United we stand, UPS man
a SUIT column by Chris Jungle

It's been about four years since I took a part time loading job at UPS, where I worked Monday through Friday 11:00 PM to 3:00 AM. I was just about to enter my sophomore year in college, and the $8.00 an hour UPS offered sure beat the hell the $4.75 an hour I was making at a local twenty-four hour diner as a cashier. The blue and purple belts were to be my home at work, and I worked in trailers such as Denver Day, Denver Night, Lenexa, and Cold Sort. As far as loaders go, I was above average. I could load and stack quickly, but they were not the fine brick stacked walls the company strove for. I was good enough to keep working through the first thirty day trial period when I learned zip codes from places all over the country, and I passed the hazardous material test required of all UPS employees. They told me all of the answers right before the test, but I knew them all anyway. After those first thirty days, a change happened for me. I was no longer called New Guy, or always told to do the clean up work at the end of the night. I was an equal, a comrade, a Teamster.

One of the strange qualities about being part of a union is that you start to have an us vs. them mentality toward your employer. While all of the loaders were proud Teamsters, the supervisor was a company man who answered to management instead. The supervisor would tell us on our ten minute break the news the company said he needed to tell us, and we would interrupt, tease, and ignore him. Even though the guy was decent and helped out when the loads were immense, he wasn't a Teamster, so we would always have something against him.

Of course, we (Teamsters) did our share of bitching about the union. Where was our twenty-five bucks a month going? We only got a small turnkey at Thanksgiving and Christmas for bonuses from the company, and yet twenty-five bucks a month was getting sucked out of our pay. Of course, we did have the best health insurance deal around. I always joked with women that if they got pregnant, I'd just claim them as a significant other, and they could have the baby with UPS footing the bill. Some girls thought it was funny, most didn't. Not everyone gets health care humor.

By the time Christmas season came around, I was a three and a half month veteran, and that gave me seniority over all of the seasonal help. I treated the new guys well because I still remembered the shunning I got when I first started. I've never been much of a hazer. While people complained about the Christmas season, it was actually pretty fun. There was a hectic, chaotic order to it all.

The union/management thing rose its head four months later in April when one of the blue belt's crew hurt himself and took a couple weeks off. Management did not fill the slot which meant I had to do twice the work I'd been doing. When I told my supervisor that we needed to get another man on the belt, he told me in no uncertain terms to shut up and do my job and not tell him how to do his. After a twenty-four hour period in which I contemplated what he said, I came back with a verbal two week notice. I had been there eight months, lasted the Christmas season, still hadn't gotten any vacation days, went home every night with cardboard dust all over my shirt, blew black gook out of my nose in the shower, lost contact with most of my college friends due to the hours I worked, started a small marijuana habit, grew my hair out a good five inches, had the third most seniority on the blue and purple belts, and he still treated me like my name was New Guy and I didn't understand the difference between Denver Day and Denver Night. I had planned on keeping my UPS job until I graduated college, but that one statement of management disrespect to a union man ticked me off so bad, I didn't want to be deal with it anymore. So I quit.

That's what the UPS strike is all about. The Teamsters say they want more opportunities for part-timers to become full-timers, and they want subcontracting to stop, and they want better working conditions over all--but what they really want is management to stop treating the Teamsters like their name is New Guy. The Teamsters have been connected with UPS a lot longer than I was, so they're not going to quit like I did.

Are the Teamsters corrupt? Of course they are. They're probably the most corrupt union on the planet, but if you disrespect them by telling them to shut up and do their job, they're going to bite you back. And most union folks will side with the most corrupt labor union in the world before defending a company that profits from their labor. That's just the way it is, and that's why the Teamsters will win.

Chris Jungle loves to consider himself a microcosm of a macrocosm. Don't we all?

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