areas hitting 140s, and most drivers wouldn't agree to lose $5/hr for AC today or something like that. The heat shield is for the cargo compartment, along with improved air intakes / ventilation and possibly other mitigations - they get absurdly hot and have minimal airflow.

https://archive.is/cyWUm <- for bloomberg blurb

I’d love to see unions start agitating for climate change initiatives to counteract investor demands for profit at all cost. Union members as low and medium income individuals will be disproportionately impacted by climate change.

In this case, people making $21 an hour are not worried about climate change. They're worried about putting food on the table, making rent etc. Climate change is a problem for the elites/big corps/government. The idea of making it a problem for the lowest in society - who are also generally the lowest co2 emitters - is unfair.

> The idea of making it a problem for the lowest in society - who are also generally the lowest co2 emitters - is unfair.

It is a problem for the lowest in society even if they are the lowest emitters. They are the ones sweltering in the heat or freezing in the winters because of insufficient insulation, getting flooded out of their homes built too close to waterways, etc etc.

In this specific article they mention the lack of A/C in the vehicles as a major bargaining win.

Whether they are responsible for the emissions or not (and you and I agree on this point that they largely are not), the lowest in society, by virtue of being most impacted, need to use their large numbers to hold elites accountable and make change.

uh huh, they need to hop to it

"The problem is mostly caused by the very wealthy and large corporations, but because the poor are and will be disproportionately victims of it, they need to be the ones spending their time and money to fix the problem, thereby leaving them even poorer and more exhausted than they already are!"

...Yeah, I don't think you've entirely thought this one through?

I don’t think this quote is a fair interpretation of what I was saying. I don’t think the poor should fix it. I think they should force the hands of the wealthy to fix it. The wealthy aren’t and won’t do it on their own because they aren’t impacted the same way or to the same extent.

This won't work because climate change mitigation is a prisoners dilemma. You could negotiate for $x to be spent on climate change mitigation, or for $x to be spent on your ingroup (ie. union). In the former case, the benefits are spread across all 8 billion people on earth, whereas in the latter case the benefits will only be spread among your ingroup (tens of thousands of people?). Sure, a ounce of prevention might be worth more than a pound of cure, but at these scales (ie. 8 billion vs tens of thousands), it's basically guaranteed that the numbers won't work out. They can certainly try to negotiate for climate change mitigation, but doing so will be economically irrational and will basically be an act of altruism.

That’s how unions work at blogs. In the real world, in Teamster type jobs it’s usually about how can they move jobs and pay around to look like they gave you more than scraps. How do I know? I was a Teamsters through many contracts.

Those 25,000 + 7,500 jobs will probably make it harder for Amazon to hire drivers in some areas.

This is awesome news and a great addition to the trend of power coming back to the workers that I feel like I'm noticing lately. Super exciting: if you're a laborer, you should feel inspired by this. Collective bargaining is a seriously powerful tool.

Excellent news indeed. Looking at the list of bullet points in the article, I challenge anyone to say, with a straight face, that each individual UPS worker negotiating on his/her own would have been able to achieve even half of them, let alone all of them. Well done. Hopefully you are right about a trend.

Hm, I can almost see the standard HN response here. I'm thinking specifically of the non-programming posts of a regular HN'er programmer[1]. Something like:

Unions work on their own behalf and distort the market. Both in terms of the needs of individual workers and the efficiency of the company to deliver products/services. This negatively affects the company, and if the trend spreads ends up making the entire U.S. economy less competitive.

I would then follow you down a rabbit hole where I post 2-3 sentence glib retorts.

Digression: I could have done a lot better in the days before they locked down the vast majority of ChatGPT's capabilities. I know because I got it to impersonate both Dang and myself, at which it excelled; it also did a very good job of explaining style of any given user's writing here on HN.

1: Fun 2nd digression: the account I'm satirizing originally used a throwaway account for all of the zealous free-market flame posts. Dang ended up called out the pattern, asking the user to "stop using this account" to start low-effort flame wars. Rather than stop, the user instead opted to do their overzealous free-market trolling from their normal account. Problem solved, apparently! :)

Counter-point to the “standard response”: this would be a non issue if we had protective tariffs like just about every other first, second, and third world country instead of outsourcing everything.

This is yet another issue caused by the Boomer’s “have my cake and eat it too” mindset.

I was talking to someone who’s partner works at UPS doing IT stuff. Apparently their contingency plan was to force people like him to additionally work the striking roles for no additional pay under the threat of firing.

This is how Caterpillar handled the assembly line employees strike. My understanding is they never really rehired union labor.

More than half of Cat’s labor is outsourced outside of the US, and they just got caught using slave labor in china not long ago.

If we kept manufacturing inside of the US, they wouldn’t be able to abuse their workforce like that.

I interned at AT&T a while back. At the time, they required all "management" employees to prepare for their alternative roles in case CWA called a strike. The IT group I was in had people training to do field installs and maintenance as I recall. Interns in the group were considered "management" employees. Weird times.

If that’s true then UPS management is not very smart. Thanks to changing demographics there is now a permanent worker shortage which has allowed these strikes to succeed. You can’t threaten to fire people when they know they can get hired by the next company. The workers will just call your bluff.

I worked with UPS's top management in an outside consulting role unrelated to labor issues around the time of their first contract negotiations after the strike of the 90s. Avoiding another strike was their number one priority even if they had to put out a strong public face of something different. Workers have fared well each time the contract has come up and I believe the 90s strike had far more impact on the company's management culture than most, even the union, realizes. The folks I worked with seemed to believe another strike would be perhaps not fatal but damaging enough to put the company on a path towards death. It was to be avoided at all costs.

Nobody really notices that the garbage on TV is a rerun and not a new season of my 600lb life.

They notice really quick when their Amazon packages get delayed.

If a worker strike caused Amazon delays by 2-3 days people would be storming UPS headquarters.

This is what happened last time. Managers and office workers were sent out on delivery runs, usually doubled up since they're not going to be as efficient.

I was at UPS IT and my manager regularly did deliveries. In that case it had nothing to do with unions.

That's also the contingency plan for the national postal service in Brazil (ECT/Correios) - a state-owned company. My father, an instructor, had to drive a van around the town to deliver express packages during strikes. The strangest thing about these situations was that old employees (a few were 80+) were also assigned to package delivery duties and some of them would end up getting lost. This was before cellphones were widespread, so Dad and his colleagues would go searching for the missing employees after lunchtime and bring them back to the office.

This is really awesome, one of the few jobs that now seem to be keeping up with inflation.

20 years ago I remember they paid everyone $8.50 an hour starting out, but had awesome perks like free college and housing assistance. Slowly they of course eroded the perks away, so the least they could do is pay more.

Kudos Teamsters.

"Wage increases for full-timers will keep UPS Teamsters the highest paid delivery drivers in the nation, improving their average top rate to $49 per hour."

One has to wonder what tech workers could achieve through collective bargaining.

Don't worry, that number is a total misrepresentation.

Having said that - tech workers could achieve a whole lot through collective _struggle_ (of which bargaining is just a part):

* They could prevent mass government surveillance

* They could force companies to share their patents and other "intellectual property" with the rest of society, for the benefit of everyone.

* They could link up with other workers in areas such as the SF bay to force the government and tech companies to finance construction of public housing and limit rent.

* They could mobilize and lead struggles for getting corporate money out of politics (well, at least the direct kind of money in politics).

... and of course take care of their own interests in the form of participation in company decision-making, protection against arbitrary terminations, equitable pay scales, less excessive work hours etc.

> Don't worry, that number is a total misrepresentation.

I was hoping for more details on the agreement, and it seems you have them. Could you please share the data that leads to this conclusion?

Thanks!

You don't really need them. An "average top rate of $49/hr" is like saying that the average top salary for a SWE is $500,000/yr. Great number; now, who is actually making it, and how many of them are there? Because this number is supposed to be, somehow, a representation of the gains of a typical worker who is subject to the deal. If it is not representative of such a worker, it's a misrepresentation.

I follow the argument, but one can't even make that statement with those numbers about most places SWEs work.

So if we take a company like Google where we could plausibly say "the average top salary for a SWE is $500,000/yr," already it is possibly more remunerative than most places an SWE would work. We could assume it was stated in extremely bad faith, that only 0.5% of the SWEs there make that and everyone else makes $75k. Or we could assume there is a ladder, a progression, and a path to get there. I don't believe the extremely bad faith representation would work here because of likely PR blowback. QED there is likely a path for a delivery driver to earn six figures at UPS.

> a representation of the gains of a typical worker who is subject to the deal

This is covered elsewhere in TFA, and is dependent on the kind of employee.

Accepting this logic: a top-end figure tells you nothing about the nature of the progression to get there. In particular, it doesn't say anything about the relative conditions on each step of the progression, nor (again) about how many make it up each step. The extreme version of this is, of course, how many food service and retail companies have billionaire owners while their lowest level employees qualify for Section 8 and food stamps. Clearly, there is a better way to represent conditions in such a company, beyond simply stating the CEO's take-home. (QED /s)

> now, who is actually making it, and how many of them are there?

Somewhere around 100-125K delivery drivers; any of them with 4 years full time seniority by the end of the contract, since the 5-year contract includes year-by-year general wage increases. The exceptions are employees in progression (less than 4 years full time under any classification), article 40 employees (air drivers, not many), and some seasonal work, most of which is defined under regional supplements.

Pay rate is determined by the contracts and years of seniority, nothing more.

UPS drivers never get an overtime rate?

Overtime past 40 hours (8 in a day or 6th punch) is the case across the US, I think, typically at 1.5x rate. Exact overtime rules vary considerably by supplement beyond that, particularly for part time employees.

My question was really whether “top rate” is “top regular hourly rate” or “top hourly rate overall”.

OK. Top rate means the base pay rate (non-overtime) after completing progression, it's not totally clear to me if the "average" is over time or by area.

What is the balance of driers with 4-years full time seniority vs employees in progression and part-timers/seasonal workers?

Essentially, you didn't answer the question.

See the analysis here:

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/07/26/pers-j26.html

> improving their average top rate

What is this.

A compensation number that overlaps neatly with posted ranges for full-stack engineers located in San Francisco.

Presumably every UPS driver receives a range of rates based on their schedule and other factors (e.g. holidays, overtime).

So the average top rate would be the average of the top end rate amongst all drivers.

Oh, got it. I thought it was the average of a trimmed set, i.e. the average that their top-paid drivers make.

This is great for UPS! I am always happy when retailers choose them to send packages to me. They never get lost. But what often and increasingly happens to me instead is that they make OnTrac deliver my package to save $.15 cents and then my package gets thrown into a hole in the mail room instead of treated with a once of care. I hope UPS funds these changes via not making their executives richer instead of raising prices across the board.

That's why Unions work, and so many lobbyists has ingrained in the US society that they are bad. Take that.

Well, we do have teachers’ unions, police, firefighter unions, steelworker unions (not so much anymore, failed to adapt and killed the industry). Who’s taking what?

Is there any other independent analysis of this agreement? It all sounds good, but its also the teamster website. when is UPS's next earnings call?

August 8th seems to be the next Earnings Call. https://investors.ups.com/news-events/ir-calendar

Full employment works people. Go read https://www.employamerica.org/ for some excellent analysis of the macroeconomics.

And let's be clear, this is good for tech. Tight labor markets -> automation is actually needed. All the "above the API" / "below the API" scaremongering from the 2010s we should not see as the inevitable nature of things, but rather as a direct consequence from shitty economic policies during the Obama years.

I don’t follow, how does this decision affect tech

Labor solidarity means that companies will look to automate more, thereby accelerating technological progress. This argument is known as (particularly, automation based) accelerationism.

Not direct causation either way, but shared root causes.

Labor in short supply -> stronger unions -> better deals for workers

Labor in short supply -> more consumption -> more demand -> automation to increase output more valuable

Labor in short supply -> automation to reduse labor needed more valuable

Whenever I think of the Teamsters I think of Scorsese gangster movies which are basically just the Teamsters cinematic universe.

Haha, well warranted, I think. Sean O'Brien succeeded James Hoffa - son of the infamous Jimmy Hoffa. So the mob connections are not too far away there.

When you think of CEOs, do you think of Les Grossman?

https://www.dexerto.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=3840,quality=75,...

Please expand on why you think the teamsters are essentially irish and italian mafia.

Tony Pro was national vice president of the Teamsters while caporegime in the Genovese family. And there was Jimmy Hoffa, of course. They were quite heavily involved in organized crime at the time, with their top leaders being literally in the Mafia.

They frequently show up in films covering the time. So it doesn't seem outlandish. Hoffa is the one that built it into a powerhouse. It's unsurprising that he remains the known face of the union. A Hoffa ran it for a third of its entire age.

One has to wonder if UPS caved in because they can pass the cost of the agreement on to customers rather than cutting back on executive pay and perks.

It’s a victory for the workers, but at a cost to those that need to ship or receive things when we’re already seeing wages not keeping with inflation.

These agreements are a form of collusion by the teamsters bureaucracy to break the upcoming strike and save the employers' asses.

They write: "UPS came dangerously close to putting itself on strike, but we kept firm on our demands."

those two pieces of the sentence don't match that well, do they? If the union kept firm, then the strike would have happened. It should read: "UPS came dangerously close to putting itself on strike, but we gave up on the workers' demands."

The corrupt union leadership knows that with a strike, there would be even more rank-and-file pressure against a sellout deal, especially if workers organize for collective disruptions while striking.

The Teamsters leadership has just done something very similar at Yellow, a few years ago, see coverage here:

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/07/25/yell-j25.html

To expand on my previous comment: we literally have more job openings than unemployed people, per the latest BLS statistics. And this is a situation that has stayed constant for months.

So what happens when demand for workers is higher than the available supply?

How much less spending power do employees have now as compared to 2020? That’s the real question… If it’s less than a 30% adjustment they will just come out less behind.

Congrats!

Unions work, unionize!

This is spin on a bad agreement. I hope the workers reject it and push for more.

What do you think would be achievable that they haven't negotiated for already?

Probably everything...

Remember that you're getting the press releases from the union leadership which needs to justify calling off the strike, plus the pro-corporate news media.

Why would they call off the strike unless they thought they were getting a good deal?

The reason to call of a strike is actually to be able to pass a _bad_ deal. You see, the workers are not very likely to accept a bad deal if they've just come out on strike - even if their leadership has made excessive concessions in the negotiations and is putting it up to a vote. If, however, the leadership has "taken the wind out of the sails" of the struggle, the demobilized workers have the gotten the message that their struggle is over and there's nothing to be done, and are much more likely to accept it. This is usually accompanied by union leadership publishing glowing descriptions of all of the wonderful gains, usually in vague and confusing terms; never listing the set of original goals; and not mentioning what concessions were made.

An uncorrupted union would never calls off a strike because of an employer proposition: If the proposition/proposed contract is offered enough time before the strike was decided, then it is brought up for discussion - with the negotiations team presenting both the benefits and the detriments: What they got and what they conceded; and the result of the discussion decides the fate of the planned strike. But when an offer is made just before a strike, naturally - the strike proceeds, and the offer is discussed in parallel with the strike. If the offer is accepted, the strike ends up being a short one; and if it is rejected - the struggle continues with the "wind in their sails".

> Wage increases for full-timers will keep UPS Teamsters the highest paid delivery drivers in the nation, improving their average top rate to $49 per hour.

Seems pretty good. I may take a break from tech and drive for a while.

You need a lot of seniority to get that rate.

4 years full time, to be specific, unless progression time is reduced. Off the street 22.4 hires from Covid times, who started at $20.50, will be converted to RPCD and making $45 within the next couple years.

Good for them. Real work, deserves real pay.

This is great news for workers in America in general. I know HN doesn’t like unions, but this shows that unions do work when they are motivated in working for the people they represent. More than Sean O’Brien, this victory was made possible by TDU’s rank and file members not giving in when UPS tried to shortchange them.

Taking your word for it regarding HN not liking unions. Why is that if you know? What's the alternative for a UPS worker to get fair pay and fair working conditions?

> Taking your word for it regarding HN not liking unions

Don't. HN is far from a monolith on this issue.

To the degree I've seen even a semblance of consensus, it's in animosity towards public-sector unions and gentle support for blue-collar private-sector unions. Where it turns to total anarchy is when we debate unionizing tech workers. (They tend to be fun reads.)

Even amongst public sector, cop/firefighter/judge/politician unions are a different animal than the other government worker unions.

> turns to total anarchy is when we debate unionizing tech workers

haha, true. Lots of straw men creep into that discussion.

> I can't live off $500,000/yr, what if I get laid off? We need to unionize to protect our jobs and make sure our salary keeps up with inflation!

Just wait until we talk about VP's unionizing.

HN (generally) doesn't like unions because we're highly paid software engineers who think we're better at negotiation one-on-one than in a group.

You can have both ways which I'm shocked isn't more common. Everyone in the same position gets paid the same, if anyone negotiates higher for themselves everyone gets a pay bump to match. Now you get paid max(individual rate, group rate).

Bad negotiator? Anxious? A woman? Congratulations! You're probably doing better than you could on your own.

Amazing negotiator? Could sell ACs in Alaska? Congratulations! You get all the fruits of your labor and your new coworkers immediately love you.

I think what messes people up isn't that they think their temporarily embarrassed millionaires, but that their temporarily undiscovered principal engineers who deserve more money for pulling the same cards as everyone else on the team.

That can only be true if labor budgets are limitless.

Even a business like Apple has some number that is the most it can pay to all of its employees. And if there is a maximum, then that means it can be divided any number of ways.

Yes but that gets factored into the hiring because this salary scheme is for retention. If someone negotiates a higher salary it's taken as the market price for the position increasing and the company not wanting to lose their employees who will eventually or immediately realize they could be making more somewhere else.

I do not understand what salary scheme for retention means. There exists $x to pay everyone in the company. You can start from dividing it equally amongst all employees. As you pay some employees more, you have to pay others less.

Keep going along this track and “max(individual rate, group rate)” will break down as you winnow down the definition of group.

I don't think Apple (or any company) are paying "the most it can pay to all of its employees". Labor is a market, and in a market, buyers don't pay any more than they can get away with. All companies are paying the least they can get away with while still retaining the people they want to retain.

There isn't some fixed bag of money $X that gets distributed to employees, where X is uninfluenced by the market. If the labor market happened to change such that X must be more, companies would have to pay X or do without some employees.

EDIT: I think we actually agree. Roundabout way of saying the same thing.

> You can have both ways which I'm shocked isn't more common. Everyone in the same position gets paid the same, if anyone negotiates higher for themselves everyone gets a pay bump to match. Now you get paid max(individual rate, group rate).

Except this misses the fact that negotiating for your own pay raise is now suddenly harder. Suppose there's a company with 100 non-supervisory employees, each of which $200k worth of value for the company, gets paid $100k. Under a regime where everyone's pay is automatically bumped up to the highest rate, if you're trying to negotiate a $10k raise for yourself, you're actually negotiating for the company to part with $1M ($10k * 1000 employees). Without such a regime, a negotiated $10k raise for yourself only costs the company $10k. Obviously negotiating in the latter situation would be easier to pull off.

Of course, the real world is more complicated than this, because the union can hire trained negotiators or whatever, but your simplistic model of "max(individual rate, group rate) so everyone wins" makes no sense.

HN has a mix of opinions but there are a lot of "temporarily embarrassed ~~millionaire~~ billionaire" wannabe entrepreneurs. People that think of themselves as employers not employees, etc.

"Temporarily embarrassed millionaire" is one of the most ridiculous bits of motivated reasoning to ever come out of the left. There's little to no evidence for it but gives the one who states it the ability to hold anyone who disagrees with them both in contempt and inferiority at the same time. It is quite clever, if your goal is to protect many of the inherent contradictions on the neoliberal worldview but is terrible if your goal is to ever understand those who frustratingly refuse to hold views you paternally believe are what's best for them.

Maybe you should actually read and understand the anti-union comments on this site rather than using a memetic caricature from reddit or whatever. Of the anti-union comment I've seen, none were justified on the basis that the commenter was a '"temporarily embarrassed ~~millionaire~~ billionaire" wannabe entrepreneurs'. The closest I've seen are people who think they're above average performers, and think that contracts that typically result from union negotiated contracts (eg. seniority based or credential based) would negatively impact their compensation. Regardless of whether you think arguments like these hold any water, it's a massive disservice to portray them as them being anti-union because they "think of themselves as employers not employees".

That is indeed close: Why do we always hear from people who think they are well above average contributors, and not the ones that don't?

I've read the other comments too. The most interesting ones were the people who previously had "conventional, blue collar" union jobs and didn't like their union. There are certainly real problems, but thankfully there are a number of "reform caucuses" right now winning elections that can start to fix them.

I don't think that's it. It's just that some people see the world of business, particularly in the West, as the main mechanism for pay rises.

If there's a relatively open market, non-onerous regulation, and some money to be made, then businesses will spring up and the best engine of salary-raising, other employers, will work without intervention.

It's not a perfect solution, but it also requires paying close to zero taxes to work. Every regulation is more cost paid in tax by employers to central and regional government, and also within every business as they have to employ more people to ensure they stay compliant. This is all money that could go to salaries / lower prices / higher quality elsewhere / dividend payments. It's not free.

And so you don't need to be a Fountainhead-quoting 17 year old to question this stuff. It's a fundamental lever on how economies and productivity work.

I am not sure what you are arguing. What is the mechanism you are proposing?

It sounds like "overhead depresses wages", but outside of a few special cases like Academia, I don't really see much evidence of that. Until recently we had chronically loose labor markets. There is simply no reason to presume employers are handing out all they can in that case. And the ones that are and not paying above-market wages are, by definition, low-productivity businesses that do not deserve to exist.

That's the great thing about high employment: as the "floor" of acceptable comp/working conditions goes up, we find all sorts of shitty (typically small) businesses that cannot make it. Those shitty businesses do fine in the Obama years when everyone is desperate for work, but they can't cut it now. They go under when they can't hire, and average productivity rises accordingly.

> There is simply no reason to presume employers are handing out all they can in that case

I didn't say that there was.

> That's the great thing about high employment

Not if it's coming from the public sector. Then it's government taking taxes from businesses and using it to pay people more than said business can. Saying that means the businesses shouldn't exist feels like a statement of faith.

> we find all sorts of shitty (typically small) businesses that cannot make it

We also find good small businesses that can't, and bad public sector ones. We just call the public sector ones "underfunded" when that happens.

Two answers:

* In the US there's a narrative that unions add layers to bureaucracy to a process that should (from an IMO limited "pro free market" position) efficiently settle on an optimal solution all by itself. Many people just by default accept this argument, and to be entirely fair US unions definitely got complacent in the last few decades.

* Many HN commenters are affluent tech workers or entrepeneurs, and some are bosses or capital owners themselves. People in this first group kind of "won" the economy, and in the second group actively benefit from workers negotiating 1-on-1. Group (1) has a tendency to not relate well or understand the position of the typical union constituency, Group (2) has financial motivation to push back against it.

It's true it's not a monolith, but the loudest voices here have been against all union,s not just public sector ones. But do you hear that today? Silence. It's the sound of former well-paid engineers and other tech workers of the techbro-libertarian bent realizing that the worker rights they've spent years decrying actually matter. Could this be because they finally realize that despite their notion that they are in the ownership class with their options and investments, their jobs have more in common with a UPS driver than with management and the superrich who own the companies where they work?

What about this post makes such people identify more with UPS than they previously would? And what about this post makes them suddenly care about the workers rights that they previously didnt think mattered?

Many HN readers don't want to be paid more.

One position is that there are not only two parties involved in a person's employment situation. The alternative is they go work another company.

Another position is that unions destroy companies by forcing a cost structure which dooms the company to fail.

Lots of people think one or both plus other things.

They work when applied to jobs that fit what American unions do well.

On the other hand teachers union, I don’t know what they have done. That is still a thankless job, poor pay for most of the career, dwindling benefits, and even situations where teachers have physical security issues.

They’ve removed the ability to fire the bad ones (hurting students in the process), and hence preventing the good ones from getting paid better

Determining a good UPS worker is much easier than determining a good teacher.

It is. Amazon uses metrics to rate driver performance and they're regularly derided for it. Based on that, I'm highly doubtful that unions would allow performance based firings in their contracts.

Correct, the union does not recognize any performance standards. However, getting the (driving) job is done by demonstrating you can meet very high performance standards over the course of 30 days, and other things like even minor dishonesty can result in being fired on the spot. There's also lots of gentler pressure than "work faster or we'll fire you" that happens in practice, with a lot of contract language that can work both ways.

Yup. It’s a mess for teachers.

> This is great news for workers in America in general.

It really is.

Workers in certain industries have been pushed to the absolute breaking point. This is exactly what unions were meant to solve.

You can only take so much before you get pushback.

This is good for the US. Unions built the middle class in prior generations.

I used to be a commercial pilot and a federal ATC. Unions were an option.

unions for private companies are fine imo, unions in government funded roles only cause problems :/

I don't dislike unions anymore then I dislike any monopoly.

More seriously, I don't have a problem with Unions - except when they start to get propped up by the government. I don't have a problem with UPS cutting a deal with the teamsters. If the government steps in and sets the deal or the government steps in and says that all shippers have to use the teamsters - that's when I have problems.

If that's the deal the workers got imagine the deal the teamster boss's got!

I don't know enough about teamster bosses to imagine. Can you give the rest of us an idea of what you're implying?

Great news for the Teamsters, but how much more inflation is this likely to cause?

UPS has to pay for all of this somehow, which means we have to pay for it.

You sure it’s going to be us instead of shaving half a percent of the Bezos budget for rocketry or something?

99% sure it’s going to be us.

The elites don’t usually do pay cuts.

So free market forces only work in the market for CEOs and top executives?

Here’s a dilemma for you - if they can raise prices for us without any consequence why haven’t they done it alredy?

Do you not buy your own groceries? They (retailers) clearly already have and had done so well before inflation began to bite suppliers.

But why do free market forces and concerns about pricing only apply when labor wants higher wages?

Do you register the same concerns about all of us being forced to pay higher prices when companies do stock buybacks?

The unfortunate reality is that in recent years wage increases result in higher prices, less hours for hourly employees, and fewer employees working.

Walk in to a McDonald’s now that they’re paying over $15 an hour. There are half the employees in the restaurant than there used to be. They got replaced with touchscreen kiosks.

Walmart, same thing, 2 lanes open and the rest is self checkout.

Just pay people more isn’t the whole answer.

Are you basing this on walking into stores or like economics or something?

We’re currently in a situation of rising employment rates and dropping inflation.

Inflation is most certainly not dropping. The rate that inflation is increasing is slowing. That's a huge difference.

Also the reported rate of inflation is very misleading considering it doesn't include housing, energy, or food costs, which just so happen to be sectors of the economy that experienced the most inflation.

UPS has had record profits lately. Inflation is due to corporate profit record breaking not employee wages.

If you think UPS won’t charge customers more to cover these costs you’re not paying attention.

The solution is not to prevent workers from getting better wages but to punish companies for profiteering. It can be argued that the current spike in inflation is because companies are raising prices despite record profits

I'm not saying that companies should pass these wage increases on to consumers, just that they usually do.

No inflation necessary.

Quick math. UPS has 532,000 employees. Let's assume they all work full time(they don't), and all get a $2.75 raise -

2.75 * 40 * 52 = $5,720 per employee

5720 * 532000 = $3,043,040,000

UPS profits 2022: $13,900,000,000

So, a quarter or so of profits.

The relevant population of workers is 340,000 ; and they don't all work a full-time job. On the other hand, you did not calculate the annuities depending on the hourly rate. Still, probably a lot less than your result. Not to mention how this will probably lock-in UPS workers for a number of years.

Good points. I bet it's close, or a bit below as you said, in reality.

The exact details would be impossible to figure out without knowing precisely hours works, how much each person makes, etc. I was trying to roughly show you can increase wages for an entire company without 'causing inflation.' UPS has been jacking up prices the last few years and just pocketing the change. Seems the employees caught on and want their share.

> "The creation of 7,500 new full-time Teamster jobs at UPS and the fulfillment of 22,500 open positions, establishing more opportunities through the life of the agreement for part-timers to transition to full-time work."

"How ya' doin'? This is my brother Jimmie, my cousin Jimmie, and his son Jimmie. Nice place ya got here. Mind if we take a look around?"

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