There was a time when it might have been useful to start this story by tracing the journey of a single cardboard box. I would explain that the air fryer or couch or deeply discounted jeans you recently bought online were made and packaged in Asia, then moved by boat and container truck to a warehouse not far from where you live. I would explain that to travel the last few miles from the warehouse to your home, the box would pass through the hands of overnight sorters and loaders and the delivery driver who walks right up to your door. By now, deep as we are into the mail-order way of life, facilitated by Amazon and cemented by the pandemic, all of us already know this. We’re pros at checking the time stamps and location updates for the stuff that we buy online. The system works so well, so much of the time, that it’s easy to forget the bursts of labor required at every turn.
For the past few months, the unionized drivers and warehouse workers at UPS have tried to remind us. Collectively, these three hundred and forty thousand people handle an astonishing one out of every four packages in the U.S.—the equivalent of six per cent of the country’s G.D.P. and enough to have earned UPS fourteen billion dollars in profits last year. The majority of UPS employees belong to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and have been in the process of negotiating a new five-year contract to replace the one that expires on July 31st. The union demanded radical changes: a living wage for part-timers, more full-time positions, the elimination of a two-tier system that disadvantages new hires, an end to forced overtime, and big pay hikes to compensate for the hardships of the pandemic. Many of these issues were settled by early July. Then bargaining broke down, over economic issues, chiefly the one relating to part-timers’ pay. To get UPS back to the table, workers staged practice pickets outside the company’s facilities—“Just Practicing for a Just Contract,” the signs read—and rallied with big-name politicians, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. An actual strike by the largest unionized workforce in the private sector would have been the most significant work stoppage since 1970.
On Tuesday, the two sides resumed talks and, after just a few hours, reached a surprise deal. The Teamsters’ negotiating committee (picture rows of mostly burly men in suits) announced that it had “reached the most historic tentative agreement for workers in the history of UPS.” Carol Tomé, the company’s C.E.O., called it a compromise “win-win-win” and boasted........