Americans’ shopping habits have made us reliant on delivery workers—and helped UPS’s business boom. Now UPS workers are threatening to strike to get a piece of that success.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

When will the Southwest become unlivable? Learn a foreign language before it’s too late. The Republican lab-leak circus makes one important point.

Five of the most beautiful words to see in my inbox are Your package is coming today, courtesy of UPS. The missive means that something I ordered online—recently: three tie-dyed shirts in different colors, 100 personalized matchbooks for a party—is on its way, and that a classic brown truck will be rolling down my street soon. Like many Americans, I depend on the United Parcel Service and its reliable service, and I welcome digital updates about the status of my stuff.

Lately, I have been thinking more about the human dimension of package delivery, too, and about the hundreds of thousands of workers who make up UPS. Amazon has conditioned many of us to expect speedy, free delivery, and as a result, all package companies are facing intense competitive pressures. As the only union-represented major players among private companies in the delivery game, UPS workers are fighting to make strides for their cohort.

Come August, hundreds of thousands of UPS workers could walk off the job: 97 percent of UPS’s Teamsters have voted to authorize a strike if the union can’t come to an agreement with management by the time their current contract expires, on July 31. The two sides can still align on a contract in the next few weeks. But the possibility of a strike is real—and it would have major repercussions for the workers, the company, and the economy writ large. “UPS is one of the largest players in the delivery business. The nature of a strike would be to shut it down entirely,” Alex Colvin, the dean of the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell, told me.

Even as Amazon, FedEx, and DHL have competed with UPS for curb space and market share in recent years, UPS’s business has boomed. Americans’ online-shopping habits have helped the company’s revenue skyrocket: In 2022, according to company earnings, UPS took in more than $100 billion for the first time. The company’s more than 300,000 union workers, represented by the Teamsters through the largest private-sector union agreement in the country, want a slice of that success. And they are ready to walk out to try to get it. “UPS is so clutch for so many other businesses,” Suresh Naidu, an economics professor at Columbia, told me, so any disruptions could have “a multiplier effect.”

The Teamsters have said that 95 percent of the issues in their negotiations are "out of the way." A major sticking point now regards the fate of part-time workers, who represent much of the unit. The union is working to get better pay for them. Unlike full-time drivers, who can make about $40 an hour, the part-timers—many of whom are package handlers—make an average of $20 an hour, a company spokesperson told me. Asked about the unresolved issues at the negotiating table, the spokesperson for UPS said, “We’re focused on economic issues, especially pay for part-time workers.” He also noted that part-time workers are eligible to receive a pension and health insurance with no premium.

Over the Fourth of July weekend, negotiations broke down. Now each side is blaming the other. A spokesperson for the Teamsters told me that two days ago, there were no more bargaining sessions scheduled.

UPS has had a productive relationship with the Teamsters for nearly 100 years, and as the company grew, so did its unionized workforce. The company’s workers have gone on strike before, most recently in 1997, in what was then the largest American labor action in decades. At the time, 185,000 workers picketed for 15 days and ultimately declared victory. A lot has changed since then—including what customers expect. Colvin said that while the last UPS strike was certainly disruptive, “I would expect [a strike] to have a bigger impact today across the country.”

This strong union history makes UPS both an outlier in the current delivery landscape and a leader when it comes to pay and benefits. Seventy percent of UPS’s workers in the U.S. are represented by unions (that includes the Teamsters, as well as other unions for employees such as machinists and pilots). Amazon, which started delivering its own packages after shipping delays in the 2013 holiday season, is largely not unionized—though its structure may make it vulnerable to labor action at key locations. Gig workers, who are largely independent contractors, are playing a greater role in package delivery, too.

Saying that workers are ready to go on strike can help the Teamsters gain leverage at the bargaining table. But it’s not the only tool the union has at its disposal. Colvin told me that because the union is negotiating a master contract for workers across the country, it has more bargaining leverage than it would in a series of smaller local contracts: UPS’s integrated, national delivery system is part of what makes it a great company, he said, but also means that it’s reliant on its wide network of workers. The tight labor market gives these workers further leverage, because UPS may struggle to find replacement workers during a strike, Naidu told me.

The outcome of these negotiations could have an effect on other workers in the industry, too, especially those  at other companies, like Amazon, who might be looking to unionize with the Teamsters. Colvin told me that a positive outcome for the UPS workers would “send a strong message to workers organizing at places like Amazon about union representation.”

American workers have lost a lot of ground in recent decades. As the country’s workforce has ballooned, its number of union workers has not kept pace. But workers, including many young people, are excited about unions right now. It’s hard to measure that energy beyond anecdotes, and it may take years for union density to rebuild. But public perception of unions is as positive as it’s been since the 1960s, Colvin told me, and the outcome of UPS’s negotiations may shape that further. Strikes have been happening and looming across industries, including in Hollywood and at Starbucks.

Americans’ reliance on fast shipping can be tough for workers: Many have to complete their delivery routes in extreme heat (at UPS last month, the union and the company came to a tentative agreement on new heat-safety measures that included adding air-conditioning to new trucks and fans to existing ones).. But our dependence on shipping may also give workers leverage at UPS. We need them. That’s great for the company, for the most part, and it could turn out to be great for the workers, too.

Related:

Surprise! You work for Amazon. If 15-minute-delivery apps sound too good to be true, that’s because they are. Today’s News The Secret Service wrapped its investigation into a small bag of cocaine found at the White House. The agency was unable to identify a suspect. Ukraine was not able to secure a timeline for membership to NATO, but received long-term assistance pledges from the United States and other G-7 countries. Multiple suspected tornadoes touched down in the Chicago area. Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf rounds up a second batch of reader responses to the Supreme Court’s affirmative-action decision.

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Evening Read

Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid

By Jonathan Haidt

What would it have been like to live in Babel in the days after its destruction? … Let’s hold that dramatic image in our minds: people wandering amid the ruins, unable to communicate, condemned to mutual incomprehension.

The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.

Read the full article.

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Watch. Joy Ride (out in theaters now) is part of a new crop of films reviving R-rated raunch at the theaters and upending tropes about women in filthy romps.

Listen. The AI doomers are trying to scare us. In a new episode of Radio Atlantic, Hanna Rosin talks to The Atlantic’s executive editor, Adrienne LaFrance, and staff writer Charlie Warzel about what should really concern us.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I recently learned some new information that led me to feel that a mea culpa is in order: To my surprise, apparently Taylor Swift did sign a sponsorship agreement with FTX! A couple of weeks ago in the Daily, I included in my P.S. the nugget that Taylor Swift had reportedly turned down the opportunity to partner with FTX, the now-bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange. This anecdote was widely reported after the lawyer Adam Moskowitz said as much on a podcast.

But last week, The New York Times reported a new twist: The tale turned out to be apocryphal. Moskowitz told the Times that he actually had no inside information about the talks. In reality, Swift’s team did sign an FTX agreement, and it was Sam Bankman-Fried’s team that pulled out. I maintain that Swift ended up dodging a decentralized bullet—just not for the reasons I thought.

— Lora

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

This is the second batch of reader responses to the Supreme Court’s affirmative-action decision. Batch one is here.

Replies have been edited for length and clarity.

Matt argues that the stakes are lower than many think:

I find the competition for all the elite schools really out of touch with the reality of most people. As a high schooler, I bombed the SAT. I hadn’t figured anything out in my life, so I decided to do two years at a community college, then transfer to a larger state school in rural Appalachia. I did well and graduated with honors. Everyone should get a fair shake at life. But when you have to divvy up a limited number of spots, there’s going to be some winners and losers. It’s just that some of the “losers” in the competition for admissions to Harvard are going to end up attending their secondary-choice Ivy on full rides.

Lucretia laments the decision:

It seems to me that affirmative action is an attempt to make up for the failure to provide basic services in schools, health care, policing, and other services in poor, Black, and First Nation communities. I would suggest that poverty and systemic racism are the problem and need to be corrected. Until they are, affirmative action is probably necessary.

Mary urges colleges to work around the decision:

As long as racism and other prejudices persist, affirmative action will be necessary. As long as we continue to have opportunity gaps by race, class, language, religion, and gender, we will need strategies in place to eliminate those gaps. For the selective colleges and universities that will be most impacted, we need to rethink recruitment and we need to be more intentional about partnerships with high schools and community colleges.

If we are serious about racial diversity on our campuses, we need to partner with organizations and leaders in communities of color to actively recruit future students, and we need to start before the senior year of high school. College-going identity starts to solidify in middle school so we need to start there. We can’t wait for students to come to us. We need to tap into our alumni of color and current students of color to partner in these recruitment efforts. We also need a multipronged strategy to rethink admissions. We can do that by reducing or eliminating legacy admissions. Due to a long-standing history of racism in the U.S., our city neighborhoods and suburban communities are already racially segregated. We can also take geography into consideration by zip code, census tract, and even census block. We can ramp up holistic admissions and give more weight to essays, interviews, and other qualitative measures.

Anna questions a premise of using race in college admissions:

Ending race-based admissions is a good decision because “race” is not a category in which we can segregate people. The national census has trouble even correctly counting representatives of each race. The concept of race as in skin color (Black, white etc.) is racist and colonialist in nature. Many Black people in South America have been living there for generations, becoming part of those nations, integrating into society, becoming Latino. Who are we to assign them to other [races]? And what about mixed children? How should we consider them—if you’re Black and white, does it cancel each other out? Should children looking more Black be officially considered more disadvantaged than their lighter-toned counterparts with the same parentage?

If one of your grandparents was black and it really shows, should you be treated differently than someone whiter, but with three Black grandparents and rare genetics that made that happen? If you are Black Indigenous, are you different from white Indigenous? When you look at income, which is going to benefit minorities disproportionately anyway, you can much more easily divide people into nonarbitrary categories.

Mark defends the use of race in admissions:

The concepts of fairness and justice do not arise in a vacuum, detached from the human societies that create them. Once upon a time, society considered trial by combat “fair.” The notion that we should not take race into account when considering admissions would be more palatable if we truly lived in a color-blind society (which I am an advocate for). We do not. Ours is a society in which race still privileges and disadvantages certain peoples. As long as that is the case, affirmative action is necessary.

Indeed, ideologies like critical race theory arise because minorities are not given a seat at the table and reject the systems of society, even if they happen to be good systems. If we want to preserve the good parts of society (and there are good parts of Western civilization), we need to have minority groups participate and benefit from that system—otherwise they are justified in tearing it down. Affirmative action is not just a moral good, it serves a profoundly practical purpose—to keep society stable and strengthen trust in our institutions.

H. is a gay white male from the South who now attends a top-20 private institution.

I do not believe in affirmative action. The issue with admissions isn’t race, it’s wealth. Many of the people of color at my predominantly white college come from vastly wealthy backgrounds and attended premier boarding schools across the world (Eton, St. Andrews, Exeter, etc.). It is oversimplifying the issue of representation to boil this debate down to race. Although it is true people of color are more likely to be impoverished, have fewer resources, and attend worse public schools, white and Asian people in underfunded communities experience this, too. I went to a public school that was severely underfunded, and my family could afford no tutors or enrichment programs. My high school was majority white. We all experienced an equal lack of resources. What is the value of biasing applicants by race, if the similarity with their white peers is yachting or using summer as a verb? While admissions should strive to reflect the demographic makeup of this nation, they should reflect the financial background of it as well.

Hilary, “a lifelong liberal,” writes:

As an Asian American I agree with the Supreme Court’s striking down the use of race in college admissions. I find it patently unfair that the average Asian American admitted to Harvard has SAT scores higher than African Americans who are admitted, and also higher than whites. Why should my teen be so disadvantaged for college admissions based on his race? Many of the current African American, Hispanic, and Native American admits aren’t from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. I believe that universities should scrap preferences for athletes, children of faculty, donors, and legacies, and pursue socioeconomic and political diversity instead of racial diversity. Race and ethnicity shouldn’t be factors.

Matthew defends the principle of race neutrality in law:

Even as a solid liberal, I have always been flummoxed by the left’s insistence that using race in higher admissions is acceptable. It is a classic example of “ends justify the means” thinking and it undermines foundational principles we should all agree on. Justice Jackson was correct to say that “deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.” But race’s relevance in life does not mean it should be relevant in the law.

One of the law’s purposes is to lay out neutral principles that can be fairly applied across the board. If we agree as a society that people should not be treated differently because of their race (and I hope we do), then there is no principled way to say using race in admissions upholds this ideal. Further, as a legal matter, if we say that diversity in college is a “compelling government interest” that meets the constitutional requirements of strict scrutiny, then practically anything is fair game for the use of race.

There are many principles that provide bedrock support for a well-functioning and just society even if they are not true in any factual sense. For example, we presume those charged with a crime are innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt using admissible evidence. This procedural protection makes our society a better place to live overall, and it is more fundamental than any one case.

Suppose a person commits a murder but walks free because the available admissible evidence could not prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt (e.g., all witnesses have died of natural causes). We consider this an acceptable outcome because it was the correct result of a system whose principles we support. If we give in to the temptation to make an exception in this one case, then we beg the question of why we even had the system in the first place. And where do we draw the line? And who decides where to draw it?

In the same way, we have a principle that people should not be treated differently before the law based on their race. The fact that Black Americans in particular are subjected to racism and discrimination, including by the government, does not justify using race as a general mechanism to balance the scales. Who exactly is deciding how to do the balancing?

This is by no means to suggest the law is powerless to right past wrongs. If an employer discriminates against Black employees, they can be sued. This means the actual perpetrator is held responsible for their actions. We don’t punish all employers in the industry as a group. Even in the case of more systemic wrongs, there is a way to be more rigorous in our response. We paid reparations to Japanese Americans who were interned during World War II, and we could pay reparations for slavery without putting the burden on any one group based on their immutable characteristics.

In the case of affirmative action, however, we apparently decided that Asian and white college applicants should bear the burden of the sins of their parents’ generation. After all, college admissions at a competitive school is by definition zero-sum. It is odd to me that the left has fought so hard to defend the use of race in such a specific context. After all, most colleges accept the majority of applicants. Affirmative action only really affects a select few of the world’s most competitive schools. This strikes me as a Band-Aid on a serious wound. The interventions needed to minimize or reverse the effects of systemic racism must happen much earlier. Undoing redlining or properly funding poorer school districts would go much farther to making our society more equal. These interventions can also be justified without treating individuals only as members of racial groups.

Affirmative action was always destined to be a Pyrrhic victory at best.

Daniel has a suggestion:

If one wanted to return to the original idea for affirmative action, perhaps the answer is to award points to college applicants—regardless of race—who are descended from people enslaved in the United States.

S.B. believes there is a strong case for focusing on economic disadvantage:

I’m a white student from a low-income background at a very selective private school in Massachusetts. My college has been writing emails to the student body about how important affirmative action is to their admissions process and how this decision harms their ability to “attract and educate a community made up of many different kinds of students.” I hope, though, that this decision will create a better education system for students of all races, and that it will motivate schools to focus more on factors like class and geography when making admissions decisions. The best way to fix the racial wealth gap is to better support all economically disadvantaged people. There is no way in which helping poor people of one race hurts poor people of another race; therefore there is no good rationale for affirmative action as a way to solve economic inequality.

Then the primary motivation for race-conscious admissions is social diversity, something I do feel I have benefitted from as a student. However, I believe colleges should look deeper than race and create communities of people who don’t just look different but think and act differently.

James argues that “as a civilization, we have to move beyond skin color as an essential quality of a person before it’s the undoing of our societies, because of one inescapable point nearly everyone misses: The mind fundamentally finds security in homogeneity—the known, familiar and safe—and there is literally nothing we can do about it except stop separating people into the other.”

The ruling comes after Turkey agreed to allow Sweden to join NATO which it previously called a haven for 'terrorists'.