The biggest strike in US history is on the horizon

And Dick Durbin is just sitting there

Welcome to a Sunday edition of Progress Report.

It’s official: In a Senate filled with out of touch cowards, Dick Durbin dwarfs them all.

Durbin, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, continues to astound with his stubborn refusal to do anything about any of the national crises that threaten the American legal system. Appearing on Meet the Press this morning, Durbin piddled through pitiful excuse after pitiful excuse for his inaction on the Clarence Thomas bribery scandal, the Supreme Court and federal judiciary’s continued disinterest in following laws, and the domino effect of Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s ongoing absence.

The excuses were all connected in a perfect circle of ineptitude: Durbin isn’t asking the Judiciary Committee to subpoena Clarence Thomas, he explained, because Thomas would just ignore the legal order. Plus, even if he wanted to hit Thomas with a subpoena, doing so would be impossible at the moment given that Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s ongoing absence means that Democrats don’t have a majority on the committee.

Where the perfect cycle breaks down is the fact that Feinstein could easily be replaced on the committee should she be asked to retire early, Alas, this doom loop is dragging on because Durbin is not only unwilling to call for the 89-year-old convalescing shingles (and likely dementia) patient to step aside from her position, he won’t even call her on the phone. (Or, if he has called, Feinstein hasn’t been able to answer, which is even more disconcerting).

The entire affair so encapsulates an entire generation of Democratic leadership that still has not fully come to terms with modern politics and what’s at stake.

Feinstein’s staff insists on propping the poor woman up, pushing her to return to DC against all medical and ethical logic, and subjecting her to media scrutiny during what may be her final days.

Dick Durbin lets it all happen and uses it as an excuse to cling to collapsed institutions and dead traditions even as Republicans block Democratic judicial nominees and a corrupt Supreme Court systematically strips people of their rights and neutralizes super-popular programs (student debt is next) without any concern about accountability or repercussions for blatantly illegal acts.

I have no concluding thought here, other than to say that Democratic voters desperately need to reconsider who they support in primaries and why they’re so often willing to be deferential to elected leaders that fail them.

Now for some good news: Our main story is about people who are very unafraid of taking on some of the most powerful people in the world.

OK, now let’s get to tonight’s newsletter, which takes us from Nebraska to Minnesota to DC and parts in between.

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I spent much of Friday morning at a very early Teamsters rally outside a UPS depot in Canarsie. Gathered across the street from a huge sorting center, members of Local 804 were there to build internal solidarity and bank public support for the union as it begins a contract negotiation that could lead to the largest strike in American history.

Most of the assembled workers were wearing the company’s trademark brown uniform, but at 7:30 am, having not yet clocked in for a day of backbreaking warehouse labor and delivery work, they were there as full-time union members. Their speeches, chants, and conversations were all defiant and unequivocal about the union’s key demands and their willingness to hit the picket lines if a new contract is not hammered out by July 31st. Talks began last week after tentative agreements were hammered out with 28 different regions of workers.

The Teamsters now represent 350,000 UPS workers, and for many of them, from the younger rank and file to vets that were part of the successful 1997 strike, the fighting posture was long overdue.

With new reformer president Sean O’Brien now in control of the Teamsters, rank and file members spoke freely with me about the regular indignities they were contractually obligated to endure under previous agreements, which they deemed far too conciliatory. The most recent contract, negotiated in 2018 by former Teamsters president James P. Hoffa, effectively created a new two-tier wage structure for full-time employees that now frames this year’s negotiation.

The 22.4 jobs, as they’re coded internally, were sold to workers in 2018 as an improvement over what had been part-time utility driver roles. Proposed as a combination of driving and warehouse work, the idea was that they’d be a temporary middle ground: while they offered $5 less per hour and required weekend shifts, the 22.4 jobs would provide more hours, pay, and benefits than the company’s part-time gigs. Crucially, they’d also serve as a stepping stone to the top-paid driver position (a regular package car driver, known as an RPCD at the acronym-happy company).

Instead, UPS decided to stop hiring as many RPCD drivers and began assigning more delivery work to those 22.4s, turning what was supposed to be a hybrid role into a full-time driver position, only without the commensurate pay. The 22.4s also have to work on weekends, while RPCDs are never asked to do so.

The hours are brutal, as well. The 22.4 workers I spoke with often start their shifts at 4 am and work until 8 am, then head home until the second part of their shifts, which run from 4 pm until 8 pm or later. The schedule makes it impossible to ever get enough sleep — two four-hour naps don’t add up to a good eight straight hours — and thus brutal on the mind and body. For people with families, the split schedule makes spending time with kids and loved ones virtually impossible, without any financial advantage to justify the sacrifice.

It’s exactly what many members predicted would happen, their prognostications informed by a 40-year spiral.

Leveling the two-tier structure

The two-tier system has slowly engulfed blue collar labor unions since the 1970s. The Teamsters’ then-president Jimmy Hoffa gave UPS permission to create an unequal structure back in the 1960s, and the company did so with zeal until a setback in 1997. UPS ramped it up again once control of the union was seized by Hoffa’s son, who took a much softer and more conciliatory approach to negotiations.

Two-tier has been catastrophic across the labor industry, but it would often pass with the exhausted support of long-time employees who were guaranteed the higher wages and better retirement packages, should they not take buyouts.

As the old guard have retired to their preserved pensions, two-tier has been an animating factor in the surge of strikes at major employers over the past few years. Aside from the era-specific indignities — including employer disregard for Covid precautions and resentment at being dubbed “essential workers” without ever being paid as such — the insulting reality of the scam has been the top issue at nearly every single picket line I’ve covered since 2021. Young workers fought against it at Frito-Lay that summer in the strike that preceded the autumn of picket lines that became known as Striketober, during which striking Kellogg’s and John Deere workers took a stand against unequal pay and retirement packages as well.

O’Brien was one of Hoffa’s top lieutenants until being sidelined in 2017 for insisting that the union take a more aggressive posture in both organizing and contract negotiations; his insurgent leadership campaign was an explicit rebuke of Hoffa’s complacency. In the case of the 350,000 Teamsters employed at UPS, that meant paying rare attention to the part-time employees at UPS, who make up a vast majority of the company’s employees but have rarely been all that active in the union.

It’s even harder to be a part-time UPS worker than a 22.4. They make far less money per hour and are guaranteed only 3.5 hours per day for doing the physical grunt work of moving, loading, and unloading packages. Social media and text apps like WhatsAp have enabled part-timers to communicate and organize more freely, and right now they’re striving to make their demand for $25 an hour a prominent plank in the union’s platform.

An increase in the minimum wage would make that a lot easier.

The Political Dimensions

The last major Teamsters strike on UPS took place in 1997, when 180,000 workers hit the picket lines. The stakes then were similar to what they are today: the union sought to reverse the company’s swift transition to hiring part-time workers, win existing workers promotions to full-time jobs, and secure better raises and benefits for all.

Bill Clinton was in the White House at the time, having won re-election on a platform of extreme triangulation that included an emphasis on a softer version of Reagan neoliberalism. This was the president that signed NAFTA and deregulated Wall Street, but in the summer of 1997, Clinton refused requests to publicly condemn the strike or order its dissolution by invoking the Taft-Hartley act; he later privately leaned on the union to come to a compromise, but by then, UPS’s position was crumbling.

The workers had the support of upwards of 75% of Americans, the company was hemorrhaging money, and help was not on the way. After 15 days, the company finally agreed to all of the union’s demands.

Now, the politics of the strike could become more complicated.

Decades of free trade, financialization, automation, and sophisticated union-busting strategies have weakened labor’s bargaining power significantly since 1997. At the same time, the pandemic and unprecedented income inequality has super-charged public support for the union movement to the highest it’s been since the 1950s.

The high approval rating is in part a result of the sizable number of union members that actually vote Republican, more out of cultural affinity than financial interests. That has thus far blunted the impact of right-wing effort to paint unions as corrupt tools of the leftist elite, which inoculates labor to some degree from the conspiracies that surround other institutions that are traditionally associated with Democrats.

For many Democrats, there is little political risk and a fair amount of upside in showing support for the striking UPS workers, as progressive Rep. Jamaal Bowman did when he spoke at the rally in Brooklyn on Friday. What’s a bit more uncertain is how President Joe Biden will respond.

Biden has fashioned himself as the most avowedly pro-labor president since FDR and received strong support from the Teamsters in 2020. In the closing days of the campaign, Biden sent a video message to the union’s 1.4 members in which he explicitly pledged to return the favor.

“It’s long past time the government went to work for you as hard as you have been working for us,” he said. “It is not enough to praise you — we need to protect you, pay you, make sure your pensions are square.”

The White House took care of the pension part over the winter by releasing $36 billion to shore up the union’s retirement fund and prevent members from experiencing cuts of up to 60% within the next few years. Protection, at least theoretically, has been extended by a more activist NLRB, but the grinding work of an underfunded federal agency isn’t exactly the stuff that screams “I’m on your side” and motivates people to vote.

What may give the Biden administration pause about explicitly supporting the strike is the impact on consumers. UPS controls more than a third of the parcel industry at a time when e-commerce continues to boom — 21% of retail sales are expected to be placed online this year —and next-day shipping is considered the norm. Retailers and shippers are locked into contracts at this point, which will significantly delay millions of packages every day of the strike.

That gives the union logistical leverage over UPS, but it could frustrate a much larger customer base and cause the White House to sweat its response. While not apples to apples, UPS’s share of deliveries is around 10% higher than the percentage of freight that’s handled by the rail industry, which Biden prevented from striking last fall out of concern about broken supply chains and scarcity-induced inflation.

The administration received more backlash for the decision than it probably anticipated, then got bit when the East Palestine train derailment was caused in part by tiny crew sizes a few months later. The UPS-Teamsters conflict represents a rare second chance for Biden to take a strong public stand for union workers against corporate employers awash in profits, and even offers an opportunity to change his image with Railroad Workers United, which announced last week that it won’t cross any picket line with its own freight.

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The Child Labor Horror Show

Here’s a way for big corporations to crush a union: Bribe lawmakers into allowing children to do dangerous jobs on the cheap.

The Iowa state Senate last week passed a gobsmacking rollback of the state’s child labor laws, opening the door for kids as young as 14 to work in meatpacking plants, on construction sites, and manufacturing facilities. I dug into the corporations, trade groups, lobbyists, and politicians responsible for the legislation, and it’s all in this report:

The bill is filled with callous policies meant to take advantage of poor kids regardless of how doing so may impact their physical and mental well-being or their educational development. In some places, the revisions are so reckless that they violate the New Deal-era federal law meant to be a bare minimum upon which states can and should build.

Someone actively opposing the bill sent me a long outline of its worst provisions and how they violate federal law, which I’ve highlighted below:

Provision: Section 3 expands what work is permitted for 14 year olds, including:

• Cleaning vegetables and fruits, including work in freezers and meat coolers

Problem: Federal law expressly prohibits 14 and 15-year old’s from working in meat coolers, even momentarily.

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Provision: Section 8 expands what work is permitted for 16 & 17 year old’s including:

• Light assembly work involving explosives or articles containing explosive components, as long as the assembly is not performed on machines or in an area with machines.

• Work activities involved in the operation of balers if the machine is powered off and the key is stored in a separate area from the machine

Problem: Federal law allows 16- and 17-year-olds to only load balers; those under 18 may not operate or unload balers.

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Provison: Sections 6 and 7 allow 14 and 15-year-olds to work beyond 9 pm until 11 pm during the summer hours

Problem: Federal law states 14 and 15 year-olds can work until 7 pm, except during summer when they can work until 9pm

Provision: Section 8 and 9 allow the director of the department of workforce development or department of education to grant an exception from work activities not permitted for 14 -17 year olds and to the hours they are permitted to work.

Problem: This will allow 14 and 15 year-olds to participate in work-based learning programs involving extremely hazardous occupations prohibited under federal law, including the operation of: woodworking machines, elevators, manufacturing of brick and tile, guillotine shears, repairing and cleaning/taking apart power driven food slicers and grinders, work in boiler rooms, etc.

This one could get even worse, as the House’s version of the bill also allows exceptions for work activities including: assembly work, logging/saw mills, exposure to radioactive substances, mining, meat packing plants, exposure to poisonous chemicals, all of which violate federal law.

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