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Hello and welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henrywood. As is traditional, a phrase that was sacred during my brief sojourn in the party they're right long ago, two guests today, both named Sam by pure coincidence.

Sam Ginden will analyze the teamsters new contract with UPS, and Samuel Moyen will talk about the tragedies of Cold War liberalism.

The teamsters union has a new contract with UPS, which has been celebrated in labor and left circles.

Its new president, Sean O'Brien, a fourth-generation teamster, has a strong history, and he was elected with the support of Teamsters for a Democratic union, which has played an important and admirable part in opening up the union over the 47 years of its existence.

But despite significant gains in pay, there are some shortcomings in the contract.

As my first guest argues, the teamsters are conducting what has been called a form of militant business unionism, tougher than some of the tepid forms seen elsewhere in organized labor, but still focused largely on wages alone to the exclusion of broader issues around work.

Sam Ginden spent 26 years in the Canadian Auto Workers Union, most of them as an advisor to the president.

Since he left the union in 2000, he's been writing and talking about labor issues and consulting with workers trying to organize a union if they don't have one, or trying to toughen it up if they do.

Sam was the co-author, along with his longtime friend and collaborator, the late Leo Panich, of the making of global capitalism, published by Verso in 2012.

Sam mentions Doug Fraser.

Fraser was the president of the UAW from 1977 to 1983, a period of serious crisis for the industry, the union, and the broad economy, as de-industrialization was intensifying. Here's Sam Ginden.

There were substantial gains in the teamsters deal with UPS mainly higher pay, some improvement for the part-timers, and AC for the trucks, but there are a lot of shortcomings.

Let's start with the part-timers. What's their history with the company? They're a big issue of the 97 strike, but what's happened since?

The history of it is that UPS used to just hire full-time people, and nearly 60s, Hoffa, accepted having some part-timers.

It wasn't a lot, but there were some part-timers. In the early 80s, as you start moving towards neoliberalism and disintensification of a deregulated industry, UPS pushed very hard, and won, that the part-timers should really be second-class citizens.

They were going to really get hammered, and that was consolidated over the years. They just kept getting concessions from them.

He divided the union with the full-timers, kind of accepting that as keeping UPS competitive and not taking an arm in a leg from them.

What happens over time is the number of part-timers start growing. By 1997, there are majority of the workers.

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