UPS starts training management to step in for Teamsters

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) — Shipping giant UPS is beginning to train its management employees to step in and keep packages moving next month in the event 330,000 union package handlers, drivers and other rank-and-file workers go on strike.

The Atlanta-based company said the start of “business continuity training” is not a signal that negotiations with the Teamsters are less likely to result in an agreement on a new, five-year labor contract.

“While we have made great progress and are close to reaching an agreement, we have a responsibility as an essential service provider to take steps to help ensure we can deliver our customers’ packages if the Teamsters choose to strike,” UPS said in a statement. “…Over the coming weeks, many of our U.S. employees will participate in training that would help them safely serve our customers if there is a labor disruption.”

The Teamsters, for their part, have said UPS walked away July 5. Teamsters leaders such as President Sean O’Brien and Secretary-Treasurer Fred Zuckerman have left Washington, D.C., where the talks have unfolded, and fanned out to UPS worksites to meet with rank-and-file workers.

Zuckerman, the former president of Teamsters Local 89 in Louisville, will be back in Louisville Tuesday to rally with union at the Worldport global air hub.

The Teamsters have walked out on UPS once before, for 15 days in August 1997.

During that strike, UPS kept packages moving at a reduced pace. Managers loaded and drove package cars. Pilot supervisors flew planes, as the separately organized Independent Pilots Association withheld their pilots’ labor, respecting the Teamsters’ strike.

The Independent Pilots Association members have pledged to once again support the Teamsters by refusing to work if they go on strike.

Alan Amling, a former UPS executive who now teaches supply chain management at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, recalls being given a temporary assignment work nighttime security in Dalton, Georgia when he was a UPS corporate employee during the 1997 strike.

“We had to go into the operation and, you know, try to help out as best we can,” he said.

Amling said UPS has a “all hands on deck” culture in which white-collar employees are expected to do blue-collar work when needed.

He remembers another time in the 2010s when UPS was struggling with a surge in e-commerce volume, and he was briefly assigned to sort packages from 3 a.m. to 10 a.m. at a ground hub in Atlanta.

“I was in my 50s; that’s a young person’s job,” he said.

Amling said the contingency plans will take UPS only so far. Meanwhile, only about 30 percent of UPS’ volume could be absorbed by other carriers such as FedEx and the Post Office, he said.

“You cannot make up for the 300,000 Teamsters,” he said.

FedEx said July 6 that shippers who are considering switching to their services should do so now.

“In the event of an industry disruption, FedEx Corp.’s priority is protecting capacity and service for existing customers,” the company said.

David Thornsberry, a retired UPS package car driver, said during the 1997 strike, union picketers would follow UPS trucks driven by managers and continue picketing them as they made deliveries.

“We’d get to a stop, and they would open up the doors, and there would be hardly anything on that truck,” Thornsberry, now an organizer with Teamsters Local 89 in Louisville, recalled in an April interview. “So what we learned real quickly was, they couldn't do the job without us.”