Untapped Potential

While Greg Niemann once boasted that “UPSers turn out better than machines,” that hasn’t stopped the company from trying to turn its workers into cogs in the machinery. Harry Braverman examined the intertwining forces of new technology and scientific management in shaping the modern factory for maximum profit, but his approach is easily applicable to the daily grind of package car drivers today:

The physical process of production are now carried out more or less blindly, not only by the workers who perform them, but often by lower ranks of supervisory employees as well. The production units operate like a hand, watched, corrected, and controlled by a distant brain.

Braverman’s observation describes Orion — UPS’s new routing program, whose algorithm is one thousand pages long and was designed by fifty UPS engineers — perfectly. According to UPS, Orion “uses expansive fleet telematics and advanced algorithms to gather and calculate countless amounts of data to provide UPS drivers with optimized routes.” Drivers once valued for their route knowledge have been reduced to little more than implementers of a software program that contains the 55,000 daily package car delivery routes across the US.

Telematics, once understood as the application of computerization to fleet management, has morphed into something much broader. “Arguably one of the very first companies to employ analytics to improve operations,” Data Informed writes, “over the last 15 years UPS has moved from simply describing what happened yesterday to predicting and prescribing how it will operate tomorrow.”

This has made the driver’s life hell, journalist Jessica Bruder writes:

Now drivers were called to account for a litany of small sins. They were asked to justify bathroom breaks and any other deviations — “stealing time” in corporate-speak—that could chip away at their SPORH (pronounced “spoor”) count, or Stops Per On-Road Hour.

Another driver told her:

I have no problem doing a heavy, hard job . . . But now, after you do the job, you have to look back every day and say, ‘Did I do this? Did I do that?’ They have a report that tells them everything that you did wrong. For instance, if you turned the truck on before you put on your seat belt, that’s wasting gas.

A former driver described the purpose of this succinctly: “Data is just a proxy for control.” Indeed, while UPS’s director of process management, Jack Levis, said last year that “big data doesn’t mean much” and that he really cares about “big impact,” the biggest impact seems to be on UPS workers — who are increasingly pushed to work faster and longer.

Yet logistic workers have shown that when they use it, they have enormous economic and political power.

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) is a case in point. In May, the contract between the ILWU and the Pacific Maritime Association, the major employers association, expired. Over the next nine months, the union and employers association fought back and forth. The Los Angeles Times captured the unique power of the dockers in the battle:

The dispute that has snarled West Coast shipping revolves around a rarity in American business — a small but mighty union. The International Longshore and Warehouse Union represents 20,000 dockworkers, a fraction of the organized ranks of teachers, truck drivers or healthcare workers. But the port workers — who still queue up at hiring halls daily for work and spend years earning full membership — stand guard over a crucial chokepoint in the global economy.

The fight also showed the union’s limitations. Even though the job actions cost the US economy billions of dollars and backed up the supply chain for months, the final agreement included serious union concessions.

What happened? A central problem is that the enormous power of the dockers is being slowly eaten away by the massive non-union economy that surrounds the waterfront. The West Coast dockers “stand guard over a crucial chokepoint,” but once you pass through, vast swathes of the logistics industry are non-union, with workers laboring in terrible conditions.

For example, a 2010 study commissioned by the Warehouse Workers for Justice found that while there were over two hundred thousand warehouse workers in Will County, an area southwest of Chicago where the logistics industry is burgeoning, they were not only largely non-union but 63 percent were employed by temp agencies.

One Big Union

Amalgamation — when workers in small unions combine into one industrial union representing a particular industry — is as relevant today as ever before and should be the goal of any revived organizing in the sprawling logistics industry.

Important parts of the logistics industry are already unionized, such as UPS, USPS, DHL, FedEx pilots, dockers, and many railroad workers, and they should be the springboards for organizing the rest of the industry. The Teamsters are especially well-positioned to launch logistics organizing, and the sixty thousand UPS package drivers should be an invaluable resource to organize FedEx. But this potential army of organizers is neither inspired nor mobilized.

Amazon’s chain of warehouses — which it has constructed across North America with the help of generous tax credits — is an obvious target for a major unionization campaign. The Teamsters and the ILWU have organized and represented warehouse workers for more than eighty years, and the working conditions in Amazon’s warehouses, both in the US and abroad are notoriously bad.

After conducting an investigation that included interviews with twenty current employees at Amazon’s Breinigsville, PA warehouses, the Allentown Morning Call summarized its findings in a 2011 article:

Workers said they were forced to endure brutal heat inside the sprawling warehouse and were pushed to work at a pace many could not sustain. Employees were frequently reprimanded regarding their productivity and threatened with termination, workers said. The consequences of not meeting work expectations were regularly on display, as employees lost their jobs and got escorted out of the warehouse. Such sights encouraged some workers to conceal pain and push through injury lest they get fired as well, workers said.

These working conditions cry out for action. While many Amazon warehouse employees work for third-party labor services that have been historically difficult to organize, a National Labor Relations Board ruling in late August made it legally easier to organize workers who labor under such exploitative arrangements. And workers outside the US have already been pressing Amazon with workplace actions. Last December, ten days before Christmas, two thousand Amazon warehouse workers in Germany went on strike for better pay and working conditions.

As for the Teamsters, at its 2002 convention, General President James P. Hoffa declared, “We will set the course of our union into the twenty-first century.” The course that Hoffa has set has been largely concessionary, and his organizing is even less inspiring. The largest victory in recent years was the twenty thousand correctional, probation, and parole officers with the Florida Department of Corrections (FDOC), which joined the union in 2011. “This is a great day for Teamsters,” Hoffa boasted.

But FDOC absorption was more akin to old-fashioned raiding than organizing, and what it has to with building the union’s strength in the logistics industry is anybody’s guess. Meanwhile, the small local efforts carried out by Teamsters locals at FedEx Freight have been few in number, and a mixed bag of victories and defeats.

The Teamsters’ 1997 UPS contract campaign and strike remains the model for organizing, educating, mobilizing, and leading a nationwide workforce into battle against a wealthy and politically connected logistics giant. The campaign provides valuable lessons for contract campaigns with existing employers and organizing non-union logistic companies across the country.

The success of the campaign may also explain why there has been such a great effort to erase it from the public memory. Two of the major biographies of the era, Bill Clinton’s My Life and Hillary Clinton’s Living History, make no mention of the UPS strike or, for that matter, union leader Ron Carey or the Teamsters — despite the prominence of all three in the late 1990s. This deliberate act of political amnesia extends to the Teamsters, who, despite celebrating the strike on appropriate occasions, haven’t leveraged the victory to launch new campaigns.

Carey told Labor Notes’ Mark Brenner in 2007, “The labor movement has to grow. But it cannot attract new members when you are selling out the ones you have.” While the Teamsters have the potential to be the central players in organizing the continent-wide logistics industry, it is difficult to see that happening with the current union leadership. On the other hand, a revitalized Teamsters union initiating a Fight for 15 campaign at UPS could mobilize the type of membership and community support needed to organize the entire logistics industry.