It’s been a long time–more than a lifetime for many Americans–since organized labor could hold a nationwide strike and legitimately claim it has the majority sentiment of the public.
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No matter what the outcome of the Teamsters’ strike against United Parcel Service, this dispute will be remembered as the strike that resonated with the public, unlike any in recent memory.
The strikers are not baseball players whining about seven-figure salaries. They are not entrenched laborers trying to preserve workplace featherbedding. And they are not highly paid air traffic controllers making a quixotic charge against a popular president.
“These are $8 to $12 an hour workers. That paints a very different picture of people just trying to make a living . . . This was built around part-time people wanting full-time jobs and pensions. It was something that was very reasonable,” said David Weil, assistant professor of economics and an expert in industrial and labor relations at Boston University School of Management.
The Teamsters shrewdly exploited the broad public uncertainty about the economy and used it to their advantage in a strike strategy that resembled a political campaign. There were news conferences and rallies prior to the strike, expressions of solidarity from other unions, and a consistent public information campaign once the strike began.
Unlike earlier high-profile strikes, such as the 1981 air traffic controller strike, there was coordinated communication. The result: a series of nationwide polls showing public support for the strikers.
Arthur Shostak, a professor of industrial sociology at Drexel University, in Philadelphia, called it “the most sustained and sophisticated PR campaign that any union has conducted in years. This will be pace-setting.”
“It’s been a public relations campaign, in part,” said Marcus Alexis, the Board of Trustees professor of economics at Northwestern University’s J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management.
“There’s a great deal of anxiety in the public about the instability of the economy, the recent history of layoffs, and great concern about health benefits. . . . All of that plays into the hands of the union,” Alexis said.
The union drew upon the issue of so-called “family values,” Alexis said: “How to get control over their working conditions and their non-working conditions. That may be the silent issue that is resonating, the great issue of fairness.”
One poll conducted by ABC News showing more support for the strikers than the company seemed to symbolize the growing frustration of Americans.
“While public confidence in the economy is at an 11-year high, there is an underlying economic anxiety and there is a sense of inequity of the changing profile of income distribution,” said Gary Langer, senior polling analyst at ABC News. “Within that there are seeds of resentment that may be directed at corporate America.”
There are important caveats that should not be ignored. Public sentiment is mercurial, and labor’s hold on the nation’s sympathies could shift and crumble with the outbreak of violence, or the perception that the Teamsters are being arrogant in the negotiations.
But the Teamsters, arguably the least likely of the nation’s major unions to garner public sympathy, have worked to guard against such threats.
Rand Wilson, a spokesman for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, said the union has done an enormous amount of work since last April preparing for the possibility of a strike.
“(President) Ron Carey very early on stressed that membership involvement and unity between part-time and full-time, between tractor trailer and package car driver, would be the key to getting a good contract,” Wilson said.
To build that unity, something that has been lacking in previous work actions by Teamsters and other unions, Carey turned to the membership to find out what they wanted rather than simply relying upon the union’s negotiating committee.
On top of that, Carey has regularly warned his 50-member national negotiating committee to keep heads cool on the picket lines.
“We have made it clear that (violence) is not the way to get it done,” Carey said in an interview. “The way you get it done is by showing your support and unity. Violence is not the answer.”
“When you scuffle with police if you’re blocking an entrance, that’s not violence. That’s just people saying you’re driving away with my job. We know what violence is, . . . We’ll do our best to make sure that cool heads prevail,” Carey said.
The turning point for violent strikes for unions occurred in the 1989 Pittston coal strike.
“In Pittston, the mine workers did an enormous amount of training to the point that Cesar Chavez (farm workers’ leader) was brought in to give training on civil disobedience,” Weil said. “Some of the same people advising Carey are from that strike, including Donald Trumka,” the secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO.
On Friday, after losing the public relations war for nearly two weeks, UPS officials suddenly dropped creating a UPS-only pension fund as their principal issue.
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Instead, the privately held Atlanta-based company, which had moved 80 percent of the nation’s packages, released polls showing Americans believe workers should be given the opportunity to vote on the company’s so-called “last, best and final offer.”
Clearly, the public’s inability to understand the pension issue had forced the company’s hand, Weil said.