NP, always enjoy the exchange of ideas.
This sounds really weird to me. The "Last,Best,Final" has been posted by others on the BC, and there was no mention in that of this type of compensation, so what you would seem to be something that was circulated after the LBF during the negotiations going on during the strike. The thing is, those negotiations should have been kept at the table. The idea of a District Manager passing out company proposals on the strike line is very hard for me to buy. For one thing, he would have got his ass beat where I was, and I worked in a building in a RTW state that does not have a very strong militant culture, relatively speaking. Then, once he got his ass beat by the striking teamsters for passing that out, he would have gotten his ass beat by the region manager and corporate management for going around the negotiating committee. A DM doing that during the strike would seriously need to have his head examined. Is there any chance a teamster typed up that stuff and passed it off as an insulting offer from management to keep up morale as the strike dragged on?
Not so much LTL (if anything, we were taking LTL business, or trying to, with the heavier weight limits and the Hundred Weight service offerings) but definitely RPS, USPS, and FedEx, a handful of lesser mostly regional companies. RPS and USPS were probably the largest eaters of our market share in the early nineties. UPS still had a dominating 80% of the domestic small package ground market in 97, but that was down from the late 80's when UPS was pretty much the only game in town and closer to 90%. I wish I still had the numbers from the slides I was shown in a meeting in '95 explaining why the district CSTC's were being collapsed, among other cost savings measures. As I said, UPS leadership at the time saw the writing on the wall and wanted to react while the company was in a position of strength.
Again, the IBT should have found a way to explain to the membership that there is no way they could match the offer UPS made on benefits, that it would destroy the fund. Instead, they said sure, we'll match it, and kicked the can down the road- so now when the bill comes due it is different leadership that has to be the ones to kick the members in the nuts by telling them benefits have to be slashed in a last ditch effort to save the fund from disappearing altogether. What the IBT has done with central states is criminally immoral, and none of it is on UPS. UPS paid $6B to the fund just to exit it, while still carrying the load for UPS retirees. The fund, through poor management and oversight, was allowed to be invested in more risky investments, and lost pretty much every cent of that $6B in the financial collapse in 08-09. Then, in a colossal act of closing the barn door after the horses got out, the fund managers switched to more conservative investments and managed to miss out on the market recovery that rebuilt my 401K among other things since that time. I have seen some posters here over the years claim UPS bears responsibility for the collapse of CS for making that offer, I find that argument totally misguided. UPS was not trying to have the Teamsters match their offer, UPS was trying with the Last, Best, Final, to force Carey to let the membership vote on that proposal and they hoped the $1K pension increase would entice members to vote yes. They were trying to get to happen in '97 what happened this past year with Freight. Carey, of course, wanted nothing to do with letting the membership vote on that proposal and never allowed it to happen.
