With few exceptions in the case of both UPS (
Guardian,
9/5/22;
New Yorker,
1/9/23;
Jacobin,
2/21/23) and the railroads (
Real News Network,
9/14/22;
Lever,
11/29/22;
Washington Post,
9/17/22), media overshadow the stakes for the
workers—who, among other sacrifices, forgo much of their paychecks to hit the picket line—with hysterics about their disruption to the flow of capital.
In this framing, workers are holding hostage “the economy,” a nebulous phrase that serves only to identify the reader with corporations. Those businesses, stand-ins for everyday Americans, become helpless protagonists fighting selfish employees. In articles so patently anti-worker they could’ve been written by a McKinsey consultant,
Fortune (
9/6/22) and the
Daily Mail (
9/6/22) reported that a UPS strike could be on the horizon, “even though delivery drivers already earn upwards of $95,000 a year.” Secondary or absent in these pieces is the fact that the majority of the UPS workforce
are not drivers, and many earn
as little as $15.50 an hour in some locations.
While drivers’ top salaries and UPS’s spending “$270 million on safety for its workers” (
Fortune,
9/6/22) made the cut, neither outlet found it relevant to mention that the corporation’s revenues surpassed
$100 billion last year, and CEO Tomé took home
$19 million in compensation.
Taking the side of capital
With this context, a readership might understand that indeed it is the corporations that are holding consumers and workers hostage during a strike; it is the corporations demonstrating their greed when they refuse, in the case of the rail companies, to give their workers
even a single paid sick day. UPS, meanwhile, denies adequate protection from
life-threatening heat in the warehouse or delivery truck.
In taking the side of capital, corporate media minimize the reality that the threat of a strike is the principal leverage workers have over their employers; that the gains strikes yield are not limited to one or a few shops, but have the potential to advance the working class as a whole, should they help raise standards across industries and inspire further labor activity; and that giving workers a raise
even if they already make good money could be beneficial for all of us.
Readers should see over 340,000 UPS workers on strike—in every zip code in the country—not as a liability, but as a shot of adrenaline for labor militancy.When UPS workers struck the company
in 1997, that gave the labor movement a potential catalyst for resurgence–and, therefore, the betterment of working-class lives and livelihoods.
And indeed, it is in 1997 where we may find a glimmer of hope for corporate media’s coverage of a strike.
Winning hearts and minds
Almost 26 years ago, the strike threat by the Teamsters was not considered credible by UPS management, nor by the media. But in an era of globalization and broad-based attack on pay and working conditions, UPS workers were fed up—and highly organized by their militant union.
On August 4, 1997, 185,000
hit the picket line for 15 days. At first, corporate media brushed off the workers, focusing more on the 80% of UPS shipments coming to a halt, and the $40 million daily cost to the company. But as Deepa Kumar tracked in her book,
Outside the Box: Corporate Media, Globalization and the UPS Strike, the 1997 UPS strike demonstrated that anti-worker labor coverage is not a given.
By the second week of the strike, some mainstream outlets demonstrated a temporary tone-shift:
Some sections of the corporate media, such as the New York Times, the Washington Post and the ABC television network, began to acknowledge inequality and to discuss the problems of the US working class.
Then, when the Teamsters won
nearly all their demands, with massive public support, media were forced to answer:
What could explain the new prolabor mood in American society and the concomitant failure of antiunion propaganda? In trying to address these questions, the corporate media had to admit, however grudgingly, that a rising tide had not lifted all boats; that is, the working classes had not shared in the promised fruit of globalization.
Coverage of a UPS strike in August may be susceptible to the same forces that brought corporate media to heel in 1997—that is, UPSers’ successful campaign to win the hearts and minds of both their customers and the wider public, and to lift the veil on “Big Brown.”
Today, unions are more popular than they have been in
nearly six decades. UPS delivery drivers are in ever more contact with an ecommerce-addicted public. And fueled by the
return of the “labor beat” in many newsrooms—which are undergoing a
unionization wave themselves—the adversities of logistics workers at multi-billion-dollar corporations like
Amazon and UPS are now
more popularly known.
Without much questioning—and with, often,
active support—from corporate media, economic inequality has only
deepened since 1997. Workers across industries are beginning to understand that they can
do something about it. And that means taking control of their own stories.
www.upi.com
