In March, less than a year after the Teamsters claimed it had “won a historic contract” with UPS, at a meeting with investors, in Louisville, Kentucky, UPS announced its plans to shut down over 200 facilities and conduct a mass layoff of tens of thousands of UPS workers over the next four years in what it entitled the “Network of the Future.”

The plan follows one of the most basic strategies in the capitalist playbook: lower labor costs and increase profits by replacing UPS workers and existing hubs with automated hubs which require significantly less staffing. In January, UPS announced it would lay off 12,000 workers in just 2024. This has already begun, at UPS hubs across the nation, whole shifts have already been cut, and workers are learning about their entire hub closing. Thousands have already been put out of work, and the number of layoffs will likely only intensify over the next few years. Through casting their workforce onto the streets and implementing its “Network of the Future”, UPS estimates it will save save $3 billion by the end of 2028.

Is UPS a struggling company that is “reluctantly” being forced to leave tens of thousands of its workers without jobs in order to survive? No, UPS’s revenue has only grown in recent years increasing from $74 billion in 2019 to $90 billion in 2023. These layoffs are not making UPS any cheaper for consumers either, in an interview with Bloomberg UPS CEO Carol Tomé reported that there will be close to a 6% increase in UPS rates and prices. The only people who will benefit from the mass dismissal of tens of thousands UPS workers are the company’s investors and management.

After the layoffs, the remaining UPS workers will be met with harsh speedups, route consolidation, harassment, and a horribly unsafe working environment. Instead of improving working conditions and safety, like in any typical capitalist firm, UPS’s revenue increases go to expanding its capital and lining the pockets of its investors. UPS part-time workers still are forced to work without breaks in much of the country and UPS warehouses are not temperature controlled, forcing UPSers to work through potentially deadly temperatures in the summer. Multiple UPS drivers and inside workers have been killed on the job already this year. In May, UPS subcontractor Juan Chavez was killed after falling into a trash compactor, and in April, feeder driver Julie Reid was killed in a crash and vehicle fire.

Deaths and injuries among UPS workers are nothing new.. UPS ranks third in the country for reported severe injuries to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, behind only USPS and Walmart (https://www.epi.org/blog/an-average-of-27-workers-a-day-suffer-amputation-or-hospitalization-according-to-new-osha-data-from-29-states-meat-and-poultry-companies-remain-among-the-most-dangerous/). UPS has had to pay almost $200 million in employment related offenses since 2000 (https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/united-parcel-service).

What has the Teamsters, the “union” to which UPS workers belong, done in response to this attack on its supposed membership? What is their response to the deterioration of working conditions and a plan to lay off tens of thousands of its rank-and-file members at UPS? The Teamsters’ leadership—which so-called “communist” organizations like the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), Workers World Party (WWP), and the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) falsely call militant—has no strategy to go on the offensive and save its union members’ jobs. In reality the Teamsters have known about this plan for years and are perfectly willing to go along with it.

The 18th edition of New Day at UPS, a shop paper written by UPS workers, reported that just two days after Teamsters President Sean O’Brien posed for a photo op with the West Charlotte UPS hub’s pre-load shift, those same workers found out their entire building would be closing at the year’s end. Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), which supports Sean O’Brien and controls much of the current leadership of the union, put forward the slogan of “Fight layoffs with contract enforcement.” TDU, of course, knows this is just empty sloganeering. The sell-out state unionist contract is what allows UPS to conduct unrestricted layoffs in the first place, with its complete ceding of all rights to defend workers from “changes in operation” by the company, demanding only that UPS “notify” the IBT “in writing” whenever layoffs or other “changes in operation” occur. Despite Teamsters bureaucrats falsely labeling the contract a “historic victory” for UPS workers, the current contract ratified in August offers no protection to workers from layoffs.

The contract, in fact, goes out of its way to handicap UPS workers’ ability to use their greatest weapon, their collective ability to withold their labor, to withhold the value they produce for the company. Article 8, Section 2 of the UPS National Master Agreement disallows any work stoppage, slowdown, walkout, or lockout outside of three very specific scenarios. It is no surprise that just after announcing plans to lay off tens of thousands of UPS workers, UPS CEO Carol Tomé told CNBC, “we are very pleased with that contract,” directly pointing to how the contract supports the company’s interests. The fact that the Teamsters’ latest contract with UPS utterly betrays the interests of UPS workers is not due to incompetence but intention. In early March, Teamsters Local 25 representative Greg Kerwood publicly admitted on YouTube that Teamsters were aware of the layoffs, saying, “Our contract has nothing to do with these layoffs; this plan was in place four years ago, five years ago.” This exposes how, despite being aware of upcoming layoffs, Teamsters’ leadership opted to do nothing to protect UPS workers from them.

Teamsters’ leadership’s interests, just like the leadership of every state union, are not those of their rank and file proletarian members, but that of the capitalist ruling class. Teamsters time and time again sign contracts and make agreements that serve the interests of the capitalist class over the rank and file of their union. Last summer, just days before they signed a sell-out contract with UPS, Teamsters sold out Yellow Freight workers. On July 23rd, Teamsters called off a pending strike of 20,000 workers at Yellow Corporation, hours before it would’ve begun. just four days later Yellow would declare bankruptcy which put 30,000 workers out of work. 22,000 of those were Teamsters members, who while they were looking for new jobs, investors were carving up their slice of Yellow’s nearly $2 billion in assets. Just like at UPS, Teamsters actively was aware of the impending bankruptcy, massive layoffs and actively collaborated with Yellow. For a decade prior, Teamsters had continued to agree to wage cuts and suspensions on pension obligations, putting more money into the pockets of Yellow’s investors while its members saw their wages plummet.

Teamsters are not one particularly traitorous union among a sea of otherwise combative unions that support the interests of the working class. Despite what revisionist and class collaborationist publications claim, the state unions are not the “basic organizations of the workers”, fundamentally proletarian structures, but with an upper layer of reactionary labor aristocrats controlling them which can be simply driven out by the rest of the “lower” union body. Instead all big modern establishment unions are directly incorporated into the bourgeois state and imperialist system itself, tied at the hip with the bourgeoisie, through their state apparatus.

The UAW and its president Shawn Fain were praised by publications such as Labor Notes, People’s World, Liberation News, Fight Back News, and countless others over the past year for a campaign of isolated strikes at General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis, which won little for workers. The isolated strikes, which included less than thirty percent of autoworkers employed by the “big three” automakers, were primarily held at parts distribution plants. Such plants are after-market facilities at the last stop of the auto supply chain. The UAW largely avoided striking at critical engine and transmission plants, that would’ve significantly impacted auto companies. Ultimately, the UAW signed a contract that awarded pay raises well below its members’ demands and was barely above the inflation rate. Along with pitiful pay raises, UAW President Shawn Fain also claimed that the contract prevented plant closures and layoffs. This proved to be a lie almost immediately, as less than six months after the signing of the contract, General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis all laid off thousands of workers. This, of course, has been ignored by the aforementioned publications which continue to tout Fain in recent months despite his open support and campaigning for Joe Biden and the UAW’s recent failed unionization effort at Mercedes.

The establishment class-collaborationist labor movement in the United States is in a state of perpetual decline. Outside of two outlier years, the number of unionized workers in the United States has been in a downward spiral for over eighty years. In the last 40 years alone, the number of unionized workers has been cut in half. In 1983 20.1% percent of all workers were in a union, last year that number shrunk to 10%, which was a decline even compared to the previous year. More than seventy-five years of stagnation and decline of the labor movement must come to an end if a revolution is to ever succeed in our country. The state unions as de facto and de jure agents of the bourgeoisie collaborate with the monopoly capitalists and refuse to do the bare minimum to protect the working class, as we can see in the current struggle against shutdowns and layoffs, much less go on the offensive to fight for workers’ economic demands and support the fight for proletarian political power. Revolutionaries must place the essential tool of the labor union back in everyday workers’ hands, and must put forward a correct class line in trade unionist struggle. To do this requires carrying out a decisive break with state unionism, and the construction of a new independent, combative, and class-conscious unionist current within the contemporary labor movement.