Not that I think it would come down to a strike, but I wonder how much weight it would hold to threaten a strike against UPS. After reading about Catipillar's complete failure of a strike, I wonder if UPS could afford to do the same to us?
It seems to me that we have a HUGE advantage with our market the way it is. Almost to big of an advantage in that a strike would cost UPS a ridiculous amount of money and market share, compared to just giving us what we want in a contract.
What are your thoughts????
I'm going to repeat myself here.
IF President Obama is re-elected, THEN the 2013 contract is negotiated fairly easily, although the company WILL attempt to put some of the cost of healthcare on the employee. (They've been squeezing this out of management for the last several years, so there is no more blood in that turnip.) They will spend a lot of time talking about non-union competition pricing us out of a lot of markets.
(They are right, BTW, so some flexibility in this area would probably be a good idea. It would be nice if some creative cooperation between the company and the union figured out a way to compete with FedEx and other non-union carriers.)
On the other hand,
IF Mitt Romney is elected, THEN you guys are screwed. With a hard-right administration in control, the company may very well go all-in, even taking a strike to cripple the union. Doubt me? You mentioned what Caterpillar just did to its employees. Cat made no bones about it; they are profitable, they are solid, everything is looking good for them. Didn't matter. They were going to squeeze the troops and make more profits, and they did.
The Teamsters won in 1997 because Bill Clinton's Labor Department was sympathetic to, like, actual labor, not the corporatocracy. That won't happen in a Romney administration. The Romney Labor Department will be working out of the ALEC playbook, where "RIGHT TO WORK" is paragraph 1. Not to mention the economy is totally different this time around. Last time, customers equated "UPS" to "my really nice driver". This time around, it will be, "Why should my rates go up to pay this guy $38 an hour? My customers won't pay my prices now." Last time around, the company was completely naive as to the PR aspects of selling a strike. This time around, they won't be. They have too many examples of how to paint the evil, greedy, lazy, union thugs as destroying the job creators.
-AND- let's not forget how technology has made it MUCH easier for non-trained people to do even the delivery driver job. Just follow the DIAD, dude! Staffing the hubs would be a piece of cake. Pay the scabs $12 an hour, no benefits, and see how many people line up, picket lines or no picket lines. Use a temp staffing outfit, and call back retired management to run the hubs and preloads and so on, so the younger ones can all go on-car. I have friends that work as temp managers of the helpers at Christmas; they work for the temp staffing outfit, not UPS.
If Karl Rove and the Koch Brothers can make believable "thugs" out of kindergarten teachers, imagine how much easier it will be when the word "Teamsters" is in play. Get used to the phrases "gold-plated benefits" and "outrageous pensions for early retirement", because you will be hearing them a lot.
At this point, you guys are about the last well-paid union jobs with benefits left out there in the private sector. You can't be outsourced to China, so you have to be brought to heel some other way.
By all means, vote for Mitt Romney and the local TEA Party congresscritter. Then kiss your pay and benefits goodbye.
I'm not suggesting this is fair, or ethical. I think it stinks. I also think it will happen, because too many working people just can't figure out how the right wing is screwing them. I don't want my niece and nephew, and their kids, growing up as corporate serfs. But that is where this country is headed: a corporate plutocracy where the 1/10th of 1% take it all, and we get the 'tinkle down' from the 'job creators'. Bah...
Corporate profits and the stock market are at all time highs, the tax burden on millionaires and the corporations are at an all time low. Yet, people complain because unemployment is still high. Guess what? TRICKLE DOWN economics doesn't work!