Teamsters Union members authorize what would be the largest strike against a single employer ever

Members of the Teamsters union voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike at United Parcel Service. A strike is still more than seven weeks away, if it happens at all.

The members at the country’s largest delivery service voted 97% in favor of authorizing a strike to start on August 1, if there is no agreement in contract talks now taking place between the company and the union. The Teamsters represent more than 340,000 UPS logistics warehouse workers and package delivery drivers nationwide.

The results were not a surprise. Strike votes are a common part of labor negotiations, designed to give the union negotiators leverage while trying to reach an agreement. They typically always pass overwhelmingly. Despite that, the majority of contract negotiations are concluded without a strike.

UPS said it remains confident there won’t be a strike this time.

If a strike does come, it would be the largest against a single employer in America’s history, as UPS (UPS) is the largest unionized employer in the private sector. And it is crucial to the nation’s economy, with an estimated 6% of the United States’ gross domestic product, the broadest measure of economic activity, moving aboard UPS (UPS) trucks. It delivered 18.7 million domestic packages a day in the first three months of the year.

The current five-year contract expires on July 31, meaning a strike could start on August 1 if there is no agreement on a new deal before then. But there have been signs of progress at the negotiating table.

This week, the Teamsters announced they had reached a tentative agreement on one of the key issues in negotiations, its push to get air conditioning for UPS’s fleet of 95,000 delivery vans, the overwhelming majority of which only have a single fan to combat heat on hot days.

One of the major pushes for the union is to close the gap between pay scales for different classes of employees, which allowed UPS to begin regular Saturday deliveries in 2019. According to an analysis by Deutsche Bank, the gap is about $6 an hour for the most senior employees and less than $1 a hour for new hires. Closing the gap would cost about $140 million a year, according to the analysis, which it said is less than 0.2% of UPS’s current cost structure.

We’ll be following this case closely as supply chain workers are critical to our country’s infrastructure. Trades workers like drivers have never been in higher demand or more important to our economy.