Labor 2023: A lot of noise but few strikes

For all the hand-wringing about the potential for labor disturbances across multiple modes, the year came and went, with the notable exception of the dispute between the United Auto Workers and Mack Trucks, mostly bereft of the images of picket lines.

UPS Inc. (NYSE: UPS) and the Teamsters union reached a five-year contract without 340,000 UPS Teamsters hitting the bricks. U.S. members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union remained on the job through contract talks that would culminate in a six-year agreement, though Canadian ILWU members did walk off the job twice in July for brief periods.

Workers at less-than-truckload carriers ABF Freight System Inc., a unit of ArcBest Corp., and TForce Freight, the U.S. arm of Canadian transport and logistics company TFI International Inc., ratified their respective five-year contracts with little fanfare. The rail industry, coming off a turbulent 2022 when labor-management disputes came close to shutting down the national system, spent 2023 in relative quiet.

But there is a price to be paid for labor peace. Contracts ratified during 2023 came with employee wage and benefit increases. The gains will either be absorbed by employers, passed on to customers, their customers, consumers or a combination of all three. The mainstream media-coined phrase of the “summer of strikes” proved to be overrated. Still, the labor disputes in multiple industries, and the settlements that resulted, were sufficiently high profile to compel workers heading into 2024 to wonder if they too can get more than they have bargained for in the past.

One of the biggest stories of the year, the demise of the near-century-old LTL carrier Yellow Corp., did not involve strikes, but the destruction of 30,000 jobs, 22,000 of them Teamster jobs. It marked a sad ending to a 15-year odyssey that saw Yellow’s rank and file sacrifice mightily to keep the company afloat, only to see the company, and their jobs, disappear.

Source: freightwaves.com