Chapo Trap House - Bonus: Teamsters Delivers the Goods

Episode Date: April 15, 2020

Amber is joined by Matt Maini, a teamster and UPS worker from Local 251 in Providence, RI to discuss the challenges workers in the Teamsters union face due to COVID-19, how the union is fighting UPS for increased protections, and what you can do to support laborers during the pandemic. Here's the gofundme to support the Teamsters COVID protection fund: https://charity.gofundme.com/o/en/campaign/help-ups-teamsters-protect-ourselves-and-the-public-from-covid-19

Hey guys, it's Amber here with a very special interview segment, a Corona Dispatch if you will. You may have heard a lot about essential workers lately, a lot of times people think in terms of nurses and doctors and certainly the people who work at grocery stores and keep everything running. However, there are also the people that bring you your packages. So you can safely practice social distancing. Always happy to see the UPS men in good times, but now they're even more essential than ever.

However, you may have noticed on the news that the conditions that they're working under are absolutely ridiculous. I mean, UPS has never been a particularly good employer, but right now under these conditions everything has gotten much worse. So here to talk about it, I have Matt Manie, a teamster and UPS worker from Local 251 in Providence, Rhode Island. Hi Matt, thank you for joining. How you doing Amber, thanks for having me.

So I think the biggest shift in your work has probably been a huge, huge influx of orders combined with the fact that you are on the front lines more likely to be exposed to Corona. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what your working conditions are like. So right now at UPS working conditions are about anywhere between 12 and 14 hour days, peak days, like would you see at Christmas, you know, with dispatch anywhere between 100 and 110,000 house stops a day just in the state of Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts. And you know, these men and women, they go in five days a week, sometimes six now because

they're being forced in on a sixth bunch and they work and they work anywhere, like I said, between 12 and 14 hour days and they're dealing with the pandemic on top of that for their families and themselves. And the facilities that they're working at, well, they've never been well equipped. People are talking about not getting enough bathroom breaks and in some places like sinks weren't working, they didn't have soap. So they were already not working in safe conditions. But now it's basically impossible to keep clean and work within six feet of one another.

And a few teamsters and UPS workers have already been sick, correct? That's correct. Here in New England, we have about 38 people positive between district wide, that's over in Rhode Island and all of the other Jesus States in New England, and we won in Providence as of Friday. So we are dealing with it and I'm sure those numbers will grow as before we hit the apex and it blacked those off. But again, coming into work every day is a challenge within itself and it's even more

of a challenge now dealing with a pandemic on top of it. And workers have been on the forefront of establishing workplace safety. What have been their initial demands and how has management responded to it? Well, management is management, right? They're corporate greed. They live off and thrive off of corporate greed. So when they look at parcel, they only see dollar bills and dividend payments to their shareholders.

Workers, they play in a different realm. Workers worry about what happens to their fellow worker. And so workers united through the union through collective bargaining process and demanded for a safer work area and PPE to be supplied to them and certain guidelines to be followed in the work area so that they could give them a better chance of fighting any exposure to this coronavirus. So workers have definitely band together. They've stuck together through their union and showed what workers' power is all about

and fighting back corporate greed over profit. And as far as PPE, things like gloves, masks, hand sanitizer, that stuff is so necessary, especially for people who work for UPS or any kind of package delivery. And UPS, the biggest logistics company maybe in the world, somehow can't find a way to get gloves and masks to their members. And I noticed they said that this was an opportunity for them. That's amazing. You know, typical UPS fashion, they get on the financial channels that we all let some

people watch and they broadcast how this is going to be an opportunity to prove to their shareholders and the world as a corporation that they can deliver no matter what and make profit in any time that we're currently in. Again, they always put profit before people and the union puts people before profit. So you have this class struggle, right, this inner conflict that's always there and divides us from them and them from us. But workers basically came to them and said, well, if you think you're going to put profit before us, you're gravely mistaken because you can't make any profit unless you have

your workers. You have to cooperate and negotiate good faith with our safe working conditions when I guess you're not going to have any workers. So we stuck together and we showed them what real workers' movement, what a real organizing drive is to make that happen. Yeah, I saw this amazing story and this amazing picture of a teamster with the company credit card, which he got to buy a bunch of necessary PPE on the company dime, on company time. Can you talk about that?

Sure. So three weeks before we really started seeing large numbers where we live here in Rylan, we went to the company and basically said, look, you're going to cooperate and give us the money to fund for PPE, for hand sanitizer, bleach, mask, gloves, otherwise we're just going to put people out on what we have around called Temporate Disability Insurance because our governor instituted a COVID-19 benefit. I said, you know, and we basically said either you stop paying for this stuff and start putting in these rules, otherwise you're not going to have workers.

So in typical fashion, they worried about their image more than anything and not be able to come through with their, you know, to their shareholders on their dividends. They flocked over the credit card, we went out and dropped about 21,000 bucks in one day, and we had stuff being trucked all over at the different buildings and whatnot. And now we're closer to about $115,000 spent and now they have an actual inventory in their warehouses now that they can supply a whole workforce in each building for up to a week. So this is an ongoing thing. And again, it shows direct power and it shows what workers can do when they band together

and fight back corporate greed. Fantastic. Yeah. And you now have basically demanded regular meetings with management to update them, to let them know exactly what you need to keep working safely. Can you talk about that? Sure. So we implemented that every day they have to get on the phone with the Joint Council

10, Joint Council 10, our all the states in New England, they formed Joint Council 10 under the Team Student Leadership of Sean O'Brien. And every day they have to get on the phone with us and report back newly infected, presumptive infected, what they're doing to clean and sanitize buildings. And then they have to listen to any of our concerns that we might have in our own buildings that we represent. If the issues are not addressed, then there is action the union will take against them. And so to avoid any action in typical fashion, they play ball with us because they're more

worried about profit and losing their image to the corporate world. So it's been very effective. Yeah. Well, that would be pretty bad optics because people are very worried about the spread of the disease. And yeah, the funny thing about UPS is they don't seem to get that their profit is in offering a service. They're not the package men.

They don't make the products. What they do is coordinate a bunch of workers to bring people the things that they need. Correct. I mean, they don't make anything. They just provide services and they charge people for the service. And again, what prompted a lot of this was we really basically exposed them by sending a letter to NBC, which made the national news where they read about the working conditions and what were going on during this pandemic and they panicked and realized that we were

taking collective action against them. And then I well liked the average person because a lot of people know the different tactics that UPS is used in the overall work conditions in there. Yeah, of course. And right now, people are more happy to see their UPS than they've ever been. I know in New York where I live, very dense urban center, it can be actually kind of impossible to practice social distancing if you have to go to the grocery store, for example. My grocery store has like four foot wide aisles and last time there was a line around the

block so that they could only, you know, because they could only have like six people in there at a time safely. So it's providing really necessary things to people right now. And not only that, I mean, they're hospital providers. There are teamsters in hospitals as well, right? Yes. We actually represent the second largest division in the hospital for healthcare workers for teamsters in the United States is right here in Rhode Island at Rhode Island Hospital.

There's 2,500 teamsters that work in that unit. And they're on the forefront right now of dealing with this catastrophic event. And, you know, we see the numbers going up every day. Rhode Island is beginning to approach the apex where we have, you know, 3,000 positive cases. We've had 110 people die the last two days each day of the week. And our hospital workers are on that front line fighting it as a union. They stick together.

They make sure that the PPEs are available. They make sure that they get proper breaks to make sure that they get proper contact with their families because they're being locked into the hospital at four day pops. And I'm sure as this goes on, they might actually put them up as birthing units until this is all over. But, you know, again, collective organizing together as a group and collective bargaining is the reason why you can fight back corporate greed if you're working together as a union. You can establish these rules.

You can make corporations do things that they normally would never do because hospitals unfortunately in this country are about profit. And you know, we all know that the healthcare system doesn't work. We saw that when this pandemic hit. If we had healthcare for all in this country, this wouldn't have been the case. But we don't. We rely on a system that healthcare is controlled by employers and rather than the people. So.

Right. I mean, like this particular moment is putting so many sort of labor battles into perspective and just battles for basic social democratic reforms. I mean, Medicare for all makes more sense than ever right now. And the people who are able to fight for it are the workers, the people who are fighting not just for the safety of employees, but with regard to a pandemic, it's the teamsters that are keeping people safer right now. Yeah.

I mean, if you're a UPS driver or you're a food delivery person or you were a hospital worker, if it's got wheels in a steering wheel or they work or you're simply pulling orders in a warehouse to get that out onto the street to somebody they're working and these men and women go to work. Every day they strap those boots on and they work anywhere between 12 and 14 hours a day to get you that product. So it's quite a miracle. And they deal with all the stresses of this.

I have drivers that go home and change their clothes outside the house to shower the hose outside because they're that afraid of bringing the virus home to their family understandably so. And I even have older drivers that are in their fifties that are still out there peddling and up in packages to get them to you because that's what they've done in all their life, 30 plus years. And they signed up for this and they compensated well, but it's not enough compensation to ask somebody to do what they're doing right now.

And hopefully we can get some legislation to get them some more money. We're working on that. I know that with our governor to see if the company would have to fork over a little hazardous pay or hero pay as we call it to keep them from coming to work. And I think that I find really inspiring too is that the team's results seem to be really proud of the work they're doing. I think like a lot of people reading about this stuff in the times or seeing stuff on MSNBC are like, oh, we should boycott Amazon.

We should boycott this. It's like, well, first of all, it's supposed to be the workers that call a boycott, not you. Second of all, these workers don't want an absence of business or commerce. What they want is safety. The demands are staggering start times to reduce worker congestion in facilities, hiring cleaning crews, hand washing stations and hand sanitizer, which you should have had beforehand, personal protective equipment, obviously.

And transparency. And you've really made some advances. Right. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I mean, we've made advances through this, but it was not an easy fight. And again, like in typical fashion, corporate America is always about profit and they put profit before people. And a lot of times, the mentality in there from upper management is, well, you're expendable.

If you die, we'll just fill the seat. And the union has this constant fight and this constant struggle with this to keep us safe and to keep us moving in a social direction that we need to be for economic justice and social justice. It's not an easy fight, but it's a fight you can win if you stick together and you're collectively bogging. I mean, even Bernie Sanders, who's our main man and we love him, he's the only candidate that I know that says, collect the bargaining rights is what makes the middle class the

middle class. And that's a person who gets it and understands what it is to be a working class person in this country. The struggles it is and the lip check to check. Yeah. And I think people are paying attention to this stuff now because it's just so obvious that everyone's panicking and it's impossible to ignore, but it's incredibly important to remember that this crisis didn't start with Corona.

I learned that in the Midwest, you have a lot of UPS workers that don't have any sick leave. And that's a danger not only to them. I mean, you should be disgusted just because people deserve sick leave, but in a situation like this, these are people that are constantly exposed to disease and to all sorts of dangers. I mean, it is a dangerous job. I'm sure you've run into the odd mean dog. Yeah, I've been bit a few times, but yeah, it is a dangerous job.

We did negotiate an MOU that gives you 80 hours full-time pay for two weeks, and part-timers get 40 hours, but after that, there is nothing else left. The problem with that is that we know that this pandemic is going to stretch out and we could actually have a part two to this in September when the season comes back. And so we plan on going back to the table as a joint council and doing under the leadership of Sean O'Brien to go ask for more paid time off. Everybody in America should have paid time off, paid sick time. That's not a privilege.

That should be your right. You should be able to stay home and not fear missing your rent paint for your rent because you got sick. And the fact that we're putting people into bankruptcy or foreclosures or whatever you have, or if they have a spouse that ends up in a nursing home and they actually lose everything they own is appalling that we're living that way. And that's a crime against the working class of this country. And as far as I'm concerned, that's economic genocide against us, and that needs to be

dealt with. And it was only one candidate talking about that, and that was Mr. Sanders. And so we love him for that because he brings a light to the real issues of working-class people. Yeah, bless Bernie, man. It's amazing, too. I think this moment is, again, it's very clarifying. But I think people are sort of looking around now and looking at all of the people that

make their lives function. I mean, the sanitation workers in New York, God knows, we'd probably have like 12 different COVIDs by now if they weren't doing their job. But this is about, you know, communal safety, too. I mean, people don't just, I mean, they have human sympathy for workers, obviously. But this is a situation where you need people to be able to stay home if they are sick. And you read this, there's an article in The Times, there's a woman saying, I feel like my throat is filled with broken glass, but I can't miss work.

That's not just like horrifying and inhumane, that's literally spreading disease. Yeah, that's, like I said, that's genocide upon the working class and the poor. I mean, we see it in Wisconsin. I mean, the 14% of the African American population in Wisconsin, 72% of them make up the fatality ratio of COVID-19. So it is affecting low-income workers and rates. And quite frankly, the leadership that we have now in this country just they don't really care.

And that's why I believe, you know, full-heartedly that they should be charged with war crimes against the people of this country for what they did to us when they, the way they handled this whole pandemic was, it was, it was genocide on us. But you know, we're here, we can build our revolution. That's the whole thing. There's the fight never ends. As I always say, it's an evolving fight. It keeps going.

There's always going to be that conflict, worker versus management type conflict. And from there is the core grassroots where you build your revolution and expand it. You know, we always hear about unions don't want to give up their healthcare or their health funds, right? I'm in a health fund. So it's probably the best medical in the country. I would gladly give up my health fund to give everybody a chance to have a doctor and gladly take that contribution that my employer pays for that to put it back into my pocket and

increase my living standard because, you know, who wouldn't want to do that? Medicine is a right. It's not a privilege and to tell someone who is sick or is potentially going to get sick that you have to go to work because you don't have any paid time off is a crime. Right. And of course, for like a, you know, a militant trade unionist, Medicare for all makes so much sense because what's the thing that you always have to go to the bargaining table with the first thing on the chopping block is healthcare.

Get that out of the way. Maybe you could start working on things like hours, safety, pay. It would be a blessing. Right now we go up 60 cents every August one for our healthcare. Right now it's $13.61 per hour up to $40 for all hours that I work, right? So that's not even talking my hourly rate. They have to pay $13.61, then they got to pay my hourly rate and then they got to pay my pension.

This is ridiculous. This whole system that we have set up to have the employers do this and to basically run our healthcare system is wrong. What did corporate America ever do for workers except crush them? We the people are the real movement and the workers of this country are the real movement and we should be demanding better for ourselves. Right. And it looks like, you know, what you're doing in Rhode Island is really amazing, but it's

catching on. I mean, you've seen locals in Nashville, Tucson, San Francisco, I mean, this has the potential to be a real radicalizing movement. Right. Right. And that's what we're hoping that it catches fire and wakes people up out of the sleep they've been in for since 1981 when Ronnie Reagan took the helm. We need more people to understand that you live in a country for the last 30, 40, 50

years, they've been crushing workers and doing everything in their power to strip your collective bargaining rights away from you so that you don't have a voice. They pushed the right to work agenda. They, you know, they talk about how Medicaid Medicare for all is really socialism. Well, what's wrong with socialism? Somebody told me what's wrong with making sure that the next person gets treated the same way. And if you make more than me, you should pay more than me.

Yep. So we have a link to a GoFundMe that I'll talk a little bit about in a second, but just on sort of an individual level, what can our listeners do to appreciate their UPS vein and their Teamsters and all of the people that are keeping the world running? Well, I always say, I'm big on this one, put a sign on the window near the door. Our UPS guys love that when they pull up to a house and they walk up with the package and they see the sign on the door that says, thank you, Mr. UPS for, you know, bringing me my prescription pills.

You saved my world, you know, drivers love that stuff. Drivers love being treated with dignity and respect because right now those men and women are putting their lives on the line to make sure that you get your prescriptions, that you get your toilet paper, you know, all this stuff that they're bringing to your house. They're putting their lives on the line to do it and just remember that because it's a lot to ask somebody to do and they go to work every day with that fare. So I would just ask that you treat them with dignity and respect. Right.

And keep your distance. Yes. So Teamsters for a Democratic Union and the UPS Teamsters United campaign have a GoFundMe that we will link to and it's to help UPS workers organize and protect themselves from COVID. It's interesting to me and I think really promising that this isn't just sort of like a charitable donation to provide PPE or anything like that. This is an investment in worker power.

You in New England have figured out a model and an organizing strategy that is really getting the goods and that is keeping your workers safe and keeping, you know, all of the customers safe as well. And we want to see that reproduced across the country. I think it's obviously people are, you know, trying to, there's a lot of people in need right now, but this is really an investment in organizing so that this is something that spreads and becomes a real radicalizing movement. Yeah.

And that's the concept behind it, basically, to get people, you know, this is the old saying in the Teamster world. You have somebody hand you a five-hour bill, you have their vote, and what it's really saying is not only did they hand you money and you have their vote, but they're willing to take the grassroots steps to make sure that we get back our union because currently our union is being run by what we call business unionists, you know, James R. Hoffa Jr. and his cronies are not really what we're looking to go, we're going in a different direction, which is more of a grassroots, bottom-up type, international, get back to being Teamster

strong and spreading Teamster power all over this country to restart the working-class engine and get people going again. We saw it in our teachers, our teachers are the biggest, most powerful union in the country right now, and I love my teachers, I'm married to a teacher, and they are showing us what it means to stand up, collectively bargain and fight back corporate greed. That's where the Teamsters, and that's the direction that we want to go and revitalize our industries and get back to our core group of organizing, and this is just a step and a mechanism to make that happen and get people involved and empower them to show them that,

yes, you can do this, we can do this together as a group, and we will make a better change. Right. It's funny to be like, essential workers has kind of like a double meaning, I mean, you're essential for the functioning of people's daily lives, but when you think about what it would mean to have a really serious power labor movement, a powerful labor movement, you would have people like Teamsters, you would have teachers, you would have nurses, these are jobs that are not only essential, they can't be outsourced, you have to have these people stationary, I mean, if we're going to really like invest in a labor movement,

there are certain industries that are like, I think, first priority in terms of what kind of power they have from the immediate get-go. You guys also have, speaking of little Jimmy, he's stepping down, and yeah, yeah, that dynasty is ending, and you've got an election coming up. We'd like to do a whole episode on that at some point, but I wonder if you could sort of briefly tell our listeners what might be in store for the Teamsters coming up. Well, what's in store is that you're going to see another year and a half of really grassroots organizing a revolutionary type movement to build workers' power and get workers energized

to take on whoever the Hoffa cronies throw at us. This is the first time in 20 years, over 20 years, that we actually have a real door opened up that a chance that we can take back the IBT and make it a real revolutionary type-based workers' movement again. Last time we did this was Ron Carey. He was our main man. We loved Ron. He wasn't a TDU guy, but he was a reformer, and now we have Sean O'Brien, Fred Zuckerman

at the top, my own principal officer from this local. People like me pushing it on the shop floors, so we're really going to turn this up in the next year. It'll be the first time in a long time if we get in, you're going to have a couple of really left-wing, radicalized workers that want to take on corporate greed in this country, take on Amazon, take on Walmart, put that fight up and energize other people to do so. We're looking forward to it, man, and we want to bring a lot of revolution. I'm really excited.

I foresee a future of a left-wing, powerful Teamsters union. I can't wait. We're going to, again, I think do a whole episode on that sometime soon, but right now, we really, really need our listeners to tell everyone they know about what the Teamsters are dealing with, and if you possibly can donate, I did to the GoFundMe. This is, again, this isn't just charity. This is an investment in worker power. They're building something.

It's incredibly impressive. We've had amazing success already, and we want to see it spread, and we want to see it grow. Yeah, absolutely. Amen. I can't emphasize it enough. If you got the time or you got a couple of bucks to spare, five, 10, 20, 25 bucks, whatever you got, please give.

This is a grassroots organizing drive put on by TDU and Teamsters United, and we're pushing it and we're getting it out there. We're getting it out to the world to basically get involved and get empowered. And fight corporate greed, now more than ever, do we need this because you can see where this country is going, where it is going to go. Unfortunately, the people that run our country, as I really like to refer to them as the orange clown, who's in charge of things, is all about corporations and taking from poor in a working class as much as he can and stripping of your rights.

You need to wake up. You need to get empowered, and you need to get in the fight. Absolutely. All right. Well, on that note, I think we'll end it, and I just want to say thank you very much for everything that you do. Thank you for bringing me my packages and for bringing the hospitals their packages and for fighting so hard for the working class, and that's the only way we're going to move

forward and have a somewhat humane country. This is really encouraging, and we all really appreciate it. Thank you for giving me the opportunity, and God bless the teamsters and all the workers in the world. All right. Thanks, Matt. Thank you very much for your time, and I'll see you in the next one.