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.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

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.

More From The Atlantic

Four ways to make grief more bearable The “Israel model” won’t work for Ukraine. 18 ideas, arguments, and practical tips to help you navigate the heat Culture Break

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.

The war in Ukraine is forcing experts to rethink ideas about war and is becoming a serious test for armaments.

The allies “understand that this fight is not only a fight for the future of Ukraine,” Biden said, noting that it's also about sovereignty, security and freedom throughout eastern Europe and the world.

"Inefficient" and bad for the environment – some environmentalists are arguing against the reconstruction of the Kakhovka Dam, despite the widespread devastation caused by its breach.

Troops on the frontline in Ukraine say they need promised Western arms soonest to ensure the success of the counteroffensive.

Governments in Europe have a choice to make: do they continue to turn a blind eye to this blood money, or do they face it head-on and make sure the right thing is done, Lucy Hall writes.

Political scientist John Mearsheimer says the West will support a frozen conflict in Ukraine, but not NATO membership.

At the Vilnius summit, the United States and Germany have led the coalition of the squeamish in opposition to announcing a timetable for Ukrainian membership in NATO. They have some modestly plausible reasons, including fear of an automatic commitment to immediate war with Russia and reluctance to bring in a country whose territory is still partially occupied and whose institutions are not fully reformed.

Other arguments suggest a less thoughtful view. Ukraine has to show that it can handle modern military technology, or that it is a thriving democracy? Compare it with militarily negligible and politically contemptible Hungary, and the absurdity of these kinds of requirements becomes clear. One might infer from some official pronouncements that NATO membership is like joining a snooty club to which only those with good pedigree, clean shirt collars, and immaculately shined shoes need apply. It is not. NATO membership for Ukraine is a guarantee of Western (and not only Ukrainian) security and stability. It is not a favor to Ukraine but a move to avert another big European war.

The notion that NATO membership cannot be given to a country at war means that Russia has every incentive to keep the war simmering, no matter the cost. Similarly, the idea that a country that is partly occupied and whose borders are not universally recognized cannot be admitted will cause Russia to cling desperately to any piece of Ukrainian territory it can hold. Let it be noted that Germany joined NATO while under occupation by both the Soviet Union and the Western allies, and before it had acceded to its post-1945 borders.

[Ivo Daalder: Let Ukraine in]

The alternative advanced by President Joe Biden in a CNN interview is the so-called Israel model, in which the West, led by the United States, arms Ukraine to the teeth, guaranteeing the country, as an act of Congress put it with respect to Israel in 2008, “the ability to counter and defeat any credible conventional military threat from any individual state or possible coalition of states or from non-state actors.”

Making strategy by dubious analogy is a bad idea. The historical differences are both illuminating and cautionary.

America extended its guarantee of a “qualitative military edge” to Israel in the aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In other words, it came after Israel had defeated its Arab enemies in four major conflicts (1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973), in part by taking the war into their territories. Israel staged bombing raids against targets deep in Syria and Egypt, including their capitals, from the 1960s forward, and unlike the Ukrainian drones flying to Moscow, these were not mere symbolic strikes. The Six Day War, in 1967, was an overwhelming Israeli victory, which involved the annihilation of its neighbors’ air forces and the advance of Israeli armor and infantry across the de facto 1949 border. The 1973 war similarly ended with Israeli forces within artillery range of Damascus and on the verge of destroying half the Egyptian force that had crossed the Suez Canal. Is maintaining that kind of capability and superiority what Washington and Berlin intend for Ukraine? Do they understand what it would require?

Ukraine, at present, has no comparable edge over the Russian military. It is struggling to expel the Russian invaders from territory they seized in 2022, let alone 2014. Ukraine undoubtedly has an edge over Russia in motivation, skill, and determination, but nothing like what Israel had already demonstrated in 1967 and would do again in 1973 and 1982 against Syria.

Military superiority rests on demography and economics. Over the course of its existence, Israel’s population has grown (1.3 million in 1950, 3.1 million in 1970, nearly 10 million today). Its economy, which was just under a third the size of Egypt’s in 1960, is now substantially larger. Ukraine has been, in essence, bankrupted by the war, and has had a quarter to a third of its population displaced—this on top of a declining birth rate. One projection has Ukraine’s population shrinking (and aging) from 41 million in 2020 to 35 million in 20 years. In short, it cannot tap the demographic and economic vitality that helped make Israel a going military concern.

A series of conventional victories brought a cold peace to Israel’s frontiers after the 1973 war, just as the societal and economic forces that underlay Israel’s military edge were beginning to open the gap with its Arab neighbors. Ukraine’s advantages over Russia are proportionally much less.

Israel’s relatively peaceful accommodation with its neighboring states had one other large element: its nuclear arsenal. By most accounts, Israel developed nuclear weapons as early as 1973. Indeed, during the most intense period of that war, it may have signaled its preparedness to deploy, if not use, them. Even by that year, neither Egypt nor Syria believed, as they had in 1967, that the destruction of the Israeli state by conventional means was possible; their territorial ambitions were strictly limited.

A Ukraine that has no allies pledged to come to its aid in the event of war, whose demographic prospects are poor, whose economy has been devastated not only by brutal battles but by deliberate and massive Russian sabotage and destruction, would be foolish not to pursue nuclear weapons. It has the technical skills not only to build the bombs but to construct delivery systems for them.

That is an outcome no one should want. The Russians might very well be tempted to strike at such a program preemptively, and if the Ukrainians were to get the jump on them, Kyiv might very well detonate a nuclear weapon as a warning against proceeding further.

Ukraine is a large country with few natural borders and a powerful enemy that is likely to attack it again absent NATO membership. The immensity of Russian oil and gas reserves means that Russia can eventually rearm; the stubbornness of the Russian elite’s belief in an imperial state and its rejection of Ukrainian sovereignty suggest its intent to do so. The position, in short, is entirely different from that of Israel versus its immediate opponents in the 1970s and ’80s.

The only security commitments that can give Ukraine some prospect of peace are those that guarantee the active and effective support of Europe and the U.S. in the event of a renewed invasion. Bilateral guarantees, however, simply take the burden off America’s NATO allies and are hostage to the vagaries of American domestic politics. Far better to achieve the same result by bringing Ukraine into NATO as soon as possible. Let it be remembered, too, that in the three-quarters of a century it has existed, NATO has had a 100 percent success rate in deterring conventional Russian attacks on its members, including postage-stamp-size Estonia and other states, like Ukraine, that were once subject to rule from Moscow.

At the 2008 Bucharest summit, NATO declared that it supported Ukraine’s application to join the alliance. We know what good that did. Regrettably, the 2023 Vilnius summit has simply reaffirmed the same in language of comparable mushiness, removing only one bureaucratic hurdle for Ukraine without solidifying its prospects for joining the alliance.  A firm invitation to join NATO and a deadline by which that will occur would have been infinitely preferable, and would deny Russia indefinite time and latitude to prolong this war.

Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty declares that an attack against one member is an attack against all, a fundamental premise of the alliance. But it only commits the alliance and its members to undertake “individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.” It does not, in other words, cause an automatic declaration of war against Russia—but it is a high and demanding commitment to Ukraine’s security. It will thereby be a far more effective deterrent against future Russian aggression, which otherwise is a virtual certainty in the years to come, with all the risks that adhere to that probability.

[Anne Applebaum: Multilateral man is more powerful than Putin realized]

Has NATO membership for Ukraine been excluded for good by the Vilnius summit? No more than the supply of vital weapons to Ukraine was by Washington’s reluctance to provide HIMARS or tanks or Patriot missiles or F-16s, or by Berlin’s initial belief in February 2022 that providing 5,000 surplus helmets to Ukraine was enough of a contribution for it to make. Time and again NATO’s largest members have been pulled—hesitantly, sometimes morosely and resentfully—into doing the right thing by allies closer to the front or with stronger spines and clearer vision. In this case Poland, the Baltic nations, and other frontline states have been joined by Britain, France, and other NATO members in arguing for moving on Ukraine’s membership firmly and quickly.

There is another moment ahead: the 75th anniversary of the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty, which will be held in Washington in 2024. On that occasion President Biden can be the statesmanlike leader NATO needs in ensuring European security for decades to come by admitting Kyiv to the alliance.

Unless, of course, he prefers to be the father of the Ukrainian atom bomb.

At NATO summit, Erdogan talked ratifying Sweden’s membership, an F-16 jet deal, and Turkey's role in the Ukraine war.

Gen Ivan Popov says he refused to keep quiet over issues at the front line in Ukraine.