By Steve Wishnia

The Teamsters Union has reached a tentative contract deal with UPS it is calling “overwhelmingly lucrative” and “the most historic tentative agreement for workers in the history of UPS” — and it’s crediting intensive rank-and-file organizing and readiness to strike for the victory.

“It’s the best deal that I’ve had in my career here,” says Tony Rosciglione, treasurer of Teamsters Local 804, which represents about 8,000 UPS workers “from Yorktown Heights to Montauk” and in all the city boroughs except for Staten Island.

The proposed five-year contract “doesn’t require a single concession,” Teamsters General President Sean M. O’Brien said in the union’s announcement July 25. It will cover about 340,000 UPS drivers and warehouse workers, making it the largest private-sector collective-bargaining agreement in North America.

The deal, the Teamsters said, includes ending the two-tier wage system for the new drivers classified as “22.4s,” who will be reclassified as regular drivers who qualify for seniority.

That is a major victory, Rosciglione told Work-Bites. The 22.4s, named after a provision—Article 22, Section 4—in the contract added under the previous Teamsters leadership, were hired to alleviate demands on the regular drivers to work Saturdays. They worked Tuesdays through Saturdays, with no overtime pay and schedules that changed from week to week. One week they might have to come in at 4 in the morning, and other times work until 9 on Saturday nights, butting up against the Department of Transportation’s 14-hour limit for drivers’ shifts. And they got paid less than regular drivers—"driving trucks at a discounted rate,” Rosciglione says.

Representatives of the 176 UPS Teamster locals in the U.S. and Puerto Rico will meet July 31 to decide whether to recommend the proposal, and members will vote on whether to ratify it next month, beginning Aug. 3.

The agreement, the union says, will give all workers a $2.75-an-hour raise this year and $7.50 an hour more over the next five years, with the top rate for drivers going up to $49. Part-time workers’ minimum pay will go up to $21 per hour immediately, and they will receive raises averaging 48% over the next five years.

UPS will install air-conditioning in the cabs of all larger delivery vehicles, sprinter vans, and package cars it buys after Jan. 1, 2024, and put fans and vents in the cargo compartments of all cars. There will be no more forced overtime on drivers’ scheduled days off, and all UPS Teamsters will get Martin Luther King Day as a paid holiday.

At the beginning of the talks, Rosciglione notes, the company was looking to get drivers to work Sundays.

How did they achieve it? “The members,” Rosciglione told Work-Bites. “Sticking together, doing practice pickets.” Local 804 began preparing for a possible walkout around six months ago, having meetings to discuss contract issues and actions, and “setting up captains in case we would have to strike.”

Members of other Teamsters locals in the area regularly turned out for rallies, he adds, and the union also got press attention, plus political support from city Comptroller Brad Lander, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and state Senate Labor Committee chair Jessica Ramos. Crucially, the Independent Pilots Association, which represents UPS’s 3,300 air-freight pilots, told the Teamsters in early July that they would not cross picket lines.

Each building, each UPS facility, had a business agent and several captains, Rosciglione says, whose job was to get members to turn out for practice pickets. Initially, they scheduled pickets to see what kind of turnout they would get, but it worked well. They became occasions for “rallying the troops and educating the members,” Rosciglione says. “And the more people came, the more they learned.”

Other locals around the country also held practice pickets, carrying signs in UPS brown and gold that read “Just Practicing for a Just Contract.” They happened in the St. Louis suburb of Earth City; Presque Isle, Maine, a town of 9,000 in the remote forests of the state’s northeast, 400 miles from Boston; and the UPS customer center in southeast Brooklyn, amid the warehouses, housing projects, and grade-level subway tracks of Canarsie.

The Teamsters also made it clear that a contract offer that preserved the two-tier wage system or didn’t have an adequate raise for part-timers would provoke a strike. “The union went into this fight committed to winning for our members. We demanded the best contract in the history of UPS, and we got it,” President O’Brien said in the announcement. The talks broke down July 5, but resumed July 25.

The union included rank-and-file members on the national bargaining committee for the first time, said committee member Brandy Harris, a part-time UPS Teamster with Local 174 in Seattle. “Our union was organized and we were relentless,” she said in the announcement, and the members built “a credible strike threat around the country.”

“We just proved that in unity there is strength,” Rosciglione says. “Like our president says, ‘one union, one goal.’”