Leaders of Teamsters union locals voted Monday to endorse a tentative labor deal with shipping giant UPS and send it on to rank-and-file members for a ratification vote.
The International Brotherhood of Teamsters represents about 340,000 drivers, package handlers and other workers at Sandy Springs-based UPS. Union negotiators struck a deal last week with the company to grant pay raises and other contract improvements to workers in a five-year collective bargaining agreement.
On Monday afternoon, the Teamsters said out of its 176 locals with UPS members across the country, 161 voted in favor, 1 was against and 14 affiliates failed to show up to the meeting in Washington, D.C.
“The entire UPS Teamsters National Negotiating Committee stands behind this historic contract and our UPS local unions have resoundingly voted to endorse it,” said Teamsters General President Sean M. O’Brien in a written statement.
The next step is for Teamsters members at UPS to vote electronically Aug. 3-22 on whether to ratify the tentative agreement.
The deal reached last week forestalled a potential strike that the union had threatened to begin Aug. 1 if a deal had not been reached in time.
If ratified, the agreement will give current part-time workers raises to at least $21 per hour immediately. Full-time delivery drivers would get wage increases to an average top rate of $49 per hour.
Existing full-time and part-time workers would get raises of $2.75 per hour this year, and $7.50 more per hour over the length of the contract.
UPS CEO Carol Tomé said after the deal was reached that it “continues to reward UPS’s full- and part-time employees with industry-leading pay and benefits while retaining the flexibility we need to stay competitive, serve our customers and keep our business strong.”
But the deal won’t necessarily satisfy all UPS workers. Some union members had sought bigger pay raises, particularly after boosts in wages at other companies amid high inflation across the economy in the past couple of years.
“Did we win everything we wanted? No we didn’t,” O’Brien acknowledged during a briefing for Teamsters members Monday evening. He had pushed for the elimination of UPS’s use of drivers using personal vehicles to deliver packages, but said “we had to make compromises” to achieve other goals. The new contract would still allow UPS to use personal vehicle drivers.
O’Brien said the union also didn’t get everything it wanted for wage progressions, “but we fought hard.”
Notably, the tentative agreement allows UPS to transition to a seven-day delivery operation at its facilities, which currently operate five or six days a week, after notifying and meeting with the union in advance. That’s flexibility the company has been seeking amid today’s environment of 24/7 e-commerce demand.
The Teamsters union, which now faces the task of selling the deal to its members, will mail voting packets to them this week and conducting meetings to explain the terms.
“I’m certain we squeezed every single drop of juice out of this orange we could at UPS,” O’Brien told members Monday evening.
The ratification vote will indicate the level of support for the agreement and the Teamsters leadership.
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