High Value Clerks & Customer Counter Clerks - Union or Not Union?

[DELACROIX]

I was a full time union clerk, also union steward. Back, I believe in early 90's, management and the BA came into our office and locked the door and had a meeting. They informed us that all our work which was claims and pkg tracing was being moved to a centralized location in Bristol Tenn. This was going to be done nationwide. Several friends of mine around the nation who were also stewards and I worked together to bury them in grievances. We were offered the opportunity to follow our work. They didn't think anyone would do that. Turned out several did. They were working from Mobile trailers in Bristol. We continued our fight without any help at least from my BA. I had a personal meeting with Ron Carey. He promised he would resolve the issue. It was decided that all work was to stay until each union employee had left the company thru either resignment or retired. These positions should not have ever been eliminated. Weakens the union with less union employees. As far as customer counters positions, the company is still trying eliminate them with outsourcing by opening UPS Stores in strip malls. Through my contacts, the claims and tracing finally ended up in either South Carolina or North Carolina, right to work states, paying minimum wages and was quite a disaster as these employees had no UPS background experience.

They were not paying into any Union sponsored Pension and Health and Welfare plans at that time was probably at one of the reasons why the Union never fought for those clerical positions. In reality the whole “97” strike was about increasing full time contributions into their troubled pension plans in order to increase benefits and to prevent the Company from taking total control over our pension trusts in order to cut any future funding and benefits.

I believe local 407 had a phone center at that time that was under our collective bargaining agreements. Those jobs were eliminated and they were offered similar work in different departments with again the understanding that when they leave or retire that the position will be no more.

Any full time union job is important, those positions vacated like 22.2, full time clerks and 22.3’s usually are filled by high seniority drivers that do pay eventually into the Union’s controlled pensions plans.