UPS, Teamsters Reach Accord; Full Service Seen in a Few Days

WASHINGTON — Under pressure from President Clinton and businesses crippled by the near-shutdown of the nation’s largest carrier of packaged goods, leaders of the Teamsters union and United Parcel Service said early today that they had reached a tentative agreement to end a 15-day-old nationwide strike.

A full complement of the company’s trademark brown delivery trucks could be back on the roads on Wednesday, officials said.

Teamsters President Ron Carey portrayed the deal as a victory not only for the 185,000 striking UPS employees, but for all American workers.

“This strike marks a new era,” Carey said in a news conference held after the joint announcement of the agreement. “This victory strikes a signal that American workers are on the move again after 15 years of taking it on the chin.”

Carey said that “in virtually every area” of the proposed deal, the terms for union workers were “better than the [company’s] offer before the strike,” which began Aug. 4.

In a clear indication of the key role the Clinton administration played in ending the strike, the deal was announced by Labor Secretary Alexis M. Herman at a 12:30 a.m. news conference. The settlement was a big victory for the White House, which had dispatched Herman and federal mediators to pressure the two sides to stay the course; negotiators had met for some 80 hours of almost nonstop talks since Thursday.

Clinton, vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., praised both sides for working “to resolve their differences for the good of the company, its employees and the customers they serve.”

“The issues that were at the heart of their negotiations are important to our nation’s economic strength and to all Americans,” he said in a statement released early this morning.

Word of a settlement first came at 9 p.m. Monday, when union officials issued a statement saying Carey would hold a “major news conference” on the talks. But hours passed before an agreement was formally announced by the parties, suggesting that some key points remained in flux until the last minute.

In fact, Carey said talks nearly fell apart at the 11th hour, when UPS negotiators insisted on preserving their flexibility to hire outside contractors to handle some package delivery.

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The key points dividing the company and its workers were the union’s demand for more full-time jobs and the company’s plan to pull out of multiemployer union pension plans to create a separate plan for UPS workers, which it said would result in a huge increase in pension payments.

In his separate news conference, Carey said the deal will create 10,000 new full-time jobs, apparently a result of the combination of existing part-time jobs, and that while the union would retain control of its pension plans, benefits would still increase by 50%.

The union’s only real concession, Carey said, was agreeing to a five-year contract when it had hoped for a shorter time frame.

The union said it won a general wage increase over the life of the contract of $3.10 an hour for full-time workers and about $4.10 for part-timers.

The agreement still must be approved by UPS officials and the union’s 50-member negotiating committee, its so-called “two-person committee,” made up of two representatives from each of the union’s 206 locals, and the general Teamster membership.

It is unclear whether the agreement will require UPS to raise prices to its customers. But the early euphoria over the tentative labor agreement could complicate the Clinton administration’s efforts to keep the nation’s booming economy on course if it fuels a round of inflationary salary increases through other parts of American industry.

But Teamster members across the country--along with business owners who depend on the company’s deliveries--immediately began celebrating the strike’s apparent end.

In Anaheim, striking workers hugged. They shook hands. Some embraced as emotions poured out over a strike that had been marked by hot tempers and accusations on both sides.

“Are we happy or what?” yelled Denise Churchill, 42, a part-time clerical worker who has been with UPS for 12 years.

“As far as what we heard so far, it is an agreement we can live with,” she said. “It affected part-timers like me, and we and the full-timers wanted to make sure we kept those jobs. We all wanted to go back to work.”

Southern California small-business owners also were relieved to hear the strike had been settled, saying an agreement between Teamsters and the nation’s largest shipping company occurred just in time to save some workers’ jobs.

“As of tomorrow, we were going to have massive layoffs. I have 160 people who work for me and I was going to have to let 85 go,” said Mark Friedman, president of Blue Cross Beauty Products. The strike cost his company about $25,000 in additional shipping costs, he said.

Friedman’s company, which manufactures 45 million vials of nail polish a year, was considering shutting down its Pacoima plant after the Post Office told him Monday it was too overloaded to make an appointment today to ship his daily load of 300 boxes.

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But on the settlement news, Friedman revved up the nail-polish-making machines in hopes to finish cranking out shipments of popular pastel and neon hues before the end of the summer fashion season.

Since the strike began, a skeleton crew of managers and workers had been piloting UPS’ trademark brown delivery trucks, filling only about 10% of the company’s normal delivery capacity of 12 million packages a day. The strike cost UPS some $650 million in lost revenue, and striking workers were trying to get by on $55 a week in strike benefits.

The company’s sorters, loaders and drivers received key support from the 2,100-member Independent Pilots Assn., which is the union that does all the flying for UPS. Pilot Bud Denton said the pilots are “delighted it’s over.”

“We think the Teamsters’ issues were important ones, not just for the Teamsters, but for a lot of working people throughout the country,” said Denton, of Fontana. “The primary reason I was on strike is it was just flat the right thing to do. The whole issue was part-time jobs. There were a lot of people working 35, 40 and 50 hours a week and getting paid part-timers wages.

By avoiding a protracted strike, Clinton administration officials were able to spare the nation’s booming economy further damage from a slowdown in the delivery of packaged goods by the nation’s leading carrier.

The late-night announcement by the two sides of an imminent press conference surprised most observers, who had interpreted union and company statements made earlier in the day that both workers and management were ready to hunker down for the long haul--despite Clinton’s prediction of a quick end to the nationwide walkout.

Earlier Monday, union leaders announced plans for a new series of actions to bolster striking workers through the week.

“This week UPS workers and their supporters will dramatically increase activities around the country to show that working families want an America with good full-time jobs and secure pensions and health coverage,” said the union in a statement.

UPS Chairman James Kelly was somewhat more upbeat but predicted the strike could go “much, much longer.”

“There are still some very difficult issues for them (negotiators) to discuss,” Kelly had told Cable News Network Monday.

The outlook for resolution of the strike had taken a sharp turn for the worse Monday after reports circulated that when the UPS board of directors met on Wednesday, it would likely discuss hiring replacements for striking workers.

UPS spokeswoman Gina Ellrich confirmed that it was likely UPS directors would address the topic. “The situation we are in now will be very much a topic of board members’ conversation. They . . . will probably explore the issue of” replacing workers, she said.

“Right now the strike is simply posing an inconvenience for a lot of consumers--plus more than an inconvenience for a lot of businesses,” said Lawrence Kahn, professor of labor economics and collective bargaining at Cornell University. “But down the road there could be a downside for the president” and repercussions from voters if White House intervention doesn’t quickly end the strike in an equitable manner, he said.

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Carey, UPS’ chief negotiator David Murray and key aides had hoped to do their part to bring the labor impasse to an end as they strolled into a Washington hotel on Monday to resume talks.

But by Monday evening, sources close to negotiators expressed pessimism that a quick resolution could be reached.

Staff writers Miles Corwin and Jennifer Oldham in Los Angeles, David Reyes and E. Scott Reckard in Orange County and Art Pine on Martha’s Vineyard contributed to this story.