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Part-Time UPS Workers Say Their Jobs Are Brutal [1]

['Teddy Ostrow', 'David Broder', 'Alexander Zaitchik', 'Alex N. Press', 'Sean Orr', 'Elliot Lewis', 'Barry Eidlin', 'Joe Allen']

Date: 2023-07

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Poverty Pay From 1997 to 2013, part-time base pay only increased by $1.50 per hour to $10, reaching $12.50 by the contract’s end. And in 2018, pressured by TDU and New York City Fight for $15 movement activists, UPS raised the floor more quickly to $13.50, eventually reaching the current starting pay of $15.50. While the Teamsters have not yet publicly announced a concrete contract demand, TDU is pushing for $25 per hour starting pay for part-timers and ten thousand full-time inside jobs. “They’ve been sold out in previous agreements,” said John Palmer, the international Teamsters’ vice president at-large. “They deserve $25 per hour.” With six years under her belt, Jess Leigh, a Local 728 part-timer in Griffin, Georgia and a single mother of two, makes $17.85 per hour and works roughly thirty hours a week. “I have to have other streams of income,” she says. “You can’t raise kids on an income like that.” UPS provides decent benefits to part-timers, including health care and a pension, if they stick it out for nine months. Baca, who is the primary caretaker of her grandmother, noted that a lot of mothers and people with caregiving responsibilities appreciate the benefits and part-time hours. “But at the end of the day, your healthcare doesn’t pay your bills,” Leigh said. Decades of low pay at UPS come despite consistent growth at the company, including record-breaking profits at the height of the pandemic’s e-commerce boom. Decades of low pay at UPS come despite consistent growth at the company, including record-breaking profits at the height of the pandemic’s e-commerce boom. Part-timer frustration came to a head last year when, without warning, UPS slashed thousands of workers ’ market rate adjustments (MRAs), the noncontractual wage increases offered to some new hires in an attempt by UPS to remain competitive in the market. Some workers saw their pay decline by up to $6 an hour, according to the Guardian, prompting protests around the country. “If they can afford to just arbitrarily decide to raise everyone’s wages without even having it in the contract, then that tells me that they have the money to pay us,” said Baca.

Harassment and a Breakneck Pace Corporate restructuring at UPS not only meant slashing wages and hours. The “leaning” of production over the decades also meant that warehouse working conditions deteriorated, and UPS’s management, already known for its militaristic style, turned tyrannical. Workers say yelling, ridicule, and pressure to pick up the pace is a way of life in the warehouse. “Flow it hard! Flow it hard! Come on!” Leigh mimics her supervisors during a shift. If a conveyor belt is turned off, she says, they will begin shouting, “Who’s got the belt off?” But the question is rhetorical. “You can literally look and see the massive package with yellow tape, where somebody’s trying to get a hundred pound package off the belt. . . . What they’re really saying is, ‘hurry the hell up.’” In roughly four hours, preloaders are instructed to fill up to four package cars, totaling seven hundred to a thousand packages. Workers say that supervisors will keep facilities on skeleton crews, sending people home early or laying people off no matter how slight a decline in volume or delay in package flow. “People are getting slammed because UPS wanted to save thirty bucks or whatever by getting a handful of people off the clock,” says Leigh. Workers told me that the physical stress of the job deteriorates the body. A 2019 Bloomberg Law investigation found scores of injuries and ailments may go unreported at UPS due to a “culture of fear” of retaliation. “I developed plantar fasciitis,” says Baca of her time as a sunrise preloader. “I could barely stand up long enough to take a shower, my feet hurt so badly. . . . It’s because of how hard they work people, and the working conditions of the building itself.” According to Baca, outbursts on the shop floor are also common. “[Supervisors] don’t communicate in an understanding tone of voice,” she explained. “They talk to you like you’re stupid, you’re lazy, and you need to just work harder to get this shit done. That’s what drives people over the edge.” Indeed, the Guardian reported that some workers at UPS’s massive Worldport facility in Louisville, Kentucky believe that the dire working conditions and constant hounding by supervisors helped drive one pregnant part-timer to take her own life at the facility in October last year.

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[1] Url: https://jacobin.com/2023/07/ups-part-time-workers-teamsters-union-strike-working-conditions-pay

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