Will UPS Workers Join "Hot Strike Summer?"
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 14 July 2023
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Contract negotiations between the Teamsters and UPS broke down last week and now a strike looms. With time running out, can both sides reach a deal?
Guest: Noam Scheiber, labor reporter for the New York Times.
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Transcript
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| 0:30.0 | On the morning of July 5th, Noam Shiber got a surprising email. |
| 0:40.0 | A lot of us who covered this woke up to kind of doodling announcements from the Teamsters and UPS each accusing the other side of walking away for the bargaining table. |
| 0:51.0 | Noam covers labor in the workplace for the New York Times, and the Teamsters and UPS had been closing in on a contract deal for workers. |
| 1:00.0 | But then, in the middle of negotiations, it all broke down. |
| 1:04.0 | The Teamsters say that the talks broke down because UPS said it had nothing left to give. |
| 1:10.0 | The company says the Teamsters walked away from the table and that the company was prepared to park more. |
| 1:16.0 | Now, the possibility of a UPS strike is looming. |
| 1:20.0 | 340,000 workers could walk off the job, upending package delivery across the country. |
| 1:27.0 | The image of a UPS worker in a lot of people's minds is of the guy or woman in the brown uniform driving the brown truck. |
| 1:35.0 | But there are many tens of thousands of UPS workers who actually work in sorting facilities more than half of them are part-timers, |
| 1:45.0 | so part-timers are really significant portion of this workforce. |
| 1:49.0 | And the Teamsters maintain that they're just not been enough progress on wages for part-time workers. |
| 1:56.0 | And that caused them to walk away, or at least, again, they say that UPS walked away, |
| 2:03.0 | but that caused the breakdown of the negotiations on the morning of July 5th. |
| 2:08.0 | And we've kind of been there ever since the two sides have not returned to the table. |
| 2:13.0 | There's been a lot of messaging around part-time workers and wages for part-time workers. |
| 2:18.0 | And meanwhile, we get closer and closer to that actual drop-dead date of August 1st. |
... |
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