(The following story by Patrick Howington appeared on the Louisville Courier-Journal website on August 13, 2009.)
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — UPS has enlisted its 345,000 U.S. employees, including those in Louisville, in its intense battle to make it easier for unions to organize drivers at rival FedEx’s express delivery division.
The package-hauling giant has asked employees to write Congress to support changing federal labor law to apply the same union rules to FedEx Express as UPS, potentially increasing costs for FedEx.
UPS has provided its employees with stationery, stamps and work time for the task, said spokesmen at UPS headquarters in Atlanta and its Louisville-based airline.
Many people identifying themselves as employees have complained anonymously on an outside Web site dedicated to UPS topics, browncafe.com, that they felt pressured to write the letters.
“My system manager told us ‘this is not an optional activity.’ I wrote the letters and still feel dirty,” said one posting.
But UPS spokesman Malcolm Berkley said the effort was “absolutely” voluntary.
“The issue is one that impacts every UPS employee,” Berkley said, adding that some wrote letters on their own without being asked. “If an employee did not and does not choose to write a letter, he or she does not have to.”
Mike Mangeot, spokesman for Louisville-based UPS Airlines, said the letter writing has not taken employees away from normal duties for long. “It just takes a few minutes,” he said. UPS has 20,513 employees in Louisville.
The public relations battle between the nation’s two largest package carriers turned nasty in June when Memphis-based FedEx Corp. debuted a Web site labeling the proposed labor law change a “Brown Bailout” for UPS.
The provision is included in an appropriations bill for the Federal Aviation Administration. The bill passed the House of Representatives by a 2-to-1 margin in May.
While UPS and FedEx compete head-to-head for air and ground shipping, they got their starts as very different companies and, as a result, have been governed in part by very different labor laws.
Because FedEx Express was set up as an airline, it falls under a labor law that was first applied to railroads and later to airlines. The Railway Labor Act makes it more difficult to strike and requires unions to organize workers in one national group — a more difficult task than recruiting members at local workplaces.
Even FedEx Express employees not directly involved with air operations, including those that drive delivery trucks, are covered by the Railway Labor Act, and other than pilots, U.S. employees of FedEx Express are not unionized, FedEx spokesman Maury Lane said.
But UPS’ origins as a ground trucking company means it has largely been covered by a different law, the National Labor Relations Act, that allows workers to organize at the local level.
That allows a union to gain a foothold by organizing one location at a time, rather than needing a national majority of workers to join. A union representing workers at just a few locations of a national distribution operation like UPS or FedEx has clout because a shutdown of a key hub can have a wider disruptive effect.
UPS argues that fairness requires moving FedEx Express drivers into the same legal category as UPS drivers.
Berkley, the UPS spokesman, said FedEx Express drivers are the only delivery-company drivers in the country who fall under the Railway Labor Act.
“Your package is not delivered to you by a pilot (and) it doesn’t fall out of an airplane. … It comes to you by a driver in a truck,” he said. “All we are in support of is applying the same law equally to people who do the same jobs.”
But FedEx’s Lane said the change would subject FedEx to work stoppages like the strike by 185,000 Teamsters that hogtied UPS in August 1997. That would be bad for businesses and consumers who rely on express service, he said.
“We’ve operated for 38 years without a work stoppage,” Lane said. He said UPS’s push to change labor rules is “an effort to disrupt our FedEx Express operations by creating local labor disruptions,” which is exactly what the Railway Labor Act aims to prevent.
The Teamsters union, which represents about 250,000 UPS employees, strongly supports the legal change, said Ken Hall, director of the union’s package division. The union has sought to represent FedEx drivers.
“FedEx Express workers are the only employees within the industry … that don’t have the same basic right” to form a local union, Hall said.
Hall said UPS did not force union employees to write letters supporting the legislation and that he would have intervened if they were coerced or punished. He added that the union, too, has asked members to write Congress on the issue.
But Lane said FedEx has received numerous e-mails from UPS employees complaining about being required to write letters.
FedEx said in March that if the provision becomes law, the company might not buy 30 more Boeing 777 freighters — a $6 billion decision that could cost thousands of manufacturing jobs.
The provision would affect about 100,000 FedEx Express employees out of a total of about 125,000, Lane said. Pilots and other air-related employees would not be affected.
Nothing would change for the roughly 165,000 employees of FedEx’s other three divisions, including FedEx Ground. They already fall under the same law as UPS.
The issue could be settled in the Senate, which did not adopt a similar provision after the House passed it in 2007.
The Senate’s own FAA reauthorization bill does not include language changing FedEx Express’s labor status. If the bill passes in its current form, a House-Senate conference committee would have to resolve differences.
Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has received “many letters” on the issue from Kentucky-based employees of both UPS and FedEx, said his press secretary, Robert Steurer. He said McConnell is reviewing the legislation.
A spokesman for Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., did not return a call.