Leadership, Labour and Culture

In the summer of 2023 the International Brotherhood of Teamsters negotiated with two of the largest freight companies in the United States at the same time, and the two negotiations ended in opposite ways within a week. The first was with UPS, whose national master agreement covered about 340,000 drivers, loaders and sorters, the largest collective agreement in American logistics (union figure). The old contract expired on 31 July. The union's general president since 2022, Sean O'Brien, who had campaigned on a promise of confrontation, said the members would strike on 1 August without a better deal. On 25 July the two sides announced a tentative agreement. On 22 August the members ratified it by 86.3%, for five years to 31 July 2028 (union).

The terms were rich by any standard. Wages rose by $2.75 an hour in 2023 and $7.50 over the term for full-time and part-time workers alike; part-time workers' minimum pay went to $21 an hour; the average full-time driver's top rate was put at about $49 an hour by the end; the "22.4" tier of lower-paid drivers, a concession of 2018, was abolished; 7,500 new full-time jobs were promised; and new delivery vans would have air conditioning (union figures). The union described the deal as $30 billion of new money, a figure UPS did not adopt. UPS kept its network running. It did not keep all its customers: shippers moved parcels to rivals in June and July to avoid the risk of a strike, and UPS later said that about a million pieces a day had left its network and that only part of them came back (reported).

The second negotiation was with Yellow, whose roughly 22,000 Teamsters members had accepted concessions in 2009–11 to keep it alive (reported) and whose plan to merge its regional networks needed work-rule changes the union refused to make on Yellow's timetable (Chapter 6). As Yellow missed benefit contributions, the union served a strike notice, and the customers did not wait for the outcome. On 30 July, five days after the UPS settlement, Yellow stopped operating, and it filed for Chapter 11 on 6 August. The same union, in the same weeks, won one of the richest contracts in its history from one carrier and watched another, with all its members' jobs, disappear.