My point is, the teamsters should be doing more to stop management from unwarranted discipline and dragging out the grievance process. After a few unwarranted disciplines, the local should take strike action against UPS. THAT IS THE POWER AND PURPOSE OF A LABOR UNION! A one day strike, a three day strike, a five day strike. When district and regional managers realize they are losing money because of some d-bag manager, the problem will be corrected.
Bonus points on spirit but you get negative marks on contract and labor law knowledge.
Every local in the country, barring locals 705 and 710, is bound by a no-strike clause both in the NMA and their supplements. Ordinarily, we can only strike outside of a contract expiring if the company refuses to pay pension/health & welfare contributions as per the contract, pay wages as per the contract (ie. withholding a raise), or if the company refuses to comply with a majority decision of the National Grievance Committee (which will never happen, the company would simply deadlock if it felt they would not/could not/preferred not to comply with a ruling and then it would go to arbitration to be dragged out).
This is a direct result of the National Labor Relations Act (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NLRA) that came into being under the Roosevelt administration. While the NLRA created the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to formalize union organizing, it also set the precedent of restricting job actions and pushed contract negotiations to include no strike clauses. The Taft Hartley Act (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft_Hartley), which was passed in the late 1940's, further restricted the right of a union to strike (ie. made secondary boycotts illegal) and also allowed the President of the US to order strikers back to work. Taft Hartley also allows employers to sue a union for damages imposed by an "illegal" strike -- ie. if your local went on strike over a deadlocked grievance/termination, UPS could take them to court for the alleged cost of the resulting service failures. That could potentially bankrupt a smaller local.
All of that being said, an illegal strike (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildcat_strike_action) is only illegal if you lose. Ron Carey proved that point in ~1996 in the one day strike over UPS arbitrarily changing the weight limits on packages to 150 lbs. However, per the contract and current US labor law, shop stewards can be specifically singled out for greater discipline than their fellow union members for initiating/leading any sort of unauthorized work action. Also, you have to ask yourself this: would a majority of the drivers in your center walk out over one of their brothers being terminated (never mind the reason) if it wasn't guaranteed they would be able to ever return to their jobs?