Opinion | Jones: The Teamsters Shrugged at 48,000 UPS Jobs. Now They’re Fighting for Railroaders They Hardly Represent.

Teamsters’ union leader Sean O’Brien presents himself as a man of conviction. One may obtain a better understanding of him by examining where he spends the union’s time and political capital.

Last year, UPS, the Teamsters’ largest employer, eliminated 48,000 jobs and shuttered 93 buildings. In January, the company announced up to 30,000 more cuts and two dozen additional closures. Packages are still moving through the network, but entire facilities have gone dark. This was the largest peacetime workforce reduction in the history of American parcel delivery.

O’Brien’s response was revealing. When asked about further downsizing at UPS, he said the union “won’t stand in its way.” That was the union’s general president, officially speaking on the record. O’Brien did little publicly to push back on the broader losses.

His approach to a freight rail merger has been extremely different.

The Teamsters Rail Conference is spending heavily to block Union Pacific’s acquisition of Norfolk Southern. In April, it joined a coalition alongside BNSF and CPKC, two railroads that compete directly with UP and NS for the same freight. That placed the union squarely in the same coalition as competing rail carriers with vested interests in the outcome of the merger.

The contrast in these two labor fights is stark. The railroaders on the other side of this fight have been offered something UPS Teamsters have never had: a written guarantee that they cannot be furloughed for the rest of their working lives. SMART-TD, the country’s largest railroad union, negotiated the guarantee. Conductors, engineers and yardmasters would keep their jobs, crafts and territories. The language comes from an Illinois Central agreement SMART-TD won in 2008, which held through the Great Recession and the global pandemic. Five other rail unions signed similar agreements and endorsed the merger.

The Teamsters did not match that agreement. Instead, they are trying to brazenly stop the entire deal. SMART-TD has seemingly had enough and finally said so in public. Its president called the campaign by the Teamsters as reckless and dangerous, even a  “Chicken Little routine.” Weeks earlier, the union had published a piece titled “Should Truckers Speak for Railroaders?” Its answer was no. Tim Lee, of the Center for Individual Freedom, did the arithmetic in the Washington Examiner: for every Teamster on the railroad, there are roughly six who drive a truck, load a parcel or work in a warehouse.

The membership numbers help explain the Teamsters’ strategy.

The Teamsters have roughly 1.3 million members. About 340,000 work at UPS, the union’s largest concentration, and those jobs are being cut. Its second-largest base is long-haul trucking, another industry facing upheaval and even competition from this rail merger.  For example, some trucking companies are already running driverless commercial trucks between Dallas and Houston with plans to expand out further. AUC Berkeley Labor Center study projects that autonomous vehicles could displace as many as 294,000 long-haul drivers. Freight rail is heavily regulated and safety-intensive. For the Teamsters, it is one of the few blue-collar sectors where automation is not about to erase the work.

The Teamsters’ foothold in rail, however, is small. Their Rail Conference covers roughly 70,000 workers, about five percent of the total union. That makes rail an obvious place to grow. If the UP-NS merger clears with SMART-TD’s lifetime job-security agreement in place, SMART-TD will be the union that secured a concrete result for railroaders. The Teamsters risk being shut out of a sector they need to enter. Peter Roff, writing inRealClearMarkets, described the conflict of interest as hiding in plain sight.

The Teamsters seemingly have room to make that play because they walked out of the AFL-CIO in 2005 and have not returned. The UFCW came back in 2013, and the SEIU rejoined this January. The Teamsters are now the only major private-sector union outside the “house of labor”, and the only one not bound by the federation’s Article 20 no-raid rules.

That independence, and willingness to try to raid workers from other unions, has a history. In 2002, the Teamsters went after the Los Angeles police union. West Coast longshoremen have fought them over cargo jurisdiction for much of the past century. The rail merger is the latest chapter.

The change in the Teamsters’ language in arguing against the rail merger is telling. Six months ago, the union said the merger would cost its members their jobs. Now its filings refer to lost industry “positions.” That distinction matters. A career guarantee protects an actual worker. A position count protects a bargaining unit. Only one of those puts money in a family’s bank account.

The Surface Transportation Board should decide the merger on the merits. But when Sean O’Brien argues that a signed lifetime job guarantee is not enough for railroaders, he should have to answer one question: Why wasn’t a similar commitment worth fighting for when 48,000 UPS Teamsters lost their jobs last year?

Railroaders can see the difference. Their union has already said it out loud.

Tim Jones

Tim Jones is a former Speaker of the Missouri House of Representatives. His current career is in the worlds of media, broadcast radio, & state government affairs.