Last year, two unions representing workers at three major automakers and UPS negotiated new labor contracts that included big raises and other gains. Union leaders – the United Automobile Workers and the Teamsters – hoped the victories would help them organize workers across their industry.
The UAW won a vote to unionize a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee last month and lost one this month at two Mercedes-Benz plants in Alabama. The Teamsters have made even less headway on UPS’s big non-union rivals in the delivery business, Amazon and FedEx.
Polls show that public support for unions is the highest it has been in decades. But labor experts said structural forces would make it difficult to increase labor group membership, which is the lowest level as a percentage of the total workforce in decades. Unions also face strong opposition from many employers and conservative political leaders.
The Teamsters provide an instructive case study. Many of the workers who deliver for Amazon and FedEx work for contractors, typically small and medium-sized businesses that can be difficult to organize. And delivery workers employed directly by FedEx in its Express business are governed by a labor law that requires unions to organize all of the company’s similar workers nationally at once — a stricter standard than that which applies to organizing employees of automakers, UPS and other employers. .
Some labor experts also said the Teamsters did not make as strong an effort as the UAW to organize non-union workers after securing a new contract with UPS.
“There wasn’t that energy that you saw in UAW leaders,” said Jake Rosenfeld, a sociologist who studies labor at Washington University in St. Louis.
Teamsters officials said the deal with UPS, which increases the average annual pay, including benefits, of a UPS driver from $145,000 to $170,000, was helping them gain members. At DHL, a delivery company where the union has long had a large presence, the union added 1,100 members last year and is pushing to gain 1,500 more. The Teamsters are also seeking legal action against Amazon that could allow them to gain ground on the company and its contractors.
“The mobilization has been very helpful to us,” Sean O’Brien, president of the Teamsters, said in an interview, referring to the UPS contract. “We set the standard in the industry.”
But the union also suffered losses. Yellow, a trucking company that employed 24,000 truck drivers, closed and filed for bankruptcy protection last year.
Amazon and FedEx said they were confident in their approach to managing and compensating workers. Amazon said it made investments that increased wages and benefits for its delivery service providers. FedEx said its non-union model allowed it to quickly increase wages, while unionized UPS employees were bound by five-year contract terms.
“Our culture, built and tested over 50 years, is based on the philosophy that if we take care of our employees, they will provide exceptional service to our customers, which will drive business results for our company,” Tracy Brightman, head of Official FedEx personnel said in a statement,
About 310,000 UPS employees belong to the Teamsters. Many of them see FedEx and Amazon drivers on their routes and talk about wages, benefits and working conditions.
“We make a lot more money than anyone else in the industry,” said Essence Carlisle, a part-time package handler at the UPS center in Louisville, Kentucky. “I definitely plan to make a career here.”
The deal with UPS gave part-time employees, more than half of the company’s unionized workforce, a 26 percent raise to at least $21 an hour. Carlisle makes about $24 an hour and works about 20 hours a week, which gives her time to run a bakery on the side, she said. Her friends who work as full-time drivers for Amazon earn about $19 an hour, she said.
As big as the raises at UPS were, they didn’t raise wages much more than inflation. The highest wage immediately after the last agreement, $44.25 per hour, was 22 percent higher than five years earlier. During that period, consumer prices rose 21 percent.
And UPS typically hires new union workers for part-time jobs, which they keep for a few years. As a result, some people may not be willing to seek employment with the company.
Still, last year’s Teamsters contract was widely discussed online, spawning memes of UPS drivers arriving at customers’ doors in designer clothes.
“Joking or not, everyone said, ‘Hey man, I need a job at UPS,’” said Juan Martinez, a UPS driver in Southern California.
Under the new contract, Martinez expects to earn $110,000 to $120,000 a year, depending on how much overtime he receives, he said. He said his income allowed him to spend more on his children’s education.
Under the Teamsters’ agreement with UPS, the maximum hourly wage will increase to $49 at the end of the five-year contract. Amazon said in January that the average pay for workers at its delivery companies was $20.50 in the United States. FedEx refused to provide an average salary for its delivery drivers.
Despite UPS’s superior salaries over the years, the Teamsters haven’t made many inroads into FedEx or Amazon.
The high turnover of delivery and warehouse workers at Amazon and FedEx — where each part-time position was, on average, filled and vacant twice last year — makes it difficult to organize them.
Another challenge is that Amazon delivery drivers and drivers who deliver for FedEx Ground are hired by contractors. Rosenfeld, the labor academic, said trying to organize a few dozen people at each contractor could be time-consuming and expensive.
Last year, 84 workers at an Amazon contractor near Los Angeles joined the Teamsters. But days earlier, Amazon terminated its contract with carrier Battle-Tested Strategies, the company said, for failing to follow proper security procedures, among other things.
The Teamsters asked the National Labor Relations Board to rule that Amazon was a joint employer of the workers and order the company to reinstate the contract. The council has not yet decided.
A favorable ruling would be “a huge deal” and an “inspiration to thousands of other workers across the country,” Teamsters official Randy Korgan said.
Johnathon Ervin, owner of Battle-Tested Strategies, said he believed Amazon had terminated the contract, which led to job losses for all of its employees due to the unionization effort. An Amazon spokeswoman, Mary Kate Paradis, disputed this.
Ervin said the minimum wage for his workers under the Amazon contract was $19.75. “If you’re asking people to make this a career, you should have better working conditions and pay drivers more,” said Ervin, a 26-year Air Force veteran.
Amazon has not directly responded to these criticisms. The company noted that its contractors, which it refers to as delivery service partners, have created 279,000 driver jobs over the past five years.
“Helping DSPs create a good overall work experience is important to us, which is why we have invested more than $8 billion in cutting-edge technology, security features, fees, programs, and services for Amazon DSPs and their drivers,” Ms. Paradis said in a statement.
Labor groups have made some gains at Amazon, including organizing workers at a Staten Island warehouse. But Amazon is contesting elections in that country, and that union has been involved in infighting.
At FedEx there is another potential barrier to unionization.
FedEx was founded as an airline and employees in its Express business are subject to the Railroad Labor Act, which requires unions to organize on a nationwide, company-wide basis at once. Union officials say it is easier to hold individual votes at each company location, as allowed by the National Labor Relations Act, which governs workers at UPS and automakers.
Still, some FedEx employees belong to a union. Nearly 6,000 FedEx Express pilots are represented by the Air Line Pilots Association. The Teamsters are trying to organize mechanics who work on the company’s planes.
FedEx said its delivery workers benefited from not being unionized because the company significantly raised wages during the home delivery boom of 2021 and 2022, when UPS workers’ raises were set by an agreement reached before the pandemic. A FedEx spokeswoman noted that the company incurred additional labor costs of $1.4 billion in its 2022 fiscal year.
