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    UPS Contract Talks Go Down to the Wire as a Possible Strike Looms

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    With the Teamsters contract set to expire Aug. 1, pay for part-time workers is a major hurdle. A walkout could rattle the U.S. economy.Barely a week before the contract for more than 325,000 United Parcel Service workers expires, union and company negotiators have yet to reach an agreement to avert a strike that could knock the American economy off stride.UPS and the union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, have resolved a variety of thorny issues, including heat safety and forced overtime. But they remain stalemated on pay for part-time workers, who account for more than half the union’s workers at UPS.A strike, which could come as soon as Aug. 1, could have significant consequences for the company, the e-commerce industry and the supply chain.UPS handles about one-quarter of the tens of millions of packages that are shipped daily in the United States, according to the Pitney Bowes Parcel Shipping Index. Experts have said competitors lack the scale to seamlessly replace that lost capacity.The Teamsters have cited the risks its members took to help generate the company’s strong pandemic-era performance as a reason that they deserve large raises. UPS’s adjusted net income rose more than 70 percent between 2019 and last year, to over $11 billion.The contract talks broke down on July 5 in vituperation. The two sides are to resume negotiations in the coming days, but the window for an agreement before the current five-year contract expires is tight.In a Facebook post this month, the union said the company’s latest offer would have “left behind” many part-timers, whose jobs include sorting packages and loading trucks. The post said part-timers earned “near-minimum wage in many parts of the country.”UPS, which says it relies heavily on part-timers to navigate bursts of activity over the course of a day and to ramp up its work force during busier months, said it had proposed significant wage increases before the talks broke down. According to the company, part-timers currently earn about $20 an hour on average after 30 days as well as paid time off, health care and pension benefits. The company noted that many part-timers graduated to jobs as full-time drivers, which pay $42 an hour on average after four years.The union has gone out of its way to highlight the challenges facing part-time workers. In television interviews and at rallies, the Teamsters president, Sean O’Brien, has emphasized what the union calls “part-time poverty” jobs. He has frequently been joined by leaders of other unions and politicians, including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York Democrat.UPS said Wednesday that it was “prepared to increase our industry-leading pay and benefits.” But it is unclear if the company will satisfy the union’s demands.“UPS certainly wants to reach an agreement, but not at the expense of its ability to compete long-term,” said Alan Amling, a former UPS executive and a fellow at the University of Tennessee’s Global Supply Chain Institute.Professor Amling estimated that it would cost the company $850 million per year to increase wages $5 an hour for all part-time employees represented by the Teamsters.The company, which normally reports its second-quarter earnings in late July, has delayed the report this year until after the strike deadline. UPS said that the timing was within the required window for reporting its earnings and that it had never published a date other than Aug. 8 for the coming release.The sometimes-volatile negotiations began in April, and the Teamsters announced in mid-June that their UPS members had voted, with a 97 percent majority, to authorize a strike.Less than two weeks later, the union said that it was walking away from the table over an “appalling counterproposal” from the company on raises and cost-of-living adjustments and that a strike “now appears inevitable.”The two sides resumed their discussions the week before the Fourth of July and soon resolved what was arguably their most contentious issue: a class of worker created under the existing contract.UPS 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 — to keep up with growing demand for weekend delivery.UPS handles about one-quarter of the tens of millions of packages that are shipped daily in the United States.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesBut the Teamsters said that the hybrid idea hadn’t come to pass, 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 some employees did work under the hybrid arrangement.)Under the agreement reached this month, the lower-paid category would be eliminated and workers who drove Tuesday through Saturday would be converted to regular full-time drivers.That agreement also stipulated that no driver would be required to work an unscheduled sixth day in a week, which drivers had at times been forced to do to keep up with Saturday demand.Despite progress on these issues, Mr. O’Brien could face a delicate test persuading members to approve a deal if it falls short of the lofty expectations he helped set. He won the union’s top position in 2021 while regularly criticizing his immediate predecessor, James P. Hoffa, for being too accommodating toward employers.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 rival in the race to succeed Mr. Hoffa of being reluctant to strike against the company.He began focusing members’ attention on the contract and a possible strike even before formally taking over as president in March last year, and has spoken in superlative terms about the union’s goals for a new contract.“This UPS agreement is going to be the defining moment in organized labor,” he told activists with Teamsters for a Democratic Union, a group that backed his candidacy, in a speech last fall.The union under Mr. O’Brien has held training sessions in recent months for strike captains and contract action team members, who rally co-workers to help pressure the company.And he has strongly urged the White House not to wade into the contract negotiation. In his Boston youth, “if two people had a disagreement, and you had nothing to do with it, you just kept walking,” he said during a recent webinar with members. “We echoed that to the White House on numerous occasions.” (Administration officials have said they are in touch with both sides.)In some ways the context for this year’s negotiations resembles the circumstances of the nationwide Teamsters strike at UPS in 1997. UPS was also in the midst of several profitable years, and the rapid growth in its part-time work force loomed large.Sean O’Brien, the Teamsters president, right, at the Los Angeles rally. He was elected in 2021 after criticizing his predecessor as having been too accommodating toward employers.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesBut while a reformist president, Ron Carey, had mobilized the union for a fight, its ranks appeared divided between his supporters and those of Mr. Hoffa, who had narrowly lost an election for the union’s presidency the year before. The union may have more leverage this time because its members appear far more unified under Mr. O’Brien.Barry Eidlin, a sociologist at McGill University in Montreal who studies labor and follows the Teamsters closely, said that while the ramp-up to the current contract fight had lagged in some parts of the country, where more conservative local officials are less enthusiastic, Mr. O’Brien had no serious opposition within the union.“Not everybody is a fan of O’Brien, but they’re not actively organizing to undermine him the way people were with Ron Carey in the ’90s,” Dr. Eidlin said. “It’s a huge, huge difference.”Still, for all his pugilistic statements, Mr. O’Brien remains an establishment figure who appears to prefer reaching a deal to going on strike, and he has subtly acted to make one less likely.Earlier in the negotiations, Mr. O’Brien had said that UPS employees wouldn’t work beyond Aug. 1 without a ratified contract, and that the two sides needed to reach a deal by July 5 to give members a chance to approve it in time. But last weekend he said UPS employees would continue working on Aug. 1 as long as the two sides had reached a tentative deal.“This isn’t a shift,” a Teamsters spokeswoman said Friday by email. “This is how you get a contract. Our pressure and deadline on UPS forced them to move in ways they hadn’t before.”Niraj Chokshi More

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    How TV Writing Became a Dead-End Job

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    The writers say Hollywood studios are increasingly limiting their roles in television productions, highlighting a trend for white-collar workers.For the six years he worked on “The Mentalist,” beginning in 2009, Jordan Harper’s job was far more than a writing gig. He and his colleagues in the writers’ room of the weekly CBS drama were heavily involved in production. They weighed in on costumes and props, lingered on the set, provided feedback to actors and directors. The job lasted most of a year.But by 2018, when he worked on “Hightown,” a drama for Starz, the business of television writing had changed substantially. The writers spent about 20 weeks cranking out scripts, at which point most of their contracts ended, leaving many to scramble for additional work. The job of overseeing the filming and editing fell largely to the showrunner, the writer-producer in charge of a series.“On a show like ‘The Mentalist,’ we’d all go to set,” Mr. Harper said. “Now the other writers are cut free. Only the showrunner and possibly one other writer are kept on board.”The separation between writing and production, increasingly common in the streaming era, is one issue at the heart of the strike begun in May by roughly 11,500 Hollywood writers. They say the new approach requires more frequent job changes, making their work less steady, and has lowered writers’ earnings. Mr. Harper estimated that his income was less than half what it was seven years ago.While their union, the Writers Guild of America, has sought guarantees that each show will employ a minimum number of writers through the production process, the major studios have said such proposals are “incompatible with the creative nature of our industry.” The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of Hollywood studios, declined to comment further.SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union that went on strike last week, said its members had also felt the effects of the streaming era. While many acting jobs had long been shorter than those of writers, the union’s executive director, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, said studios’ “extreme level of efficiency management” had led shows to break roles into smaller chunks and compress character story lines.But Hollywood is far from the only industry to have presided over such changes, which reflect a longer-term pattern: the fracturing of work into “many smaller, more degraded, poorly paid jobs,” as the labor historian Jason Resnikoff has put it.In recent decades, the shift has affected highly trained white-collar workers as well. Large law firms have relatively fewer equity partners and more lawyers off the standard partner track, according to data from ALM, the legal media and intelligence company. Universities employ fewer tenured professors as a share of their faculty and more untenured instructors. Large tech companies hire relatively fewer engineers, while raising armies of temps and contractors to test software, label web pages and do low-level programming.Over time, said Dr. Resnikoff, an assistant professor at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, “you get this tiered work force of prestige workers and lesser workers” — fewer officers, more grunts. The writers’ experience shows how destabilizing that change can be.The strategy of breaking up complex jobs into simpler, lower-paid tasks has roots in meatpacking and manufacturing. At the turn of the 20th century, automobiles were produced largely in artisanal fashion by small teams of highly skilled “all around” mechanics who helped assemble a variety of components and systems — ignition, axles, transmission.By 1914, Ford Motor had repeatedly divided and subdivided these jobs, spreading more than 150 men across a vast assembly line. The workers typically performed a few simple tasks over and over.For decades, making television shows was similar in some ways to the early days of automaking: A team of writers would be involved in all parts of the production. Many of those who wrote scripts were also on set, and they often helped edit and polish the show into its final form.The “all around” approach had multiple benefits, writers say. Not least: It improved the quality of the show. “You can write a voice in your head, but if you don’t hear it,” said Erica Weiss, a co-showrunner of the CBS series “The Red Line,” “you don’t actually know if it works.”Ms. Weiss said having her writers on the set allowed them to rework lines after the actors’ table read, or rewrite a scene if it was suddenly moved indoors.She and other writers and showrunners said the system also taught young writers how to oversee a show — essentially grooming apprentices to become the master craftspeople of their day.But it is increasingly rare for writers to be on set. As in manufacturing, the job of making television shows is being broken down into more discrete tasks.In most streaming shows, the writers’ contracts expire before the filming begins. And even many cable and network shows now seek to separate writing from production. “It was a good experience, but I didn’t get to go to set,” said Mae Smith, a writer on the final season of the Showtime series “Billions.” “There wasn’t money to pay for me to go, even for an established, seven-season show.”Showtime did not respond to a request for comment. Industry analysts point out that studios have felt a growing need to rein in spending amid the decline of traditional television and pressure from investors to focus on profitability over subscriber growth.In addition to the possible effect on a show’s quality, this shift has affected the livelihoods of writers, who end up working fewer weeks a year. Guild data shows that the typical writer on a network series worked 38 weeks during the season that ended last year, versus 24 weeks on a streaming series — and only 14 weeks if a show had yet to receive a go-ahead. About half of writers now work in streaming, for which almost no original content was made just over a decade ago.Members of the Writers Guild of America have been on strike since May.Mark Abramson for The New York TimesMany have seen their weekly pay dwindle as well. Chris Keyser, a co-chair of the Writers Guild’s negotiating committee, said studios had traditionally paid writers well above the minimum weekly rate negotiated by the union as compensation for their role as producers — that is, for creating a dramatic universe, not just completing narrow assignments.But as studios have severed writing from production, they have pushed writers’ pay closer to the weekly minimum, essentially rolling back compensation for producing. According to the guild, roughly half of writers were paid the weekly minimum rate last year — about $4,000 to $4,500 for a junior writer on a show that has received a go-ahead and about $7,250 for a more senior writer — up from one-third in 2014.Writers also receive residual payments — a type of royalty — when an episode they write is reused, as when it is licensed into syndication, but say opportunities for residuals have narrowed because streamers typically don’t license or sell their shows. The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers said in its statement that the writers’ most recent contract had increased residual payments substantially.(Actors receive residuals, too, and say their pay has suffered in other ways: The streaming era creates longer gaps between seasons, during which regular characters aren’t paid but often can’t commit to other projects.)The combination of these changes has upended the writing profession. With writing jobs ending more quickly, even established writers must look for new ones more frequently, throwing them into competition with their less-experienced colleagues. And because more writing jobs pay the minimum, studios have a financial incentive to hire more-established writers over less-established ones, preventing their ascent.“They can get a highly experienced writer for the same price or just a little more,” said Mr. Harper, who considers himself fortunate to have enjoyed success in the industry.Writers also say studios have found ways to limit the duration of their jobs beyond walling them off from production.Many junior writers are hired for a writers’ room only to be “rolled off” before the room ends, leaving a smaller group to finish the season’s scripts, said Bianca Sams, who has worked on shows including the CBS series “Training Day” and the CW program “Charmed.”“If they have to pay you weekly, at a certain point it becomes expensive to keep people,” Ms. Sams said. (The wages of junior writers are tied more closely to weeks of work rather than episodes.)The studios have chafed at writers’ description of their work as “gig” jobs, saying that most are guaranteed a certain number of weeks or episodes, and that they receive substantial health and pension benefits.But many writers fear that the long-term trend is for studios to break up their jobs into ever-smaller pieces that are stitched together by a single showrunner — the way a project manager might knit together software from the work of a variety of programmers. Some worry that eventually writers may be asked to simply rewrite chatbot-generated drafts.“I think the endgame is creating material in the cheapest, most piecemeal, automated way possible,” said Zayd Dohrn, a Writers Guild member who oversees the screen and stage master’s degree program at Northwestern University, “and having one layer of high-level creatives take the cheaply generated material and turn it into something.”He added, “It’s the way coders write code — in the most drone-like way.” More

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    Amazon Union Group, Challenging Christian Smalls, Seeks Vote

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    A split over the stewardship of the union’s high-profile president, Christian Smalls, has led a rival faction to file a lawsuit seeking an election.A dissident group within the Amazon Labor Union, the only certified union in the country representing Amazon employees, filed a complaint in federal court Monday seeking to force the union to hold a leadership election.The union won an election at a Staten Island warehouse with more than 8,000 employees in April 2022, but Amazon has challenged the result and has yet to begin bargaining on a contract.The rise of the dissident group, which calls itself the A.L.U. Democratic Reform Caucus and includes a co-founder and former treasurer of the union, reflects a growing split within the union that appears to have undermined its ability to pressure Amazon. The split has also threatened to sap the broader labor movement of the momentum generated by last year’s high-profile victory.In its complaint, the reform caucus argues that the union and its president, Christian Smalls, illegally “refuse to hold officer elections which should have been scheduled no later than March 2023.”The complaint asks a federal judge to schedule an election of the union’s top officers for no later than Aug. 30 and to appoint a neutral monitor to oversee the election.Mr. Smalls said in a text message Monday that the complaint was “a ridiculous claim with zero facts or merit,” and a law firm representing the union said it would seek legal sanctions against the reform group’s lawyer if the complaint was filed.The complaint states that under an earlier version of the union’s constitution, a leadership election was required within 60 days of the National Labor Relations Board’s certification of its victory.But in December, the month before the labor board certification, the union’s leadership presented a new constitution to the membership that scheduled elections after the union ratifies a contract with Amazon — an accomplishment that could take years, if it happens at all.On Friday, the reform caucus sent the union’s leadership a letter laying out its proposal to hold prompt elections, saying it would go to court Monday if the leadership didn’t embrace the proposal.The reform group is made of up more than 40 active organizers who are also plaintiffs in the legal complaint, including Connor Spence, a union co-founder and former treasurer; Brett Daniels, the union’s former organizing director; and Brima Sylla, a prominent organizer at the Staten Island warehouse.The group said in its letter that enacting the proposal could “mean the difference between an A.L.U. which is strong, effective, and a beacon of democracy in the labor movement” and “an A.L.U. which, in the end, became exactly what Amazon warned workers it would become: a business that takes away the workers’ voices.”Mr. Smalls said in his text that the union leadership had worked closely with its law firm to ensure that its actions were legal, as well as with the U.S. Labor Department.Jeanne Mirer, a lawyer for the union, wrote to a lawyer for the reform caucus that the lawsuit was frivolous and based on falsehoods. She said that Mr. Spence had “improperly and unilaterally” replaced the union’s founding constitution with a revised version in June 2022, and that the revision, which called for elections after certification, had never been formally adopted by the union’s board.Retu Singla, another lawyer for the union, said in an interview that the constitution was never made final because there were disagreements about it within the union’s leadership.Mr. Spence said he and other members of the union’s board had revised the constitution while consulting extensively with the union’s lawyers. A second union official involved in the discussions corroborated his account.The split within the union dates from last fall, when several longtime Amazon Labor Union organizers became frustrated with Mr. Smalls after a lopsided loss in a union election at an Amazon warehouse near Albany, N.Y.In a meeting shortly after the election, organizers argued that control of the union rested in too few hands and that the leadership should be elected, giving rank-and-file workers more input.The skeptics also complained that Mr. Smalls was committing the union to elections without a plan for how to win them, and that the union needed a better process for determining which organizing efforts to support. Many organizers worried that Mr. Smalls spent too much time traveling the country to make public appearances rather than focus on the contract fight on Staten Island.Mr. Smalls later said in an interview that his travel was necessary to help raise money for the union and that the critics’ preferred approach — building up worker support for a potential strike that could bring Amazon to the bargaining table — was counterproductive because it could alarm workers who feared losing their livelihoods.He said a worker-led movement shouldn’t turn its back on workers at other warehouses if they sought to unionize. A top union official hired by Mr. Smalls also argued that holding an election before the union had a more systematic way of reaching out to workers would be undemocratic because only the most committed activists would vote.When Mr. Smalls unveiled the new union constitution in December, scheduling elections after a contract was ratified, many of the skeptics walked out. The two factions have operated independently this year, with both sides holding regular meetings with members.In April, the reform caucus began circulating a petition among workers at the Staten Island warehouse calling on the leadership to amend the constitution and hold prompt elections. The petition has been signed by hundreds of workers at the facility.The petition soon became a point of tension with Mr. Smalls. In an exchange with a member of the reform caucus on WhatsApp in early May, copies of which are included in Monday’s legal complaint, Mr. Smalls said the union would “take legal action against you” if the caucus did not abandon the petition.The tensions appeared to ease later that month after the union leadership under Mr. Smalls proposed that the two sides enter mediation. The reform caucus accepted the invitation and suspended the petition campaign.But according to a memo that the mediator, Bill Fletcher Jr., sent both sides on June 29 and that was viewed by The New York Times, the union leadership backed out of the mediation process on June 18 without explanation.“I am concerned that the apparent turmoil within the ALU E. Board means that little is being done to organize the workers and prepare for the battle with Amazon,” Mr. Fletcher wrote in the memo, referring to the union’s executive board. “This situation seriously weakens support among the workers.”Colin Moynihan More

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    Los Angeles Hotel Workers Go on Strike

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    The NewsThousands of hotel workers in Southern California walked off the job on Sunday demanding higher pay and better benefits, just as hordes of tourists descended on the region for the Fourth of July holiday.“Workers have been pent up and frustrated and angry about what’s happened during the pandemic combined with the inability to pay their rent and stay in Los Angeles,” said Kurt Petersen, co-president of Unite Here Local 11, the union representing the workers. “So people feel liberated, it’s Fourth of July, freedom is reigning in Los Angeles and hotel workers are leading that fight.”Representatives for the hotels have said that the union had not been bargaining in good faith, and that leaders were determined to disrupt operations.“The hotels want to continue to provide strong wages, affordable quality family health care and a pension,” Keith Grossman, a spokesman for the coordinated bargaining group consisting of more than 40 Los Angeles and Orange County hotels, said in a statement.The strike is part of a wave of recent labor actions in the nation’s second-largest metropolis, where high costs of living have made it difficult for many workers — from housekeepers to Hollywood writers — to stay afloat.Thousands of hotel workers in Southern California walked off the job, demanding higher pay and better benefits.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesWhy It MattersWorkers across Southern California in a range of industries have threatened to strike or walked off the job in recent months, displaying unusual levels of solidarity with other unions as they push for higher pay and better working conditions.Dockworkers disrupted operations for weeks at the colossal ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach until they reached a tentative deal in June. And screenwriters have been picketing outside the gates of Hollywood studios for about two months.Hugo Soto-Martinez, a Los Angeles City Council member who worked as an organizer for Unite Here Local 11, said that the breadth of industries locked in labor fights demonstrated frustration especially among younger workers, who have seen inequality widen and opportunities evaporate.“It’s homelessness, it’s the cost of housing,” he said. “I think people are understanding those issues in a much more palpable way.”The hotel workers’ strike comes just as the summer tourism season ramps up, and labor leaders say they are hoping to capitalize on that momentum.Last year, tourism in the city reached its highest levels since the coronavirus pandemic, according to the Los Angeles Tourism and Convention Board. Roughly 46 million people visited, and there was $34.5 billion in total business sales in 2022, reaching 91 percent of the record set in 2019.But for many workers like Diana Rios-Sanchez, who works as a housekeeping supervisor at the InterContinental Los Angeles Downtown, the pay has not helped to keep up with inflation.She often wonders how long she and her three children, who live in a one-bedroom apartment in El Sereno, a neighborhood on the Eastside of Los Angeles, can afford to stay in the city.“All we do in hotels is work and work and get by with very little,” Ms. Rios-Sanchez said. “We take care of the tourists, but no one takes care of us.”Business groups say that simply demanding that employers pay workers more does not address the much-deeper problems that have led to sky-high costs of living in California.BackgroundThe union has been negotiating since April for a new contract. In June, members approved a strike.The group has asked that hourly wages, now $20 and $25 for housekeepers, immediately increase by $5, followed by $3 bumps in each subsequent year of a three-year contract.By contrast, Mr. Grossman said in the statement that the hotels had offered to increase pay for housekeepers currently making $25 an hour in Beverly Hills and downtown Los Angeles to more than $31 per hour by January 2027.On Thursday, the Westin Bonaventure Hotel & Suites, a large hotel in downtown Los Angeles, announced that it had staved off a walkout of its workers with a contract deal.Agreements made this year will set pay levels ahead of the 2026 World Cup and 2028 Olympics, which are expected to be enormous tourist draws to the region.What’s NextMr. Petersen said on Sunday that the strike would go on for “multiple days.” The Hotel Association of Los Angeles had said in a statement that the hotels would be able to continue serving visitors.Anna Betts More

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    L.A. Workers Are Feeling Emboldened as Unions Pressure Employers in California

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    California union members are pressuring employers over wages in one of the nation’s most labor-friendly states.In the two months since they went on strike, screenwriters have become a fixture outside studios in Southern California, signs aloft as the traffic roars past. In many parts of America, theirs would be a lonely vigil.Not in Los Angeles.At the behemoth ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, operations were disrupted for weeks until West Coast dockworkers reached a tentative contract deal in mid-June. Across the city, schools shut down for three days this spring when bus drivers, cafeteria workers and teachers walked out.Now, the union representing some 15,000 hotel workers in Los Angeles is threatening to strike this Fourth of July weekend, just as the summer tourism season ramps up. And more than 160,000 actors are poised to shut down Hollywood productions if they cannot reach a new contract deal later this month.Unions have been embattled nationally, but in California they are having a moment.“We’re calling it the ‘hot labor summer,’” said Lorena Gonzalez, the chief officer of the California Labor Federation, which represents more than 2.1 million union members statewide. “We have sparks and fires everywhere, and we’re not letting it die down in California. We’re fanning the flames.”California has long been a labor stronghold, with Democrats in control of state government and most large cities. Despite a string of labor wins in recent years — including a minimum wage of $15.50 an hour, more than double the federal rate — workers say they are feeling ever more pressure from inflation, housing shortages and technological disruptions.The Unite Here Local 11 union is seeking higher wages and better benefits. Some 15,000 members are threatening to strike at dozens of hotels in Los Angeles.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesThe unemployment rate remains below 5 percent in California, so workers know they have leverage. And numerous contracts are expiring this year, forcing California employers to negotiate with unions as they watch picket lines form daily in Los Angeles. Roughly half of the large work stoppages in 2023 have taken place in the state.On Friday, a major contract for the hotel workers ran out, while the actors’ union said that it would extend its expiring contract through July 12, buying more time to continue negotiations.Hotel workers could walk out as soon as this weekend, however. Operators of hotels might be able to muddle through a short-term walkout, but a longer one could deter tourists from visiting Los Angeles in the busy summer months, and erode the convention business that has rebounded since the beginning of the pandemic, said Kevin Klowden, chief global strategist with the Milken Institute, an economic think tank based in Santa Monica, Calif.Simultaneous strikes of hotel workers, screenwriters and actors would ripple first through Los Angeles businesses that rely on the region’s signature tourism and Hollywood industries. And they could have a broader effect beyond Los Angeles; during the 2007 screenwriters strike, the California economy lost $2.1 billion, according to one estimate.The Hotel Association of Los Angeles said in a statement that it had bargained in good faith and would continue to serve tourists during a walkout. Keith Grossman, a spokesman for the coordinated bargaining group consisting of more than 40 Los Angeles and Orange County hotels, said in a statement that it had offered to increase pay for housekeepers currently making $25 an hour in Beverly Hills and downtown Los Angeles to more than $31 per hour by January 2027.“If there is a strike, it will occur because the union is determined to have one,” Mr. Grossman said. “The hotels want to continue to provide strong wages, affordable quality family health care and a pension.”A recurring theme this year among striking workers has been the unbearable cost of living in Southern California. School employees said in March that they had to take two or three side gigs to afford their bills. Screenwriters have echoed that lament. A University of Southern California survey recently found that 60 percent of local tenants said they were “rent-burdened,” spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing.“How can anyone keep living here?” asked Lucero Ramirez, 37, who has worked as a housekeeper at the Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills since 2018. On Thursday, Ms. Ramirez gathered inside an office space near downtown Los Angeles with dozens of other hotel workers represented by Unite Here Local 11 to decorate poster boards and staple together fliers ahead of a planned strike. Earlier that day, the Westin Bonaventure Hotel & Suites announced that it had staved off a walkout with a contract deal.The union has asked that the hourly wage, now $20 to $25 for housekeepers, immediately increase by $5, followed by $3 bumps in each subsequent year of a three-year contract. Hotel workers — and their employers — are well aware that this deal will set pay levels ahead of the 2026 World Cup and 2028 Olympics, when tourists will flood the region.Ms. Ramirez, who earns $25 an hour, has lived in a rent-controlled, one-bedroom apartment in Hollywood for the past decade, where she pays $1,100 a month. The hot water often goes out, and the flooring in her unit is cracked and decaying, she said.Lucero Ramirez, a housekeeper who’s been working at the Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills since 2018.Philip Cheung for The New York Times“The landlord wants me to leave so they can boost the rent,” she said. “They want me out, but I cannot afford to go anywhere else, I would have to leave the city.”Labor power is a function of the electorate in California, where Democrats have nearly a 2-to-1 edge over Republicans, supermajority control of the state Legislature, a lock on state offices — and owe a debt to unions, whose members routinely knock on doors and contribute money to liberal candidates.Next year, voters in California will consider an initiative that would raise the minimum wage to $18 an hour. In Los Angeles, members of the City Council are weighing a plan that would raise the minimum wage for tourism workers to $25 an hour. Maria Elena Durazo, a Democratic state senator and former head of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, is carrying legislation that would give all health care workers a $25 minimum hourly wage.Tens of thousands of unionized teachers, bus drivers, cafeteria workers and other employees at the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest district, won major raises this year after their high-profile walkout in March. Smaller labor actions have proliferated as well, including strippers organizing in May at a North Hollywood club, and Amazon drivers walking out in June at a warehouse in Palmdale, Calif. The Los Angeles Dodgers averted a strike by giving ushers, groundskeepers and other workers significant raises.Across the country, union membership as a percentage of the labor force has dropped to a record low of 10.1 percent of employed wage and salary workers. In California, however, such membership rose last year to 16.1 percent of wage and salary workers, compared with 15.9 percent in 2021.“This is a tug of war between inflation and wages,” said Sung Won Sohn, a finance and economics professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. “Inflation has been winning and workers are trying to catch up with inflation that’s been persistent.”Nancy Hoffman Vanyek, the chief executive of the Greater San Fernando Valley Chamber of Commerce, which represents about 400 businesses from one-person operations to Hollywood studios, said that workers should be able to afford to live in Los Angeles. But she said simply forcing employers to pay more was a Band-Aid for a much deeper problem in California.“It’s business that always has to bear the brunt of fixing these issues, when we’re not looking at what’s causing them,” she said. “What’s causing the high cost of living in our state? What’s causing the high cost of housing?”Workers nationally are trying to lock in gains from a job market that has remained tight, as employers brace for a possible recession. Rail workers were on the brink of a strike last year, while employees at manufacturing companies like John Deere and Kellogg went on strike in late 2021.In California, the activism has been further driven by white-collar workers, whose jobs have been threatened by the rise of artificial intelligence and the gig economy.“It’s remarkable, the degree to which they are getting support from other unions,” said Nelson Lichtenstein, who directs the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “There’s a new sense of commonality between the retail clerk who is being told to come in every other day from 3 to 7 p.m. and the screenwriter who is suddenly being offered seven episodes to write and then, goodbye.”Writers and supporters were on strike outside the Paramount Pictures studio in Los Angeles on Wednesday.Morgan Lieberman for The New York Times More

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    Starbucks Union Raises Pressure With Plan to Strike Over Pride Décor

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    Walkouts were called at more than 150 stores in the next week after workers said Pride Month decorations had been banned in some, a claim the company denied.Thousands of workers at organized Starbucks stores across the nation will stage strikes over the next week, their union said on Friday, after workers in some states said management prohibited them from putting up decorations for Pride Month.The company denied the accusations and issued a statement declaring that it “has been and will continue to be at the forefront of supporting the LGBTQIA2+ community.”Starbucks Workers United said employees at more than 150 stores would strike over the company’s labor practices and its “hypocritical treatment of LGBTQIA+ workers.”The union represents about 8,000 of the company’s workers in more than 300 stores.Starbucks workers in a number of stores said this month that they had been told that no decorations for the annual L.G.B.T.Q. celebration, such as rainbow flags, were allowed this year, a shift from previous years. In interviews arranged through their union, workers said the given reasons varied.Starbucks, which has roughly 9,300 corporate-owned stores in the United States, has said decoration policies are often specific to each store.A Starbucks official involved in the response to the union campaign said the company decided last year, after the union campaign began to spread across the country, to be more aggressive in enforcing dress codes and policies on what could be posted in stores. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, attributed the change to concern that many stores would otherwise become inundated with union paraphernalia.But a Starbucks spokeswoman on Friday called the claim “false” and said there had been no change in the company’s guidance on displays and decorations in the past nine years.A corporate statement — over the names of Laxman Narasimhan, the chief executive, and Sara Trilling, executive vice president and president, North America — did not address store-by-store practices. But it noted that for Pride Month, the rainbow flag was being flown over the company’s Seattle headquarters and in thousands of Starbucks stores.“We continue to encourage our store leaders to celebrate with their communities including for U.S. Pride Month in June,” it said.Casey Moore, a union spokeswoman, derided the corporate statement, saying, “Instead of apologizing for there being upper management across the country who made the decision to not allow Pride decorations, they’ve doubled down that it didn’t happen.”In addition to its complaints over the Pride decoration issue, the union said it was striking over the company’s broader response to the organizing campaign, including widespread retaliation against union supporters. The union said in its statement that workers were “demanding that Starbucks negotiate a fair contract with union stores and stop their illegal union-busting campaign.”The company has consistently denied accusations of illegality.Starbucks workers and the union say rules on employee conduct have been enforced more aggressively as a way to intimidate and retaliate against union supporters.“They’re trying to make people feel unwelcome in whatever way possible — through more strict enforcement of the dress code or anything,” said Ms. Moore, the union spokeswoman. “The Pride decorations are another level of that.”In a sweeping ruling in March, a federal administrative law judge found that Starbucks had repeatedly violated labor law by “more strictly enforcing the dress code and personal appearance policy in response to union activity.” The judge also found that the company had more strictly enforced its attendance policy and its policy on soliciting and distributing notices within stores.Starbucks has disputed the findings and is appealing the decision to the National Labor Relations Board in Washington.Unionized Starbucks workers have staged waves of strikes in the last several months over what they say are the company’s delay tactics at the bargaining table and other anti-union tactics like retaliatory firings and store closings. The administrative judge’s ruling in March also found that Starbucks had illegally dismissed seven Buffalo-area workers last year in response to union activity.In April, the labor board issued a complaint accusing the company of failing to bargain in good faith at more than 100 stores. It was one of dozens of complaints tied to labor law violations that the board has issued since the union first filed petitions seeking votes in three Buffalo-area stores in August 2021.The company has denied the accusations and blames the union for bargaining delays, citing the union’s insistence on using video-chat software to broadcast sessions to employees not at the bargaining table.Howard Schultz, shortly after stepping down as Starbucks’ chief executive in March, denied allegations of anti-union conduct in testimony before a Senate committee. More

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    UPS Workers Authorize Teamsters Union to Call Strike

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    A walkout is possible after the contract for more than 325,000 workers expires this summer. Negotiations began in April but have yet to resolve pay.United Parcel Service workers have authorized their union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, to call a strike as soon as Aug. 1, after the current contract expires, the Teamsters announced Friday.The Teamsters represent more than 325,000 UPS employees in the United States, where the company has nearly 450,000 employees overall. The union said 97 percent had voted in favor of strike authorization.Many unions hold such votes to create leverage at the bargaining table, but a much smaller percentage end up following through. “The results do not mean a strike is imminent and do not impact our current business operations in any way,” UPS said in a statement, adding that it was “confident that we will reach an agreement.”A UPS strike could have significant economic fallout. The company handles about one-quarter of the tens of millions of parcels shipped each day in the United States, according to the Pitney Bowes Parcel Shipping Index. And while UPS’s competition has grown in recent years, rivals would be hard-pressed to replace that lost capacity quickly, leaving some customers in the lurch and others facing higher costs.“What happens when you try to stuff 25 percent more food into a stomach that’s 90 percent full?” said Alan Amling, a fellow at the University of Tennessee’s Global Supply Chain Institute and a former UPS executive.The two sides have reached tentative agreements on a number of issues since they began negotiating a national contract in April, most recently on heat safety, including a requirement for air conditioning in new trucks beginning in January and additional fans and venting for existing trucks.But the negotiators have yet to tackle pay increases, which the Teamsters say are overdue amid the company’s strong pandemic-era performance. The company’s adjusted net income increased by more than 70 percent from 2019 to last year.The union has also focused on revisiting pay disparities for a category of driver who typically works on weekends.The UPS chief executive, Carol Tomé, who started in that position in 2020, said on a recent earnings call that UPS was aligned with the union on “several key issues.” She added that outsiders should not put too much stock in the “great deal of noise” that was likely to arise during the negotiation.Looming over the talks is the political standing of the Teamsters’ leader, Sean O’Brien, who during his campaign for the union’s presidency in 2021 repeatedly accused his predecessor, James P. Hoffa, of being overly conciliatory toward employers.Mr. O’Brien complained that Mr. Hoffa had essentially forced a concessionary contract onto UPS workers in 2018 after union members voted down the deal. He criticized his opponent for the presidency, a Hoffa-aligned candidate, for being unlikely to strike.“You already conceded that in your 25-year career, you only struck six times, so UPS knows you’re not going to strike,” Mr. O’Brien said at a candidates’ debate.Mr. O’Brien has largely maintained his aggressive stance on UPS since taking over as president last year. Speaking in October to activists with Teamsters for a Democratic Union, a reformist group that backed his candidacy, Mr. O’Brien vowed that “this UPS agreement is going to be the defining moment in organized labor.”Compensation for UPS drivers is generally higher than pay at the company’s competitors. UPS said that the average full-time delivery driver with four years’ experience makes $42 an hour, and that part-time workers who sort packages make $20 an hour on average after 30 days.The groups receive the same benefits package, which includes health care and pension contributions and is worth about $50,000 a year for full-time drivers, the company says.Beyond overall pay levels, the union has said it wants to eliminate a category of driver created under the 2018 contract.The company said the category was intended for hybrid workers who performed jobs like sorting packages on some days while driving on other days, especially Saturdays, to address the growing demand for weekend delivery.But the Teamsters said these workers never followed the hybrid arrangement and simply drove full time from Tuesday to Saturday, for less pay than other full-time drivers. The company says that the weekend drivers make about 87 percent of the base pay of regular full-time drivers, and that some employees have worked under a hybrid arrangement.In the event of a strike, deliveries to consumers, such as e-commerce orders, would probably be among the first to be disrupted. But experts said the supply chain could suffer, too. Some suppliers would struggle to quickly ship goods like automotive parts to manufacturers, potentially causing production slowdowns.Even a short strike could take a toll on UPS. Many customers long relied exclusively on the company, but that started to change after the Teamsters last went on strike in 1997, Mr. Amling said. After that strike, which lasted just over two weeks, more customers began to work with multiple carriers. The consequences were masked by gains from the rise of e-commerce and fewer competitors to choose from, but the company may not be so fortunate today.Niraj Chokshi More

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    West Coast Dockworkers Reach Contract Deal With Port Operators

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    After a year of prolonged negotiations that have led to delays and declines in cargo, the two sides agreed to a new contract with help from the Biden administration.After a year of contract negotiations that resulted in numerous delays and a decline in the movement of cargo at ports along the West Coast, union dockworkers and port operators have reached a tentative deal set to last for six years.In a joint statement released late Wednesday, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and the Pacific Maritime Association announced a tentative agreement on a new contract that covers 22,000 workers at 29 ports from San Diego to Seattle, some of the busiest in the world.Details about the agreement, which is expected to be formally ratified by both sides, were not immediately released.President Biden, who stepped in last year to urge a swift resolution, released a statement congratulating both parties for reaching an agreement “after a long and sometimes acrimonious negotiation.”“As I have always said, collective bargaining works,” Mr. Biden said. “Above all I congratulate the port workers, who have served heroically through the pandemic and the countless challenges it brought and will finally get the pay, benefits, and quality of life they deserve.”Mr. Biden also thanked Julie Su, the acting U.S. labor secretary, for assistance in finalizing the deal.The outcome on Wednesday somewhat mirrored past negotiations between the two sides. In 2015, as negotiations went on for nine months, officials in the Obama administration intervened amid work slowdowns and increased congestion at ports.The protracted negotiations between the union and the Pacific Maritime Association, which represents the shipping terminals, have focused on disagreements over wages and the expanding role of automation.In recent weeks the Longshore and Warehouse Union, or the I.L.W.U., has staged a series of work slowdowns at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, which in recent months have lost sizable business to ports along the Gulf and East Coasts. Cargo processing at the Port of Los Angeles, a key entry point for shipments from Asia, was down roughly 40 percent in February, compared with the year before.Recently, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wrote a letter to Mr. Biden urging the administration to intervene immediately in the negotiations and appoint an independent mediator to help the two parties reach an agreement.Matthew Shay, president of the National Retail Federation, said the ongoing delays and disruptions have had a negative impact on retailers and other stakeholders who rely on the West Coast ports for business operations.“As we enter the all-important peak shipping season for holiday merchandise, retailers need a seamless flow of containers through the ports and to their distribution centers,” Mr. Shay said.On Wednesday, Gene Seroka, head of the Port of Los Angeles, said in a statement that the tentative agreement between the I.L.W.U. and the Pacific Maritime “brings the stability and confidence that customers have been seeking.”Matt Schrap, chief executive of the Harbor Trucking Association, a trade group for transportation companies serving West Coast ports, said his organization is eager for cargo traffic to return to normal soon.“We need the certainty,” he said. “This has been a long, hard process.” More