The 1997 United Parcel Service strike - 22 August 1997

It's been a long time – 16 years – since the word "strike" was the only topic of one of these talks; it must reflect either a remarkable stretch of drowsiness on my part, or an even more remarkable period of tenderness in the relations between labour and management.

Well, it's neither. From time to time, I've remarked on the slow, steady decline in a number of union members among the nation's whole workforce. How different from the embattled 1930s when the National Craft Union merged with the National Industrial Union and became a mighty bargaining force and how, at the peak of Labour's organising power, 36% of America's workers of all kinds were union members. Today, the figure is 14%.

And if you ask why should the once all-powerful American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations – the clumsy name! – how could it have lain down so meekly for so long with the Chief Executive Alliance? The answer is, I believe, not only simple but true, one permanent result of the fierce labour-management battles of the '30s was that the benefits labour had battled for – minimum wage, pensions plan, health benefit systems – became, in the post- war boom, part of the regular contracts of corporations whose former chiefs would have fainted at the mere mention of any social service to be provided by them and not by the government.

In the 1930s, Europeans, British labour leaders especially, I recall, were always startled that these benefits were still being fought for, often bloodily 30 years after the war had been won in Britain, 50 years after Germany's Bismarck, who remember started the labour revolution that was copied by Lloyd George and Churchill in 1906 and 30 years later in America was called Mr Roosevelt's New Deal.

But you have to remember that for a span of 50 years certainly America, or rather America's big employers – the rising giants of iron, copper, coke and steel, the so-called "robber barons" – could always call on something denied to European companies: a seemingly endless invasion of slave labour. Well that's putting it crudely. Let me put it more sensitively.

We're talking about the time of the 1870s through until the crash of 1929. The steel industry provides a good example; it really got going with a new big pool of labour from central and southern Europe. If the Italians went on strike, an innocent big batch of Romanians was on hand. And when the Romanians got settled in the steel mills and after a few years began to learn a thing or two about wages, shorter hours and struck, the newly-arrived Hungarians would be drafted first as strike breakers, then as employees. This rough-and-ready system obviously worked only so long as Europe kept shipping in new supplies of cheap labour, but time would teach even the latest refugees that the ones who'd come before had acquired certain benefits.

There was a fierce and infamous steel strike in Pittsburgh. The gentle roly poly steel king, Andrew Carnegie, was off resting in his castle in Scotland, so the strike had to be handled by his tougher partner in the steel business, Henry Frick. This one strike was proving difficult to break because the newest immigrants who'd been expected to move in and take the strikers jobs, held out for the same reforms, benefits that the resident workers were striking for, which moved Mr Frick to make a bitter, immortal remark "The immigrant, however ignorant, however illiterate, always learns too soon".

I don't suppose American employers, the rulers of the great industries in their heyday, were more cruel than most, but the fact that they could depend for so long on this regular breaking tidal wave of cheap labour, of thousands and thousands in every city of penniless refugees from pogroms or from grinding poverty, it really made the big industrialists feel they were doing a public service by employing new immigrants.

And to the public in general, the strike, whatever the pretext, was an ungrateful act. Strike breaking was thought to be almost a civic duty of the captains of industry and often they could confidently call on the National Guard, if not the army, to put down what was legally a riot. As a very bizarre but true reflection of the general public attitude to labour, I should mention that we're talking about a time when the United States Supreme Court could rule in all sanity that the Constitution protected the right of small children to work 16 hours a day.

It seems, more than a century ago, a whole civilisation, since those were the prevailing attitudes between the workers and the boss and when the public was not even consulted about the wrongs and rights of a strike.

Today, well as Mr Ellington said, "there have been some changes made". The prosperity of the 1960s was so impressive that its lessons, put in the context of the benefits of the unions once kept striking for, was well learned, no need for massive union organising, so nothing has happened since the Second War on a national scale like the great steel and railway and mining strikes of the 1930s. Even during a severe recession during Reagan's time, more and more people – eight million in two years moved into their first jobs. The big unions might have been non-existent.

The last big push for a national union strike ended in a disaster, August 1981. It involved PATCO, a union either so docile or its members so affluent that most of us had never heard of it, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organisation suddenly struck, demanding a $10,000 rise and a four-day week. It sounds pretty brazen until you learn about the harrowing conditions of their work.

This was, though, the rare case of a strike against the government. The air traffic controllers are employees of the government, pledged not to strike. When they struck, 80% of the domestic flights were in the air and everything seemed to be going the controllers' way. There are 22,000 daily civilian flights; they require 12,000 controllers to guide them safely up and across and down and the Secretary of Transportation said "It would take just short of two years to train as many as 9,000 new controllers".

But President Reagan looked on the strike as a dereliction of public duty; he was boiling mad. All right, he said in a fitful moment, I'll fire the lot! Preposterous, we said. Chaos has come again, we said! He called on the retired, on military pilots, apprentices, supervisors, every sort of qualified retired professional. Planes did not drop from the sky. Half the regular flights were resumed at once, then three-quarters, in time the lot, to the pride of old Republicans who remembered the glory days of Frick and Harriman and Rockefeller and Carnegie. President Reagan became the first successful strike-breaking president in 30 years.

But now during the past fortnight, we've had a strike in the old "Give 'em hell" style, the United Parcel Service Company versus the teamsters. UPS delivers the staggering percentage of 60 of all the handleable goods posted across the United States and the strike did grievous damage to thousands of small businesses, had hospitals throwing blood max out for lack of new blood and inconvenienced everybody.

Much of the company's business is done at night or in rush hours and they have to have about 40% of their workforce part time. The union wants them all in the long run to be full time. The arguments on both sides are amazingly complex. The company yielded beyond the union's wish in rates of pay and the numbers of part-time men who will move into full time. The union yielded to a five-year instead of a three-year contract.

The teamsters you've surely heard about before, usually in a bad odour, they represent all the people – the truckers, packers, drivers, middlemen – who carry most freight, goods that were once transported by trains. More, perhaps, than any other union, the teamsters could bring the internal commerce of the United States to a halt quicker than any other body. Today, the teamsters echo the cry of a new AFLCIO leader that labour has awakened from a long sleep and is back in fighting trim.

The president of the teamsters claimed a victory in similar terms. This he said, is an historic turning point for working people in this country, American workers have shown they can stand up to corporate greed. He brought up the point, which is being made quite often by newspapers and in public talk, that many corporations are using huge profits to reward their retiring CEOs rather than sharing them with the employees.

In the new UPS contract, the employees will be in charge of four-fifths of their own pension funds. There's no question that the settlement is very much in the employees' favour mainly, I think, because for once a big strike rallied general public support, 60% of the people supported the union's case, less than 40 the company's.

The last big company versus union strike was the baseball players strike of two years ago. Never was there a strike less calculated to jerk a tear from a suffering public who had little sympathy with downtrodden workers whose low average earnings were a million dollars a year.

The UPS strike may or may not be a turning point in labour relations and in the ballooning prosperity, but people who don't take an historical interest in the economy are nevertheless beginning to shake a little at the length and undisturbed joyfulness of the stock markets. Life of Reilly!

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