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    Impact of Hollywood Strikes on Jobs Goes Beyond the Strikers

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    Walkouts by screenwriters and actors have meant less work in fields that cater to the TV and film industry.One reason the August employment report wasn’t stronger: Television and movie production has largely halted since a deadlock in contract negotiations between major studios and unions that represent screenwriters and actors.The motion picture and sound recording industry subtracted 16,800 jobs in August. That’s not a huge share of its approximately 438,000-person work force, but it underestimates the total impact of the labor stoppages, given how much spending power the film industry creates in Los Angeles specifically.The shutdown started when 11,500 members of the Writers Guild of America went on strike in May. In the second quarter alone, according to Los Angeles’s film office, activity was down 28.8 percent from a year earlier.The stoppages spread when SAG-AFTRA, which represents more than 160,000 actors and broadcasters, struck in July after its contract with the largest film and television studios expired.Striking actors and writers, however, don’t translate one for one into payrolls. For one thing, many of SAG-AFTRA’s members work for television news stations and aren’t on strike. Those who do act in movies and TV shows usually sign contracts, sometimes for a day or a week, rather than entering into a continuing employment relationship.Between intermittent gigs, they’re used to taking second jobs, like waiting on tables or designing websites. During the strike, they’re also allowed to work in theater and commercials, as well as on a handful of independent projects that have agreed to abide by the union’s demands.Even with no work, most earn at least some money through residuals — although that revenue has shrunk with the rise of streaming, and will fade as the months drag on.“We’re used to being freelancers, and just being able to go along,” said Jodi Long, president of SAG-AFTRA’s Los Angeles local. “For now, what’s really going to affect the job market is the people on set — the hair and makeup people, the gaffers and the grips and the people in production.”Ms. Long is right: The support services required to make movies and shows have largely shut down. Some serve other industries as well, but many have grown up around the needs of film production. Even if the industry becomes very busy when the strike ends as studios restock their pipelines, months of income will be hard to replace.Take Limelight Catering. Its owner, Steve Michelson, mostly mothballed the business in May when the writers’ strike started, laying off 50 staff members, nearly all of them represented by the Teamsters. Since then, he has been repairing trucks and doing other maintenance at his facility in the northern reaches of the Los Angeles area.“We’re kind of the side effect,” Mr. Michelson said. “We depend on the film industry, but we get nothing out of this. The actors and the writers, hopefully they’ll get a nice raise, but we get nothing out of it.”Unlike striking workers in California, those who lose their jobs as collateral damage of labor disputes are eligible for unemployment insurance. (New York State does allow workers on strike to collect unemployment checks.)That’s what most of Mr. Michelson’s workers are doing. Many of those who were in more physical jobs, like carrying heavy cameras and lights around, are using the time to take care of occupational injuries by claiming disability benefits.Bill Bridges, a member of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, has worked as a grip for 25 years. Getting through the Covid-19 shutdown was hard enough, he said, and then he needed a year off for a total knee replacement. During that time, Mr. Bridges became licensed to drive a truck, and applied for jobs with the long-haul freight lines — but he said they paid only $650 a week for someone with no experience.After recovering from surgery, he was able to drive film trucks, and sometimes earned $1,600 a day. That stopped when the talent went on strike. This time, he’s back on disability to get bunion surgery.Mr. Bridges supports the strikers, but said he was way behind on bills, barely sustaining his wife and 11-year-old son. The union has started a mutual aid food pantry and a GoFundMe appeal for its members.“This is probably financially the lowest point in my life,” he said. He worries about his own union’s contract negotiations, coming up next year: “If there’s another strike, I don’t know what I’m going to do.” More

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    West Coast Dockworkers Ratify Contract

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    The six-year agreement is expected to increase traffic at Pacific ports, which had sagged because of the prospect of a walkout.Dockworkers at ports along the West Coast have ratified a new contract, securing a sweeping agreement set to last six years and expected to ease tensions after cargo shipments were diverted to other regions.The contract between the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and the Pacific Maritime Association, which operates the terminals, covers 22,000 dockworkers at 29 ports from Los Angeles to Seattle.The contract was approved by 75 percent of members who voted, the union said late Thursday. Details of the agreement were not released publicly, and the union declined to comment. Unionized workers at the ports have average salaries in the low six figures.The maritime association did not respond to a request for comment.The two sides announced in June that they had reached a tentative agreement after a year of negotiations that prompted intervention from the Biden administration and coincided with a decline in the volume of cargo at several major ports along the West Coast.During the negotiation period, as workers staged a series of slowdowns, including at the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, some shipping companies diverted freight to ports along the Gulf and East Coasts and then never returned to their old routes.And the movement of goods continued to lag into the summer.At the Port of Los Angeles, the amount of cargo imported in July was down 25 percent from a year earlier. But at Port Houston, where some companies rerouted cargo, officials reported its best July on record in processing cargo.Geraldine Knatz, a former head of the Port of Los Angeles and now professor of the practice of policy and engineering at the University of Southern California, said she expected the contract’s ratification to give some shippers the level of comfort they needed to return to their old routes.“Everyone is expecting we will see an increase in volume,” she said of cargo handled on the West Coast.Matthew Shay, president of the National Retail Federation, said the West Coast ports played a critical role in the vitality of the business community nationwide.“Now that an agreement has been ratified by all parties, the millions of businesses and employees who rely on their operations can be assured that long-term stability will remain at the West Coast ports,” Mr. Shay said.Santul Nerkar More

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    UAW Votes to Authorize Strikes if Negotiations Fail

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    The United Auto Workers union is seeking big raises and other gains in contract talks with General Motors, Ford and Stellantis.The United Auto Workers union said on Friday that 97 percent of its members had voted to authorize strikes against General Motors, Ford Motor and Stellantis if the union and companies were unable to negotiate new labor contracts.The result gives the union’s president, Shawn Fain, the power to tell workers to walk off the job once the current contracts expire on Sept. 14.Strike authorization votes are normally formalities that pass by significant margins and do not ensure strikes. But this vote comes as the newly energized U.A.W. takes a more assertive stance with automakers, part of a larger shift in organized labor.G.M., Ford and Stellantis have posted strong profits for about a decade. That has emboldened Mr. Fain and his members to call for substantial wage increases, cost-of-living adjustments, and improved pensions and health care benefits.“This is our time to take back what we are owed,” he said on Facebook Live on Friday. “We are united, and we are not afraid,” he added.Mr. Fain, who was narrowly elected president this year in the union’s first direct election of its top leaders, appears to have united the union’s members. He appeared at rallies with workers in Detroit on Wednesday and in Louisville, Ky., on Thursday and Friday. About a dozen similar events are planned over the next two weeks. Such events were rare in contract talks over the last 20 years.“There’s nervousness, but there’s excitement,” Luigi Gjokaj, a vice president at U.A.W. Local 51, said at the Detroit rally. “If the company comes to the table and they’re fair, we’ll have an agreement. If it has to go to a strike, we are prepared.”Mr. Fain spoke to about 100 workers at that rally from the bed of a pickup truck just outside a Stellantis plant that makes the Jeep Wagoneer, a highly profitable sport utility vehicle.“We’re not asking to be millionaires,” he said to loud cheers. “We just want our fair share.”In a statement after the result of the strike vote was announced, Ford said it hoped to work with the U.A.W. toward “creative solutions during this time when our dramatically changing industry needs a skilled and competitive work force more than ever.”This month, Mr. Fain sent the companies a list of demands, including the possibility of working only four days a week and wage increases of 40 percent, noting that the chief executives of G.M., Ford and Stellantis have been awarded bigger compensation packages over the last four years. New hires at auto plants start at about $16 an hour and over several years can work their way up to the $32 an hour earned by veteran workers.G.M., Ford and Stellantis have suggested they will probably agree to some form of higher wages. In a fresh indication of how the talks may go, an Ohio battery plant owned jointly by G.M. and LG Energy Solution, a South Korean battery maker, agreed on Thursday to increase the wages of 1,900 U.A.W. workers by 25 percent on average.Mr. Fain had repeatedly criticized wages at the plant, which had started at about $16 an hour, as being too low. The plant is covered by a separate bargaining agreement from the one the union is negotiating for workers in G.M.’s wholly owned plants. Wages there will now start at about $20 an hour.The three manufacturers aim to minimize increases in labor costs in any new contract because they are spending tens of billions of dollars on a momentous transition to electric vehicles. The companies have suggested that agreeing to all or most of Mr. Fain’s demands would leave them at a competitive disadvantage against Tesla, the dominant maker of electric cars, and European and Asian automakers that operate nonunion plants in the United States.President Biden told reporters on Friday that he was “concerned” about a potential strike by autoworkers. “I’m talking with the U.A.W.,” he said.Mr. Biden said the transition to electric vehicles should not shortchange workers. “I think that there should be a circumstance where jobs that are being displaced are replaced with new jobs,” he said, adding that the pay for those new jobs “should be commensurate.”Former President Donald J. Trump, who is the leading candidate for the Republican nomination, has seized on autoworkers’ unease about the switch to electric vehicles to court the U.A.W., which typically backs Democrats but has declined to endorse Mr. Biden so far.Despite the costs of investing in electrification, the three automakers are enjoying healthy profits.G.M. said in July that it expected to earn more than $9.3 billion this year, about $1 billion more than a previous forecast. Stellantis, which is based in Amsterdam and owns Chrysler, Jeep, Ram and other auto brands, made 11 billion euros (about $11.9 billion) in the first half of this year, a record. Ford expects earnings before taxes of $11 billion to $12 billion this year. All three companies make most of their profits in North America.“Regardless of what other opinions might be, business profits enable future investments, which support long-term job security and opportunities for all,” said Gerald Johnson, G.M.’s executive vice president for global manufacturing and sustainability, in a video message to employees last week.The U.A.W. typically names one company that it will focus on in negotiations and make the target of a strike if it cannot reach an agreement. The union has not done so thus far, although Mr. Fain has publicly sparred the most with Stellantis.After Mr. Fain presented his demands, Stellantis responded with proposals that would increase how much workers contributed to the cost of health care, reduce the company’s contributions to retirement accounts and allow the company to close plants temporarily with little advance notice.In a Facebook video, Mr. Fain angrily denounced the Stellantis proposals and tossed a copy in a wastebasket. “That’s where it belongs, the trash, because that’s what it is,” he said.Stellantis’s chief operating officer for North America, Mark Stewart, said in a letter to employees that he was “incredibly disappointed” by Mr. Fain’s remarks. “The theatrics and personal insults will not help us reach an agreement,” Mr. Stewart said.Tensions between the U.A.W. and Stellantis, which was formed in the 2021 merger of Fiat Chrysler and Peugeot S.A., have been simmering since the automaker idled a Jeep plant in Illinois. One of Mr. Fain’s key objectives is getting the company to reopen the factory. More

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    UPS Workers Avert Strike by Approving New Contract

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    The vote by members of the Teamsters union removes a potential threat to the economy.Averting a strike that could have shaken the U.S. economy, the union representing more than 300,000 United Parcel Service employees announced Tuesday that its members had ratified a new labor agreement with the shipping giant.The union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, said that its UPS members approved the five-year contract with more than 86 percent support.The Teamsters have said that the agreement includes wage gains of at least $7.50 an hour for current employees over its five-year term. It also raises the minimum pay for part-time workers to $21 an hour from under $17, and raises the top rate for full-time delivery drivers to about $49 on average.Under the previous contract, which expired on Aug. 1, full-time drivers made an average of about $42 an hour after four years on the job.In a statement, the union’s president, Sean O’Brien, said the contract was the most lucrative ever at UPS and would serve as a model for other workers that the union is seeking to organize. “This is the template for how workers should be paid and protected nationwide, and nonunion companies like Amazon better pay attention,” Mr. O’Brien said.The Teamsters have made unionizing Amazon a top priority in recent years, and Mr. O’Brien said while running for the union’s presidency in 2021 that doing so would first require big, concrete gains at other companies.Despite the ratification, the new UPS contract will not take effect immediately. The union said in its statement that a group of workers in Florida voted down a supplement to the national contract that covers about 175 members — one of 44 supplements that the union also negotiated.The union said its negotiators would immediately meet with UPS to resolve the remaining issues so that those Florida members can vote again. The national contract will take effect once the supplement is approved.UPS declined to comment beyond a brief news release noting the ratification vote and stating that the Florida supplement would be “finalized shortly.”The Teamsters had been aggressive in mobilizing members and ratcheting up pressure on the company in recent months, including picket-line practice and training sessions for strike captains. Mr. O’Brien has frequently referred to corporate leaders as a “white-collar crime syndicate” and argued that “this multibillion-dollar corporation has plenty to give American workers — they just don’t want to.”UPS moves about one-quarter of the tens of millions of packages shipped in the United States each day, according to the Pitney Bowes Parcel Shipping Index. Its adjusted net income rose more than 70 percent from 2019 to last year, reaching more than $11 billion.The negotiations on a national contract began in April, and the union announced in mid-June that its members had voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike.The two sides resolved many key issues by early July, including eliminating a lower-paid category of full-time driver that had angered many UPS employees, and requiring air conditioning in new trucks to improve heat safety. But then negotiations broke down, with the Teamsters arguing that the company had not offered sufficient improvements in pay for part-time workers, who make up more than half of the union’s UPS members.Mr. O’Brien and the union spent the next few weeks condemning what they sometimes referred to as “part-time poverty” jobs, before the sides resumed negotiating in late July and quickly finalized a tentative deal.UPS employees represented by the union began voting on the agreement in early August. While some part-time workers continued to argue that the wage gains should have been even larger and urged a “no” vote, the final margin suggested that most were satisfied with the deal. More

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    New Union Leaders Take a Harder Line

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    Pushed by angry members, unions representing actors, autoworkers and UPS employees are becoming increasingly assertive under new leadership.Shawn Fain is not a typical president of the United Automobile Workers union.Mr. Fain recently declined a symbolic handshake with the chief executives of the major Detroit automakers, a gesture that traditionally kicks off contract negotiations. He is seeking an ambitious 40 percent wage increase for rank-and-file members — in line, he says, with the pay gains of those corporate leaders over the past four years. And in a video meeting with members last week, Mr. Fain threw a list of proposals from Stellantis, the maker of Chrysler and Jeep, into a wastebasket, saying it belonged in the trash “because that’s what it is.”On one level, the circumstances that produced the union’s more aggressive leadership are idiosyncratic. Mr. Fain, who won his position in March, is the first president in the union’s history, dating back nearly 90 years, to be elected directly by its members. The change took place after a major corruption scandal engulfed two of his predecessors and several more union officials.But on another level, the forces that swept Mr. Fain into power are the same ones that have borne down on unions across a variety of industries: a feeling among members that they have spent years enduring out-of-touch leaders, meager wage growth and concession-filled labor agreements, which forced some to do similar jobs as co-workers for less pay.“We kept being told, ‘This is a good contract,’” said Shana Shaw, a U.A.W. member who has worked at a General Motors plant in Missouri since 2008. “And our members are saying, ‘It’s not a good contract!’”The long-simmering rage helps explain why, in addition to Mr. Fain, several prominent unions are now in the hands of outspoken leaders who have taken their membership to the brink of high-stakes labor stoppages — or beyond.Sean O’Brien, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, has repeatedly referred to corporate leaders as a “white-collar crime syndicate” and warned that a strike of the union’s 300,000-plus United Parcel Service members appeared inevitable. (The union recently reached a tentative agreement that members are voting on.)Just after a union of more than 150,000 Hollywood actors called a strike in July, Fran Drescher, president of SAG-AFTRA, said that she was “shocked by the way the people that we have been in business with are treating us.” She added: “It is disgusting. Shame on them!”The companies, including UPS and the automakers, have indicated that they are willing to increase compensation but cannot jeopardize their long-term viability. The large Hollywood studios have offered actors pay increases but say they must be able to adapt to the decline of traditional television.Some executives have called out the unions’ more confrontational gestures. “The theatrics and personal insults will not help us reach an agreement,” Mark Stewart, a top Stellantis official, said in a letter to employees after Mr. Fain literally discarded the company’s proposals.And channeling members’ anger is not without risk: It can raise expectations and make it difficult for leaders to finalize contracts. Mr. O’Brien is facing a “vote no” campaign organized largely by UPS part-timers who argue that the union did not secure large enough raises.The populist approach is not unique to labor unions. The 2008 financial crisis and the grindingly slow recovery produced a more militant style of politics that upended established institutions around the world. The crisis helped lay the groundwork for the unexpected support of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential race.If anything, unions were slower to adapt to the rising anger than other institutions, largely because they were less democratic.In 2018, UPS employees voted down a labor contract negotiated by the Teamsters leadership, which created a new category of lower-paid drivers. The union’s president, James P. Hoffa, who had served in the position for nearly 20 years, used a procedural rule to impose the contract anyway.But even the change-averse labor movement could not withstand a final blow: Covid-19, and union members’ anger over their perilous working conditions as corporate profits grew at one of the fastest rates in decades.“There’s a historical memory of all the concessions they made,” said Ruth Milkman, a sociologist of labor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, referring to union members. “And they feel shafted. The C.E.O.s are sitting pretty with all this pandemic money that didn’t go into their pockets.”Many nonunion workers saw their wages rise rapidly thanks to a tight job market, but contracts negotiated before the pandemic often locked union members into smaller wage increases as inflation surged.Mr. O’Brien has tapped into that resentment.A vice president and ally of Mr. Hoffa in the mid-2010s, Mr. O’Brien ran to replace him in 2021, deriding his predecessor for foisting concessionary contracts onto members. He vowed to raise pay for part-timers at UPS — an unusual concern for a would-be Teamster president, even though part-timers make up a majority of the union’s members there — and secured a significant wage increase.Fran Drescher, center, president of SAG-AFTRA, came to channel her members’ anxiety over declining pay because of the rise of streaming.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesOther union leaders have followed a similar arc. In 2021, Ms. Drescher ran for president of SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union now on strike, on the union’s moderate slate and narrowly won. But she came to channel her members’ anxieties over the rise of streaming, which has led to longer gaps in work for many actors and more limited royalties as shows are reused less often.“The streaming contracts negotiated back at the beginning of this, when certain individuals thought this would be a fad, set us up for failure,” said Linsay Rousseau, a SAG-AFTRA member who works primarily as a voice actor. She said Ms. Drescher’s outspokenness had won over even members who voted against her.In some cases, outraged rank-and-filers have taken matters into their own hands. Edward Hall, a rail worker and local union official in Tucson, said he decided to run for the presidency of the more than 25,000-member Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen in early 2022. The union’s longtime president had arrived to hold a town-hall meeting about labor negotiations that had dragged on for over two years. But, Mr. Hall said, he was unable to provide frustrated members with a timetable for a deal. (Dennis Pierce, the former president, declined to comment.)Mr. Hall was elected last fall, shortly after Congress intervened to enact a labor agreement that members of several rail unions had voted down. Many workers felt the agreement did not go far enough to rein in a system of railroad operations that sought to minimize equipment and employees.“It was profitable for them,” Mr. Hall said, referring to rail carriers. “But for lack of a better way to put it, it made life on the railroad hell for regular employees.”The combination of agitated members and more assertive leaders can sometimes pry loose concessions from employers even without a strike, especially amid a worker shortage. This year, rail carriers began voluntarily addressing one of the workers’ biggest concerns: the lack of paid sick days.At UPS, Mr. O’Brien spent months preparing his members for a possible strike, even holding training sessions for strike captains and practice pickets. The pressure appeared to yield significant gains in the recent tentative agreement between the two sides, including more than $7 an hour in raises over the five years of the contract.In an interview last month, Mr. O’Brien said the Teamsters’ actions under his leadership had made the strike threat credible. “We’ve been striking since I took over,” said Mr. O’Brien, pointing to other companies where the union represents workers. David Pryzbylski, a labor lawyer at Barnes & Thornburg who represents employers, said the strident rhetoric of union leaders often reflected a genuine shift in workers’ attitudes. Still, he added, negotiations more often hinge on fundamentals like a company’s profitability and the union’s ability to disrupt operations through a strike, making it wise for employers to ignore the bluster.“A lot of times that stuff stops: They go out and say what they wanted to say, they send up a signal flare and move on,” Mr. Pryzbylski said. “If you start responding, it stays in the news cycle.”Sean O’Brien, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, in white, has repeatedly referred to corporate leaders as a “white-collar crime syndicate.”Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesThe full-throated demands can also backfire in economic terms. Yellow, a trucking company with 30,000 employees, declared bankruptcy several months after talks with the Teamsters broke down. The company’s chief executive said in a statement that the Teamsters’ intransigence drove Yellow out of business, though analysts note that the company showed signs of mismanagement for years.The risks may be even higher in industries under pressure to embrace a new business model.The major U.S. automakers have said that they need the ability to team up with nonunion battery manufacturers to secure additional capital and expertise. But Mr. Fain, the new U.A.W. president, has said that the failure to organize more battery workers was a major failure of his predecessors, and that battery workers must receive the same pay and working conditions that union workers enjoy at the Big Three.Many U.A.W. members say the tension between the automakers’ goals and the union’s indicates that a strike will be hard to avoid when their contract expires in mid-September. But they do not appear to be shrinking from that possibility.“We have an extremely well-oiled machine,” said Ms. Shaw, who also serves as a co-chair of the organizing committee of Unite All Workers for Democracy, a reform group within the union that assembled the slate of candidates Mr. Fain ran on. “We’ll be ready to go if happens.” More

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    Yellow, the Freight-Trucking Company, Declares Bankruptcy

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    A pandemic-era lifeline that the Trump administration predicted would turn a profit for the federal government failed to keep Yellow afloat.Three years after receiving a $700 million pandemic-era lifeline from the federal government, the struggling freight trucking company Yellow is filing for bankruptcy.After monthslong negotiations between Yellow’s management and the Teamsters union broke down, the company shut its operations late last month, and said on Sunday that it was seeking bankruptcy protection so it can wind down its business in an “orderly” way.“It is with profound disappointment that Yellow announces that it is closing after nearly 100 years in business,” the company’s chief executive, Darren Hawkins, said in a statement. Yellow filed a so-called Chapter 11 petition in federal bankruptcy court in Delaware.The downfall of the 99-year-old company will lead to the loss of about 30,000 jobs and could have ripple effects across the nation’s supply chains. It also underscores the risks associated with government bailouts that are awarded during moments of economic panic.Yellow, which formerly went by the name YRC Worldwide, received the $700 million loan during the summer of 2020 as the pandemic was paralyzing the U.S. economy. The loan was awarded as part of the $2.2 trillion pandemic-relief legislation that Congress passed that year, and Yellow received it on the grounds that its business was critical to national security because it shipped supplies to military bases.Since then, Yellow changed its name and embarked on a restructuring plan to help revive its flagging business by consolidating its regional networks of trucking services under one brand. As of the end of March, Yellow’s outstanding debt was $1.5 billion, including about $730 million that it owes to the federal government. Yellow has paid approximately $66 million in interest on the loan, but it has repaid just $230 of the principal owed on the loan, which comes due next year.The fate of the loan is not yet clear. The federal government assumed a 30 percent equity stake in Yellow in exchange for the loan. It could end up assuming or trying to sell off much of the company’s fleet of trucks and terminals. Yellow aims to sell “all or substantially all” of its assets, according to court documents. Mr. Hawkins said the company intended to pay back the government loan “in full.”The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment after the filing.Yellow estimated that it has more than 100,000 creditors and more than $1 billion in liabilities, per court documents. Some of its largest unsecured creditors include Amazon, with a claim of more than $2 million, and Home Depot, which is owed nearly $1.7 million.Yellow is the third-largest small-freight-trucking company in a part of the industry known as “less than truckload” shipping. The industry has been under pressure over the last year from rising interest rates and higher fuel costs, which customers have been unwilling to accept.Those forces collided with an ugly labor fight this year between Yellow and the Teamsters union over wages and other benefits. Those talks collapsed last month and union officials soon after warned workers that the company was shutting down.After its bankruptcy filing, company officials placed much of the blame on the union, saying its members caused “irreparable harm” by halting its restructuring plan. Yellow employed about 23,000 union employees.“We faced nine months of union intransigence, bullying and deliberately destructive tactics,” Mr. Hawkins said. The Teamsters union “was able to halt our business plan, literally driving our company out of business, despite every effort to work with them,” he added.In late June, the company filed a lawsuit against the union, asserting it had caused more than $137 million in damages by blocking the restructuring plan.The Teamsters union said in a statement last week that Yellow “has historically proven that it could not manage itself despite billions of dollars in worker concessions and hundreds of millions in bailout funding from the federal government.” The union did not immediately respond to a request for comment after Yellow’s bankruptcy filing.“I think that Yellow finds itself in a perfect storm, and they have not managed that perfect storm very well,” said David P. Leibowitz, a Chicago bankruptcy lawyer who represents several trucking companies.The bankruptcy could create temporary disruptions for companies that relied on Yellow and might prompt more consolidation in the industry. It could also lead to temporarily higher prices as businesses find new carriers for their freight.“Those inflationary prices will certainly hurt the shippers and hurt the consumer to a certain extent,” said Tom Nightingale, chief executive of AFS Logistics, who suggested that prices would likely normalize within a few months.In late July, Yellow began permanently laying off workers and ceased most of its operations in the United States and Canada, according to court documents. Yellow has retained a “core group” of about 1,650 employees to maintain limited operations and provide administrative work as it winds down. Yellow said it expected to pay about $3.4 million per week in employee wages to operate during bankruptcy, which “may decrease over time.” None of the remaining employees are union members, the company said.The company also sought the authority to pay an estimated $22 million in compensation and benefit costs for current and former employees, including roughly $8.7 million in unpaid wages as of the date of filing. Yellow had readily accessible funds of about $39 million when it filed for bankruptcy, which it said would be insufficient to cover its wind-down efforts, and it expected to receive special financing to help support the sale process and payment of wages.Jack Atkins, a transportation analyst at the financial services firm Stephens, said that Yellow’s troubles had been mounting for years. In the wake of the financial crisis, Yellow engaged in a spree of acquisitions that it failed to successfully integrate, Mr. Atkins said. The demands of repaying that debt made it difficult for Yellow to reinvest in the company, allowing rivals to become more profitable.“Yellow was struggling to keep its head above water and survive,” Mr. Atkins said. “It was harder and harder to be profitable enough to support the wage increases they needed.”The company’s financial problems fueled concerns about the Trump administration’s decision to rescue the firm.It lost more than $100 million in 2019 and was being sued by the Justice Department over claims that it defrauded the federal government during a seven-year period. Last year it agreed to pay $6.85 million to settle the lawsuit.Federal watchdogs and congressional oversight committees have scrutinized the company’s relationships with the Trump administration. President Donald J. Trump tapped Mr. Hawkins to serve on a coronavirus economic task force, and Yellow had financial backing from Apollo Global Management, a private equity firm with close ties to Trump administration officials.Democrats on the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis wrote in a report last year that top Trump administration officials had awarded Yellow the money over the objections of career officials at the Defense Department. The report noted that Yellow had been in close touch with Trump administration officials throughout the loan process and had discussed how the company employed Teamsters as its drivers.In December 2020, Steven T. Mnuchin, then the Treasury secretary, defended the loan, arguing that had the company been shuttered, thousands of jobs would have been at risk and the military’s supply chain could have been disrupted. He predicted that the federal government would eventually turn a profit from the deal.“Yellow had longstanding financial problems before the pandemic, was not essential to national security and should never have received a $700 million taxpayer bailout from the Treasury Department,” Representative French Hill, a Republican from Arkansas and member of the Congressional Oversight Commission, said in a statement last week. “Years of poor financial management at Yellow has resulted in hard-working people losing their jobs.” More

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    Jobs Sit Empty in the Public Sector, So Unions Help Recruit

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    Shortages of state and city personnel, especially those who must work on site, are so dire that unions are helping to get people in the door.The State of Minnesota, like nearly every public-sector employer across the country, is in a hiring crunch.Not just for any job, though. The desk jobs that can be done remotely, with flexible schedules? Applicants for those positions are relatively abundant. It’s the nurses, groundskeepers, plumbers, social workers and prison guards — those who are on site, sometimes at odd hours — that the state really can’t find.“It’s terrifying, if I’m being honest,” said Mitchell Kuhne, a sergeant with the Department of Corrections staffing a table at a state jobs fair in Minneapolis this week. “People just don’t know about the opportunities that exist. It’s a great work force, it’s a great field to be in, but it’s a really intimidating thing that isn’t portrayed accurately in the movies and media.”Understaffing requires employees to pick up many hours of mandatory overtime, Mr. Kuhne said. The additional income can be welcome, but also makes home life difficult for new recruits, and many quit within a few weeks. So his union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, is playing an unusual role — helping their bosses recruit workers.It’s a nationwide quandary. While private-sector employment fully regained its prepandemic level a year ago — and now sits 3 percent above it — state and local governments remain about 1 percent below the 20 million people they had on staff in February 2020. The job-opening rate for public-sector positions is below that of private businesses, but hasn’t come down as much from the highs of 2022.Private-Sector Employment Bounced Back. State and Local Government Hasn’t Recovered.Employment level as a percentage of employment in February 2020

    Source: Bureau of Labor StatisticsBy The New York TimesIn historical perspective, it could be worse: State and local government employment had only barely recovered from a long slide after the 2007-9 recession, which left many public services underpowered as states and cities lacked the funding to return to full strength.This time, the problem is different. Tax collections recovered more quickly than expected, and the federal government helped with transfers of cash to local jurisdictions to offset the effects of the Covid-19 crisis. That helped many governments award temporary pay increases to retain key personnel, and hire others into departments that had been cut to the bone, such as public health.But officials then faced a new twist. Wages in the private sector were growing faster than they had in decades, drawing people away from government jobs that had, for some, become too stressful. Civil servants also tend to be older than other workers, and more of them retired early rather than put up with mounting strain. As federal relief funds peter out, governments face difficult questions about how to maintain competitive pay.Public needs, however, have only increased. Minnesota, along with recovering from a hiring freeze early in the pandemic, has passed larger budgets and new laws — regulating cannabis sales, for example — that have added hundreds of positions across several agencies. At the same time, the federal infrastructure bill is supercharging demand for people to manage construction projects.That’s a victory for labor unions, which typically push for more hiring, higher wages and better benefits. But it doesn’t help them much if positions stay empty. A survey of local government human resource officers, released in June by the nonprofit research organization Mission Square, found that more than half the respondents had to reopen recruitment processes very often or frequently for lack of enough applications. In Minnesota, the vacancy rate for state government jobs rose to 11.5 percent in the 2023 fiscal year from 7.5 percent in 2019.That’s why the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, known as AFSCME, decided it needed to pitch in on a function usually reserved for human resources departments: getting people in the door. The union has started a national campaign to generate buzz around frontline positions, while locals are contacting community organizations and even families of union members to spotlight opportunities.“Our employers are feeling the heat,” said Lee Saunders, the union’s president. “They understand that services are not being provided at the level that they should be provided. It’s a team effort as far as bringing fresh blood into the public service.”That was the point of the hiring fair in Minneapolis. Seventy-five job seekers filtered through, often looking for more stable or higher-paying positions than the ones they held, usually referred by a friend or relative in the union.Cassandra Crawford spoke to someone at nearly every table, looking for something better paid and more active than her remote job in health care administration. “The older you get, the more you want to move your body,” she said. Speaking with recruiters in person was also more encouraging than sending her résumé to an automated portal. “I think they might remember me,” she said, laughing.Joel Shanight, 43, a disabled Army veteran and Peace Corps volunteer with experience in hostile environments, expressed confidence that he had landed a job doing roadway assistance on state highways. After doing unsatisfying accounting work in the private sector, he was glad to have learned about positions that could allow him to help people again.“I can’t find that in the corporate world,” Mr. Shanight said. “There’s no compassion anymore.”Also present were high-level officials from the state government, including Jamie Long, the House majority leader, who praised the union for helping out. Other government unions — like the American Federation of Teachers, which represents a field that saw an exodus during the pandemic — also have programs to try to bring more people into the classroom.AFSCME plans to create a national training and development center that will maintain a database of available union-represented jobs and centralize apprenticeship programs to build the next generation of public servants.Joseph McCartin, the executive director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University, said he hadn’t seen anything similar since World War II, when unions joined the federal government to fill positions essential to the military effort. Unions can be trusted messengers in communities, he said, and have a better understanding of what job seekers are looking for than employers do.A tour bus used for recruitment by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, a trade union of public employees, at the hiring fair in Minneapolis this week.Tim Gruber for The New York Times“I think it’s an extraordinary development,” Dr. McCartin said. “It’s a great advantage when you have a partner that’s going to be working with you to try to help you solve this problem.”Some states that limit collective bargaining in the public sector think that not having to deal with labor organizations allows them to adapt compensation more quickly in response to staffing needs. But they still deal with their share of difficulty in hiring.Take Idaho, whose population boomed during the pandemic. By the 2022 fiscal year, the state was facing vacancy rates as high as 20 percent at the Department of Corrections and 15 percent in the Department of Health and Welfare. A benchmarking analysis found that state jobs paid 24.6 percent less than the private sector for comparable positions, and annual turnover had reached 21.8 percent.The state ramped up recruiting, eased formal education requirements for some positions and brought on contractors to fill labor gaps, which is expensive. Those moves didn’t solve the problem, especially for less attractive shifts at hospitals, prisons and veterans’ homes, which couldn’t fill available beds because of understaffing.So in early 2023, Gov. Brad Little, a conservative Republican, asked for an 8.5 percent across-the-board pay increase for state workers over two years, with another 6 percent for those in public safety. Next year the governor plans to seek the same bump for workers in health care, information technology and engineering.The Legislature generally went along with those recommendations, with a few tweaks. But given the continuing constraints, Lori Wolff, head of the Division of Human Resources, said she was looking for ways to provide services with fewer people, especially for tasks like enrolling people in state benefits.“There’s a lot of jobs that we’re going to have to start looking at technology to solve,” Ms. Wolff said.The state’s 199 municipalities have an even tougher time increasing pay and adopting automated services. The state has limited their ability to raise revenue through property taxes, so it has been more difficult to compete. Skyrocketing housing costs are compounding that problem, fueled by high-income remote workers who moved out of bigger cities during the pandemic.Kelley Packer, director of the Association of Idaho Cities, said she had recently spoken with a member whose public works director had been forced to live in his car.“It’s a really interesting balancing act to allow for the growth to happen, and meet the needs of the housing crisis that we’re in, and still be able to provide services with a restricted property tax system,” Ms. Packer said.Of course, it’s not all about salary. Rivka Liss-Levinson, research director with Mission Square, said people usually listed three primary motivations to work for governments: job security, job satisfaction and robust retirement benefits. Conveying the value of comparatively generous health care coverage and pensions, plus the public service mission, is still the basic strategy.“Those things haven’t really changed over time,” Dr. Liss-Levinson said. “States and localities that are able to address these needs and concerns are the ones that are going to thrive when it comes to recruitment and retention.” More

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    UPS and Teamsters Reach Tentative Deal to Head Off Strike

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    United Parcel Service faced a potential walkout by more than 325,000 union members after their five-year contract expires next week.United Parcel Service announced Tuesday that it had reached a tentative deal on a five-year contract with the union representing more than 325,000 of its U.S. workers, a key step in averting a potential strike.The union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, reported in June that its UPS members had voted to authorize a walkout after the expiration of the current agreement on Aug. 1, with 97 percent of those who took part in the vote endorsing the move.UPS handles about one-quarter of the tens of millions of packages that are shipped daily in the United States, and the strike prospect has threatened to dent economic activity, particularly the e-commerce industry.Representatives from more than 150 Teamster locals will meet on Monday to review the agreement, and rank-and-file members will vote on it from Aug. 3 to Aug. 22, according to the union.Negotiations had broken down in early July, largely over the issue of part-time pay, before resuming Tuesday morning.“We demanded the best contract in the history of UPS, and we got it,” the Teamsters president, Sean M. O’Brien, said in a statement. “UPS has put $30 billion in new money on the table as a direct result of these negotiations.”The company said it could not comment on the dollar value of the deal ahead of its second-quarter earnings call in early August.The Teamsters said that under the tentative agreement, current full- and part-time UPS employees represented by the union would receive a $2.75-an-hour raise this year, and $7.50 an hour in raises over the course of the contract.The minimum pay for part-timers will rise to $21 an hour — far above the current minimum starting pay of $16.20 — and the top rate for full-time delivery drivers will rise to $49 an hour. Full-time drivers currently make $42 an hour on average after four years.The company has also pledged to create 7,500 new full-time union jobs and to fill 22,500 open positions, for which part-time workers will be eligible. The company has said that part-time workers are essential to navigating bursts of activity over the course of a day and during busy months, and that many part-timers graduate to full-time jobs.“Together we reached a win-win-win agreement on the issues that are important to Teamsters leadership, our employees and to UPS and our customers,” Carol Tomé, the company’s chief executive, said in a statement. “This agreement continues to reward UPS’s full- and part-time employees with industry-leading pay and benefits while retaining the flexibility we need to stay competitive.”The union had cited the company’s strong pandemic-era performance, with net adjusted income up more than 70 percent last year from 2019, as a reason that workers deserved substantial raises.It had especially emphasized the need to improve pay for part-timers, who account for more than half the U.S. employees represented by the Teamsters, and who the union said earn “near-minimum wage” in many areas.The path to the agreement appeared to be paved weeks ago after the two sides resolved what was arguably their most contentious issue, a new class of worker created under the previous contract.UPS had said the arrangement was intended to allow workers to take on dual roles, like sorting packages some days and driving on other days, especially Saturdays, as a way to keep up with growing demand for weekend delivery.But the Teamsters said that the hybrid idea was never actually carried out, and that in practice the new category of workers drove full time Tuesday through Saturday, only for less pay than other drivers. The company said that, under the previous contract, the Saturday drivers made about 87 percent of the base pay of other drivers and that some workers did work in a dual role.Under the tentative agreement, the lower-paid category of drivers will be eliminated, and workers who drive Tuesday through Saturday will be converted to regular full-time drivers.The deal also stipulates that no driver will be required to work an unscheduled sixth day in a week, which drivers had at times been forced to do under the existing contract to keep up with Saturday demand.The two sides also agreed on several key noneconomic issues, such as heat safety. Under the proposed deal, new trucks must have air-conditioning beginning in January, while existing trucks will be outfitted with additional fans and venting.Whether it passes will partly be a political test for Mr. O’Brien, who was elected to head the Teamsters in 2021 while regularly criticizing his predecessor, James P. Hoffa, as being too accommodating toward employers and toward UPS in particular.Mr. O’Brien argued that Mr. Hoffa had effectively forced UPS workers to accept a deeply flawed contract in 2018, even after they voted it down, and accused his Hoffa-backed rival of being reluctant to strike against the company.Since taking over as president last year, he has frequently said the union would be aggressive in pressuring UPS and suggested on several occasions that a strike was likely.A few days before the agreement on eliminating the hybrid worker position, Mr. O’Brien said in a statement that the Teamsters were walking away from the table over an “appalling counterproposal” and that a strike “now appears inevitable.”The company sought to reassure customers and the public that a deal would be consummated despite the occasionally heated pronouncements.On an earnings call in April, the UPS chief executive, Ms. Tomé, said that the two sides were aligned on many key issues and that outsiders should not be distracted by the “great deal of noise” that was likely to arise in the run-up to a deal.The deal, if ratified, removes a serious threat to the U.S. economy. Economists say a strike by UPS employees would have made it harder for businesses to ship goods on time, and the resulting restrictions in supply chains would probably have stoked inflation just as it had shown signs of easing.“It would have been devastating to the economy, just given the size and scale of UPS,” said Mike Skordeles, head of U.S. economics at Truist Advisory Services. “You can’t just pull out a player that big without causing disruption and prices to go up.”A 10-day UPS strike would cost the U.S. economy about $7 billion, according to an estimate from the Anderson Economic Group.Small businesses were most at risk from a strike as UPS might be their sole or primary shipping provider, meaning they would have to scramble for alternatives. Large retailers tend to have more diversified delivery providers and are more likely to have contingency plans to soften the blow.Mr. O’Brien had explicitly asked President Biden, who has called himself “the most pro-labor union president,” not to get involved in the negotiations. A group of over two dozen Democratic senators also pledged not to intervene.The Biden administration helped broker a deal that headed off a freight rail strike last year. Many union members involved in that dispute saw the deal as leaning too heavily in favor of the major rail carriers.In 1997, about 185,000 UPS workers staged a strike for 15 days. That time, the company reported that the strike cost it more than $600 million. But the last strike happened when e-commerce was in its infancy. UPS has benefited from the e-commerce boom: In 2022 it reported more than $100 billion in revenue, compared with $31 billion in 2002.J. Edward Moreno More