250 Face Firing Over Walkout

No Reprisals Against Queens UPS Workers!

NEW YORK CITY—Around 250 UPS drivers in Teamsters Local 804 walked off the job in Maspeth, Queens, on February 26 to protest the firing of longtime union activist Jairo Reyes—until they were pressed by union officials to go back to work a few hours later. On March 3, company executives broke away from official discussions with the union over potential discipline for the walkout and hit these drivers with “working terminations,” which means they can be fired at any time. UPS also banned Teamsters business agent Liam Russertt, a leader of the job action, from all company facilities.

“Big Brown” management nationwide is notorious for vicious anti-union persecution of workers, petty disciplinary write-ups and enforcing a backbreaking pace of work. The Maspeth UPS bosses terminated Reyes, who had been on the job for 24 years, on fabricated “dishonesty” charges of punching in early without permission. In reality, he was sent packing for filing a grievance against the company, which had violated seniority rules in fixing route start times. His firing was the straw that broke the camel’s back for union members who have to put up with the company’s “culture of harassment,” not only the drivers but also the part-time inside workers who joined the protest after finishing their shifts.

Now the company has turned up the heat on the workforce. According to Russertt, “it only helps the company’s fear mongering with me not being on the job to talk to the guys.” If UPS goes ahead and fires the 250 for their elementary act of union solidarity, all Local 804 must be prepared to mobilize in action until every worker has his job back and disciplinary records are wiped clean. And it is incumbent upon the rest of New York City labor to back them up. Reinstate Jairo Reyes! Lift the ban against Liam Russertt! No reprisals against the drivers!

The brief exercise of union power by the Maspeth workers stands in sharp contrast to the path later charted by the Local 804 leadership. Video of the February 26 job action posted on the Internet documents the palpable anger of the workers who wanted to fight. Indeed, a phone call from local president Tim Sylvester urging everyone to go to his truck was not heeded. Workers started their routes only after the secretary-treasurer was dispatched to the facility.

Since then, union officials have built a campaign around getting capitalist Democratic Party politicians to pressure the company to “respect” their workers. On March 21, Sylvester called a press conference and rally outside the Maspeth garage, attended by about 100 workers. NYC Public Advocate Letitia James, City Council majority leader Jimmy Van Bramer and other “friend of labor” Democrats blew a lot of hot air in speeches meant to play to working-class constituents.

The Working Families Party (WFP), whose purpose is to shill for the Democratic Party swindlers, helped the union bureaucrats organize this campaign. WFP is coauthor with MoveOn.org of one of several online petitions that have garnered 100,000 signatures in support of the victimized Teamsters with the toothless message: “Tell UPS: Firing 250 workers for protesting is wrong!” The union’s own petition demands that all UPS workers “be treated with dignity, respect and fairness.” But UPS, like other capitalist enterprises, respects nothing but the profits it squeezes out of its workforce.

It is not wrong in itself to seek allies among friendly UPS customers in the community who know and depend on the drivers. But as is normally the case, union officials are substituting a consumer campaign for mobilizing solid labor action and solidarity, a losing strategy. Allies with real potential social power are to be found among the city unions, all currently working under expired contracts because their leaders have pinned all their hopes on the largesse of new Democratic mayor Bill de Blasio, who has made clear that he will not give without taking.

The working class can hit the capitalists where it matters, in their profits. Workers make the wheels of industry turn—or not, as when the Maspeth UPS drivers withdrew their labor on February 26. The 1997 national UPS strike reduced commerce to a crawl and wrung concessions from management, notably the promise of 10,000 full-time driver positions for part-time loaders. That struggle united black, white and Latino, part-time and full-time, younger and older workers, cutting across the divisions that weaken the working class. (See “Unchain Labor’s Power!”, WV No. 673, 5 September 1997.) But UPS reneged on its promise, and the Teamsters bureaucracy has taken it lying down, squandering the potential power of the union.

On that score, there’s little difference between “old guard” business unionists typified by current International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) president James Hoffa Jr. and “reformers” who lionize his predecessor Ron Carey for the 1997 strike, such as the current Local 804 leadership. In the Teamsters, reform has become synonymous with inviting the capitalist government into the union to “clean up” corruption as against mobilizing the union ranks to clean house themselves. The main culprit is the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), which in the late 1980s filed lawsuits that first opened the union’s door to the government and then delivered the blueprint for reorganizing the Teamsters to the Justice Department. The Feds have been running union elections, installing regulators and putting locals in receivership ever since.

The aim of the government in interfering in the affairs of the unions is not to ensure “democracy” but to cripple them. The career of Ron Carey is an object lesson. Having sued the union himself in the bosses’ courts, he won the 1991 election for IBT president with TDU support. Six years later, on the heels of the wildly popular UPS strike, the Feds turned on their eager accomplice in a renewed anti-union vendetta. Under the pretext of “political contribution violations,” Carey was barred from running for office again. Similarly, far from rooting out corruption, the earlier government war against Jimmy Hoffa was intended to crush his campaign for a Master Freight Agreement, a single national trucking contract.

Over the years, fake leftists like the International Socialist Organization and FightBack!news, which is associated with the Chicago-based Freedom Road Socialist Organization, have been effusive in their praise of Carey and the TDU. Such groups are incapable of telling the simple truth to the working class: The capitalist state, with its cops, courts and prisons, is the repressive apparatus that protects the profits and rule of the ruling class against the workers and oppressed. Instead, they peddle the lie that the government and the state power it represents are neutral and can be pressured into serving the interests of the workers.

By their appeals to the bosses’ state, union-suing “reformers” and their ostensibly socialist supporters undermine the very purpose of unions—to defend workers from the bosses. Both wings of the union bureaucracy stand for class collaboration in one form or another, especially the subordination of labor to the political fortunes of the Democratic Party. What workers need is a leadership that sets the unions on the path of class struggle against the exploiters. The watchword must be the total independence of the unions from the capitalists, their political parties and their state.