“I think it went really well,” Ross Kinson, a business agent with Teamsters Local 533, says of a recent practice protest outside the UPS Customer Center on Vista Blvd in Sparks, ahead of a threatened national strike Aug. 1st.
“We have about 1200 folks within this local that work at UPS, and there's over 340,000 workers nationwide. And of that group, most of them haven't been on a strike before. They haven't been on a picket. It’s not something that people just do every day, and we want to start to get these folks ready. Negotiations broke down, early on the fifth … and from there, there's been practice picketing happening across the nation. We want to make sure that here locally, our folks are ready to go. Now we have essentially three weeks left.”
The UPS Teamsters contract with the shipping giant is set to expire on July 31, and sticking points for a new agreement include better terms for its many part-time workers and getting AC into its trucks immediately.
UPS recently released a statement saying the Teamsters "have stopped negotiating despite historic proposals that build on our industry-leading pay. We have not walked away, and the union has a responsibility to remain at the table.”
The Teamsters released their own statement saying: "Following marathon negotiations, UPS refused to give the Teamsters a last, best, and final offer, telling the union the company had nothing more to give.”
Kinson said competitors such as FedEx, Amazon and OnTrac all have air conditioning. “It's not something that is difficult for the company to do… With the way that temperatures are continuing to ramp up, we had multiple people last year who went down with heat related illness or injury… So heat related issues are going to become more and more prevalent, and finding an actual fix to them is important.”
Another sticking point he says has to do with part-time wages, which became exacerbated during the pandemic, as work hours went up in the delivery sector.
“We went into work, did all the same stuff, and it got steadily worse and worse and worse to the point where many of our employees are working 60 plus hours a week and are being forced in six days a week, almost every week in order to keep up with the demands that this pandemic has created. What we're looking for is, specifically with our part-timers, a lot of them are forced to live at home, with their parents or, you know, on subsidized housing, food stamps, things of that nature. And we want to make sure that those part-time wages are actually competitive.”
Nationally he said about 60% of the UPS workforce is part-time and 50-50 locally.
Kinson says he’s impressed by the willingness of the current workforce, both full-time and part-time “who are willing to stand up.”
He attributes it to a shift which happened during the pandemic.
“I see more workers starting to get fed up with their working conditions and getting paid minimally for the essential work that they do. In the meantime, you have corporate Wall Street making money hand over fist... I do think strikes are becoming more prevalent. I do think they're becoming more effective. I see a lot more young people who are willing to … toss their hat in the ring and say, ‘let's take back something for ourselves.’”
Northern Nevada is a warehouse driven economy, so locally the stakes are high, according to Kinson.
“I mean, obviously we have have the casinos and everything like that, but our bread and butter is the major warehouses that we have in this area, warehouses like Tesla, Apple, Amazon, all of that. And UPS nationally ships 20 million parcels per day,” he said. “Our hub is an outbound hub. So all of these folks who are relying on getting shipments out to their customers, they truly rely on UPS to do that. So if a strike was to happen, there would be major effects to the supply chain and people getting their goods to them in a timely manner and that would stop, especially here in this area, because there are so many warehouses, and we do so much outbound shipping.”
Kinson said the Teamsters are looking for local support.
“A strike isn't something that anyone wants. It's something that you save as a last resort,” he concluded. “All of these folks who work at UPS … they're also hopeful that UPS comes to its senses … and get a deal done so that we can continue to take care of our customers and can continue to help take care of our community. But we can't have our part-timers take a hit and continue to live in poverty. So sometimes you've got to stand up and fight. So if the company isn't willing to do that, that's when we're going to go on strike. But it's not something that we're actively looking for because we live in this community too. We take care of our customers. We love our customers, but we have to stand up and protect our people first.”