the workforce for a fight.
When it was formed in 1976, UPS workers were already a major constituency for TDU. The number of UPS workers who became active TDUers over the years was small in relation to the rapidly growing workforce, but the group provided a core of knowledgeable rank-and-file leadership among both full-timers and part-timers.31 UPS workers were no less likely to accept the pro-company logic of team concept than any others, but they had access to an alternative “common sense” in the form of the TDU activists, the regular publications of TDU, and the critical literature on the topic developed by Labor Notes, an independent trade union magazine and education center in Detroit that was widely used by TDU and later the Teamsters Union. At the same time, the broader reform process, with TDU as its backbone, brought an entirely new leadership, headed by former UPS worker Ron Carey, to power in the Teamsters and initiated a process of change across the union that affected many UPS workers.32 The new leadership was one of the few in the United States to explicitly reject the “team concept” and the whole “partnership” notion.
Mike Parker tells how TDUers reacted to the launch of the UPS team concept program:
In January 1995, UPS moved a trailer into its yard at the Ceres center (outside Modesto, California) to be used for Total Quality Management (TQM) and self-directed work teams. Activists responded by getting Labor Notes and TDU material (which arrived promptly overnight via UPS, they point out) and prepared to deal with the programs from the beginning. Although the company controlled how the workers were divided up, the activists had sufficient numbers and training that they were able to effectively counter management in every team it set up.33
The union itself soon took up the TDU-initiated opposition to the team concept offensive. It directly confronted the pro-company ideological assumptions of the team concept and in effect turned the entire company initiative around—against the goals of management. Teamster staffer Rand Wilson described the impact on the 1997 contract fight: “The team concept campaign foreshadowed the contract campaign. UPS geared up its team concept activity as its preparation for the contract and by necessity we had to take them on as part of our preparation.”34 Capitalist ideology not only failed to carry the day, it actually allowed or forced the union to campaign for a higher class consciousness.
The strike itself was not about team concept ideology, but about decidedly material issues and demands—above all the transformation of thousands of part-time jobs into full-time jobs, the reduction of the gap between part-time and full-time wages, and continued union influence over the pension plan. While there was a pay increase for the drivers, they had much less to gain in the most immediate sense than the part-timers, who composed about 60 percent of the workforce. Yet they were as fervent as the part-timers.
Equally interesting in this respect was the more remote, yet sharply ideological, fight over control of the pension plan. UPS workers in much of the country were part of a broader, multiemployer Teamster pension plan. UPS demanded its workers be taken out of the “inefficient” union plan and put under a company-controlled plan, which, they claimed, would pay higher benefits. While the company’s attempt to capture the pension plan may have been a bargaining ploy, the strikers took it seriously even though a certain leap in consciousness concerning the collectivist nature of the multiemployer plan was required. By the time the strike took place, that kind of collectivist consciousness was in place. UPS’s attempt to convince them it could do a better job with the plan because it was an efficient business flopped completely. Union solidarity prevailed across company lines, a mini-triumph for working-class collectivism.
The UPS strike victory was followed by a strong ideological reaction from the big-business media and conservative politicians in the United States. In the wake of the strike, the court-appointed officer who had overseen the 1996 election that put Carey back in office by a 52 percent vote declared the election invalid due to campaign funding irregularities she had uncovered earlier. Although Carey himself was not implicated, consultants he had hired had in fact broken the rules. For the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and other papers, this was a heaven-sent opportunity. They published a barrage of anti-Carey editorials and articles, often recycling the same news, in an attempt to discredit Carey and pressure the court into disqualifying him, thus in effect throwing the election to Hoffa. The media barrage was joined by pro-Hoffa Republicans in Congress—a chorus of ruling-class outrage at the effectiveness of a rank-and-file leadership that had actually been able to fight effectively for its own side. Yet, while the negative publicity was bothersome, it did not reverse the sense of achievement or the deeper class understanding gained by many UPS workers over the past couple of years.
The argument here is not that workers are not susceptible to appeals for labor–management cooperation or the superiority of business efficiency. There are too many examples of company successes to deny that, and, of course, these ideas abound across society as today’s common sense. The point is, workers are no more possessed of these ideas than they are of the working-class alternatives, which tend to already be present. When they are in struggle even over simply economic demands, the alternative ideas can make more sense. When, as in the unusual case of UPS, the ideas have an organized rank-and-file advocate and a leadership committed to them, it can be the working-class “common sense” that prevails. In this case, the working-class “common sense” became a counterhegemony that allowed the union to buck what many thought to be an irreversible trend toward low-wage contingent work.
A similar scenario—or what, with conscious organization, had the potential to become one—was suggested in the 1996 strike by British postal workers against the introduction of “teamworking” by their employer, Royal Mail. While these rank-and-file trade unionists fought the Royal Mail “Employee Agenda” proposals with a tenacity that might suggest (as indeed much of the media darkly hinted) an explicit political agenda, the reality is that their struggle was rooted in basic material resistance to proposals that ultimately threatened their job security, working conditions, and living standards.35
“Teamworking” (as team concept is usually called in Britain), along with many similar programs, has of course been accepted by countless union leaderships despite these implications.36 In the case of the postal workers, an unusually clearheaded and determined rank-and-file leadership, particularly in the London area, made a conscious effort to alert an already combative membership to the real meaning of the proposals in terms of their concrete effects on working conditions, in contrast to the “empowerment” gloss invoked by management: “The truth is it is not a case of workers having more control, but managers being in total control and workers just having to accept ‘flexible’ working but never having it really defined what they are accepting, because the parameters are so enormous and totally defined by the business.”37
The series of strikes carried out by postal workers during the summer of 1996 succeeded, through a level of unity and cohesion similar to that at UPS, in removing every line of the “Employee Agenda” from the bargaining table. The dispute is by no means over, of course; a management philosophy that has been in clear evidence since the 1980s suggests that temporary worker victories are now met by more concerted attacks, rather than consolidation. London Underground workers’ combined resistance—uniting two normally rivalrous unions—to the company’s “Action Stations” plan in 1988 was followed by wave after wave of management offensive until the proposals were finally implemented, a melancholy example of the success of this retrenchment policy. To maintain the kind of conscious class approach shown by the postal workers’ local leadership in the face of such management aggression and strategic clarity requires more than simple “militancy,” although the mobilization of the membership and its willingness to fight are of course central elements.38 It also requires a level of awareness of the overall meaning and direction of management strategy that in effect exposes its roots in capitalist production relations centering on exploitation. Such a perspective is, of course, the opposite of the “cooperation” and “social partnership” approaches with which British and American trade union leaderships forlornly aspire to court the employers’ nonexistent benevolence. It denotes a sharp awareness of which sides you and they are on; an undeviating
