ok tough guy - so how many of those sups did you assault on your side of the street?
I remember reading the union pamphlets left in the break rooms leading up to the strike. All attacking the lack of full time
jobs and ups' evil plan to take over the pension. Non of them had a proposal by the union of course, just attacks on UPS' proposals.
Yes, union membership at UPS has grown as UPS has grown thanks to the explosion of e-commerce. UPS market share has steadily declined. UPS market share was already declining prior to the strike, RPS started in 1985, the post office was seeing its primary business (letters) decline thanks to email and electronic funds transfers and was looking to get more packages, Fedex was looking to expand. UPS could not compete on price and needed to trim costs. They consolidated most of the CSTC's in 95-96 timeframe, the COD processing centers, and other operations. In 1997 they came to the union with some hard demands to try to slow the growth of cost to serve so they could compete on price. The strike could have been avoided and the union could have gotten everything it wound up getting if it had brought comprehensive proposals earlier in the bargaining process or continued to negotiate beyond 4 days after the contract had expired. They did neither of those things, which would lead me and most reasonable people to conclude they really had another agenda, namely they (and specifically Carey) wanted a fight.
Wow. Someone is just guzzling the union cool-aide. I guess you figured the greedy corporate fat cats out, they offered much better pension numbers to UPS employees not so they could try to get them on board with a cost containing contract and save money (long term) at the same time, it was just to smash the union's pension. Yes, I get what UPS was proposing would have screwed the non-UPS Teamsters in the fund, but whose fault was that really? UPS has always paid its contribution to the pension, and if the fund was such that the employees of those other companies were being paid out far more than what was ever paid in on their behalf while they were working, who's fault is that? The funds have a math problem way more than a corporate greed problem.