An ambulance waits outside of the West Charlotte UPS hub

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The following is a repost of a portion of the October edition of the “New Day at UPS” which focuses on the West Charlotte UPS warehouse. “New Day at UPS” is a monthly newsletter written by UPS workers for UPS workers. It aims to be a voice in the struggle to build an independent rank and file organization at UPS. “The New Day” is an example of the type of initiative needed to be taken up en masse by workers to build a revolutionary labor movement in the United States.

It’s now been over a month since the new agreement between Teamsters and UPS was put into effect. UPS’s petty attempts to win sympathy from UPSers are over and Teamsters officials have gone back into their holes, hardly to be seen until the next time they’re forced to interact with rank and file. The propaganda has mostly died down and UPS remains completely unchallenged on the shop floor.

One of the principal issues with the “new” contract (in reality, the vast majority of the contract is literally copy-pasted from previous agreements and many of the worst givebacks are still there) between Teamsters and UPS is the complete lack of any protections for inside workers. Absolutely vital operational details, such as the speed of work or the ratio of staff to volume, are not mentioned in the contract. This is done deliberately in order to give UPS maximum control over rates and hours at our expense. The only answer UPS has for the question of work rate is “more”. This has been readily apparent at the West Charlotte hub, with conditions only deteriorating further since the “new” contract has been put into effect.

In Charlotte, over the past month, UPS has used every sleazy method in the book to squeeze as much out of its workforce as possible. Shifts have been staggered, with management having a few selected loaders and unloaders come in early so that when the bulk of inside workers come in, the belts are already backed up and running at maximum capacity. UPS has also been trying to trim the number of loaders to decrease the overall cost of labor, refusing to let anyone more than a few minutes late clock in and sending others home at the start of the shift. Management has been telling UPSers they should come in 15-20 minutes before their start times to avoid being sent home or starting the work day backed up. Workers are expected to show up but not necessarily start working (and get paid) until the belts are at full capacity, and in fact UPS has a history of legal issues involving wage theft and to this day timecard “discrepancies” are a common occurence.

The sleaze goes even deeper, of course. In an effort to maximize the rate of packages being loaded and shorten shifts, the main belt at the West Charlotte hub has been running nearly double its recommended capacity. Hearing an ear-piercing screech as the belt struggles to handle the number of packages has become commonplace. This phenomenon is common across large hubs, especially ones with older equipment such as WORMA, and is possibly a violation of OSHA’s occupational noise exposure rules. (Unfortunately, there seems to be no systematic study of tinnitus/hearing damage among UPS workers, so it is hard to say what the full extent of the damage is.) All of this has an effect on loaders who are being forced to load a steadily increasing number of packages per hour. Some loads that are heading in opposite directions are even combined, so that management can take advantage of hard workers and reduce their spending on hours at the expense of other hubs’ hours.

The “new” contract failed to deliver part-time warehouse workers a guaranteed break. For most of the country, this is not a big deal. However, in Charlotte, this is a serious problem. Teamsters Local 71, which covers the West Charlotte warehouse, is unable to ensure a ten- minute break for part-time warehouse workers despite this being nearly standard across the country. With recent speed-ups, this issue has become even more glaring as Charlotte UPSers are doing even more work without being given a few minutes to catch their breath or grab a drink of water. This is especially felt in the summer and early fall when temperatures inside trucks frequently climb above a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. This is not just inconvenient, but dangerous. Last month in Texas, a package car driver named Christopher Begley died after being exposed to extreme temperatures. In July, at the West Charlotte warehouse, a worker was severely injured after working a heavy shift on a particularly hot day, and they were sent out in an ambulance.

The main task is building an actual union of the inside workers, and since the crucial issue of work rate is not even covered by the Teamsters contract, it makes complete sense to try to establish a uniform work rate that people agree they can do safely and reasonably for their pay rate, and have a coordinated campaign to bring everyone down to it. A big question is, would the Teamsters side with UPS in this? This could technically be interpreted as a slowdown, but if everyone participating simply denied it and said they were working as fast as they can using the right work methods, then it would not be a contract violation. In other industries this would be called “working to the letter”, but in our case, the part-Democrat-part-fascist-gangster Teamsters would potentially refuse to represent us ifwe carried out such an action. There is also the difficulty of organizing such an action, how many people would be willing to do it and how many would resort to scabbing or ratting? We cannot take a single person for granted. We are trying to build a shop-floor organization capable of bringing UPSers together in shared economic action for the benefit of all of us. (One among many tasks, of course.) All of the problems that existed on July 31 are still here. None of them are going to go away on their own, and certainly not because of any goodwill from UPS or the IBT. The question for us is, what exactly is a reasonable work rate and what will it take to get people to follow it?