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UPS Strike Coverage and
the Future of Labor in the Corporate News
The casual viewer of television in the United States in the first quarter of 2002 could have hardly missed the pervasive buzz about the color brown. The occasion celebrating this rather unsung color was the roll-out of a new $45 million advertising campaign by United Parcel Service. Breaking with their long-running promotion as "The Tightest Ship in the Shipping Business," a campaign that featured the heroic efforts of UPS delivery workers, the new ad campaign-the largest in the corporation's 95-year history-obliquely asked "What Can Brown Do For You?" In the television (and print) ads, actors portraying "the mailroom guy," "the shipping manager," "the logistics manager," "the customer service manager," "the CFO," and "the CEO" talk about what "brown" does for them. Dale Hayes, the UPS vice president for brand management and customer communications, said the campaign is a "more aggressive way" to portray the company's employees "as a strong team working together, to bring solu
tions to customers."[1] But, strangely enough, the UPS workers who wear the brown uniforms and drive the brown trucks were completely missing from the ad campaign.
Perhaps the absence of worker images from UPS's most extensive corporate branding campaign ever is not so surprising. The year 2002 marked five years after the high-profile 1997 Teamsters strike against UPS, and the expiration (on July 31) of the five-year National Master Agreement that ended the strike. As talks between the union and the corporation geared up, the fact that UPS's corporate managers would aggressively seek to supplant the image of the heroic worker with the brown brand color makes sense after losing a hard-fought strike in which the majority of the United States unexpectedly-at least according to mainstream news coverage-supported the workers, not management.
The success of the Teamsters' strike can be measured not only in the final contract signed between the workers and management, but also in the substance of the strike coverage in the mainstream news media. The traditional frames used by the news media to cover labor reflect the consumer-oriented ideological environment in which the U.S. corporate mass media operate. In most cases, these frames result in stories that prioritize consumer objectives, obscure union messages, and disdain collective action. But, as the analysis of news coverage of the 1997 UPS strike below illustrates, the consumer-oriented frames of the news may be turned to labor's benefit with democratic social activism and a message that reveals the connection between production and consumption.
Five Traditional Frames of Labor News
When the news media cover labor, they don't do so by communicating "neutral" facts, but by telling us stories about labor, especially stories that shape and reflect our culture's commonsense ideas about labor, management, and capital.[2] Like any good story, news stories can be engaging, and the way in which the story is told can encourage the news audience to understand and experience the story in a certain way. Media historian James Carey explains that "_news is not information but drama. It does not describe the world but portrays an arena of dramatic forces and action; it exists solely in historical time, and it invites our participation on the basis of our assuming, often vicariously, social roles within it.[3]
Thus, the narrative story form in news gives individual events and circumstances meaning. The particular structure of a story is its frame. As W. Lance Bennett and Murray Edelman explain, "the who, what, where, why, how, and when . . . give acts and events a narrative frame. A choice among alternative settings or among origins of a political development also determines who are virtuous, who are threats to the good life, and which courses of action are effective solutions."[4] Similarly, Todd Gitlin has called media frames "persistent patterns of cognition, interpretation, and presentation, of selection, emphasis, and exclusion, by which symbol-handlers routinely organize discourse, whether verbal or visual."[5] The act of framing is largely an act of common sense on the journalist's part. Unfortunately, common sense leads back to the familiar and traditional, and often cuts off creative thinking and imagination in news coverage.
Peter Golding and Graham Murdock suggest that there are two general ways in which cultural forms, such as news, work as mechanisms regulating public discourse. First, the form itself provides certain limitations on the range of discourses possible, from solely official discourses to the articulation of counter-discourses. News tends to operate within the parameters of a consumer sphere, addressing its audience as consumers. Second, discourses within the form can be treated in various ways, from being arranged in a "clearly marked hierarchy of credibility which urges the audience to prefer one over the others" to "a more even-handed and indeterminate way which leaves the audience more open to choice."[6] These two ways of regulating discourse are similar to the concepts of inclusion of coverage and the kind of portrayals in the coverage.
Ralph Miliband concurs with the notion that the media regulate public discourse. He notes that the mass media have the power to "foster a climate of conformity...by the presentation of views which fall outside the consensus as curious heresies, or, even more effectively, by treating them as irrelevant eccentricities, which serious and reasonable people may dismiss as of no consequence."[7] Jimmie Reeves and Richard Campbell describe this journalistic function as "policing" the boundaries of reason and nonsense, or the normal and abnormal:
In the ongoing representation of authority and the visualization of deviancy, the well-informed journalist mediates two symbolic horizons of common sense . . . on one horizon the journalist bridges the knowledge gap between 'expertness and the lack of it'; on the other, the journalist guards the frontier between 'normalcy and the lack of it,' between 'reasonable people' and 'deviant nonsense.'[8]
We might then expect similar policing of the boundaries of common sense in news stories of labor relations, where stories are framed to suggest who are the virtuous and threatening actors, what are the most effective solutions to labor disputes, and whose interests are paramount.
In fact, five central frames continually emerge in the news media coverage of major labor stories in the 1990s.[9] These frames are consistent with the generalizations and stereotypes listed by Parenti and Puette,[10] but go further in explaining the "commonsense" consumer-oriented ideological environment in which the U.S. corporate mass media structure news stories about labor unions:
1. The consumer is king. Because the consumer and his or her consumption is fundamental to the U.S. economy and culture, treating the individual consumer as a hallowed entity is the unstated assumption of all news. Likewise, this is a consumer's democracy. Americans are told they are blessed with an abundance of choices, and can "vote" with their pocketbooks. But, caveat emptor to the consumer: in this news frame, the consumer is valued when acting individually, and a menace when acting collectively on behalf of a social purpose (see Frame #5 below). As economist Juliet Schor explains, "Ours is an ideology of non-interference-the view that one should be able to buy what one likes, where one likes, and as much as one likes, with nary a glance from the government, neighbors, ministers, or political parties. Consumption is perhaps the clearest example of individual behavior which out society takes to be almost wholly personal, completely outside the purview of social concern and pol
icy."[11]
2. The process of production is none of our business. The role of the consumer is to decide whether or not to buy a product or service, and not inquire about the production process. Yet, aside from a few government labeling laws, it is nearly impossible to know anything about the means of production of a product or service. In fact, it is a main function of advertising and public relations to avoid discussing the actual collective process of production (which would entail the stories of workers and their conditions) and instead create a substitute meaning that typically has little or nothing to do with material production.[12] The news treads lightly on the topic of production, because to undermine advertising/PR's myths and images of production would be to undermine the work of their sponsors.
3. The economy is driven by great business leaders and entrepreneurs. This news frame is the flip side of the hidden production process. Why bother talking about the workers, the news seems to say, when the embodiment of production can be portrayed by individual CEOs and entrepreneurs? The heroic CEO and entrepreneur were staples of journalism in the 1990s, an era that witnessed an explosion of growth in business reporting. Yet more business journalism was not necessarily better journalism, as the news more often glorified the developing information economy with sycophantic features on the new "Culture Trust" and celebrated the ultra-wealthy's outrageous fortunes so excitedly that a writer for the Columbia Journalism Review dubbed the genre "wealth porn."[13] A corollary of this frame is that anyone with the gumption can become a superrich entrepreneur/CEO, too-the myth of the self-made man. In fact, those in power are there because, according to the business clich‚, they worker h
arder and smarter-thus denying any advantages to being born into the right social class, or having access to cultural capital.
4. The workplace is a meritocracy. This frame derives from an individualist vision that doesn't include unions. It basically suggests that "you get what you deserve" in the workplace. Similar to the corollary of Frame #3 above, the myth here is that good people rise to the top, and are compensated likewise. Those who aren't rising to the top probably aren't working hard or smart enough. Moreover, working is like consumption - an individual choice. If people don't like their job, they should get another. This kind of frame, of course, deflects any responsibility for the workplace from the employer and preempts collective action, as noted in Frame #5 below.
5. Collective economic action is bad. The notion here, developed historically in the corporate assault against unions and liberalism,[14] is that collective action by workers, communities, and even consumers will upset the well-functioning, democratic American consumer economy, and the decisions of great business leaders and entrepreneurs. The news media disapproves of collective action-including strikes, slowdowns, boycotts, and protests-with a number of standard canards: it is inflationary, un-American, protectionist, na‹ve, causes bureaucratic red tape, disrupts consumer demand and behavior, foments fear and violence, etc. The frame carries an interesting underlying assumption: that economic intervention by citizens should happen only at the individual level (e.g., tell your boss to "take this job and shove it" if you are dissatisfied, or "vote with your pocketbook" if you don't like something). Of course, individual action preempts collective action, which is more democrati
c and potent. But, politics outside of the reigning corporate-political structure is largely disdained, if not usually ignored, by the press.
These five dominant frames resulted in news coverage throughout the 1990s that was often severely critical of labor's actions, and enthusiastically supportive of capital's actions. With such framing, the news media's stories have continually undercut a legitimate social institution-labor unions-that might serve as a useful remedy to millions of U.S. workers who want independent representation in their workplace for collective bargaining and dispute resolution, and a voice in the economy.[15] Of course, one could argue that labor unions, especially in the second half of the twentieth century, have often failed to adequately communicate their case to the mass media. Even the AFL-CIO charged in 1985 that "efforts should be made to better publicize organized labor's accomplishments," "union spokespersons need training in media techniques," and "efforts must be made at every level to better inform reporters about unions and trade unionism."[16]
But the dominant news frames back labor into a tight corner. Especially in the 1990s, even with the best public relations, labor was left with little possibility for framing its story in a way that would both represent its mission and somehow fit into the typical consumer frames of coverage. However, in the following case study, we will see an instance where, with advanced planning, collective action, and a widespread and consistent public message-often through a strategic corporate campaign-labor unions engaged these same consumer frames to define the news story to their benefit, publicizing issues in ways that are difficult for a corporate, consumer-oriented press to ignore, and that are salient to both consumers and citizens.
UPS Workers Adjust Their Message to Fit the Consumer Logic of the News
The UPS strike of August 1997 is now commonly cited as labor's greatest success of the 1990s, where 185,000 Teamster workers brought the nation's largest parcel delivery service to a standstill and won most of their demands, despite the fact that millions of consumers were touched by inconveniences. The strike was one of the top stories of 1997, with 77 USA Today reports, 139 New York Times stories, and 70 network news packages (ABC, CBS, NBC) during July-August 1997. This case study is based on a critical analysis of those reports.[17]
The UPS strike story not only received significant mainstream news coverage, but also gained the nation's attention. The nonprofit Pew Research Center's monthly New Interest Index nationwide surveys asks people how closely they follow certain news stories. The UPS strike was the fifth most closely followed story (in terms of "very closely" responses) of all news stories in 1997, and was the most closely followed labor story of the entire decade, with 76 percent of respondents following it closely - a combined 36 percent "very closely" and 40 percent "fairly closely."[18] But, perhaps the most unique feature of the strike is that by the account of the news media's own surveys, the striking workers gained a majority of the nation's support.
On Monday, August 4, 1997, nearly 185,000 Teamsters working for United Parcel Service went on strike. The workers' primary concern was to reverse the fast growth of part-time positions, which had undercut the creation of new full-time jobs at the global parcel delivery company. The dual wage structure of the Teamster union workers at UPS was similar to that of the American Airlines flight attendants. In 1982, the Teamsters had agreed to a two-tier wage scale that paid part-timers less than half the wages of full-time workers. By 1997, with the company taking full advantage of the dual wage system, more than 60 percent of the Teamster workers at UPS were part-time (up from 42 percent in 1986), although many of them worked 35 or more hours a week.[19]
The day the Teamsters walked out, the story led all network newscasts. Even with the ever-improving economy at the time, the earliest stories on the strike featured hand-wringing consumer-oriented news frames. ABC's veteran reporter Dean Reynolds wrapped up his August 4 report from Dallas by warning, "And economists say one thing is certain. The longer this strike lasts, the higher will go the prices for everything UPS was shipping."
NBC's report by Mike Jensen on the same day waved an even larger red flag of inflationary fears:
JENSEN (voice-over): When all this is over, shipping charges for packages are likely to go up, says consultant William Dean.
DEAN (in office): UPS is such a dominant carrier that they're gonna have to raise their rates, and almost all the other private carriers are going to inch up at the same time.
JENSEN (voice-over): Another worry for the million-and-a-half customers who use UPS every day. For them it's only going to get worse for each day the strike goes on.
Yet, after the first day of the strike, the stories pedaling the myth of inflation had largely ended. The subsequent events of the 15-day UPS strike, which often couldn't be fit to typical labor news frames, seemed to genuinely baffle the consumer-oriented news media. One of the most unusual developments of the strike was the considerable public favor won by the workers. By the second week of the strike, the public support of the striking workers was legitimized by news surveys; a USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll showed that 55 percent of Americans supported the strikers, while only 27 percent supported UPS.[20] Similarly, an ABC News/Nightline poll conducted in the second week also found that 40 percent of respondents supported the union workers, while 30 percent supported the company (with 16 percent supporting neither, and 13 percent with no opinion).
The results of the surveys defied the news media's conventional wisdom and framing strategy-many consumers were inconvenienced, yet the bulk of Americans supported the strikers. For example, a long New York Times story on August 17, 1997 announcing the USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll data stated:
Even though the 13-day-old walkout by the teamsters is inconveniencing far more Americans than most strikes have, the American public strongly . . . supports the workers in this high-stakes showdown, the largest strike in the nation in two decades.
That is a surprising switch because the public sided with management in most other recent work stoppages that grabbed the nation's attention, including the 1994 baseball strike, the 1982 football players' strike and the 1981 air controllers' strike.[21]
Likewise, the USA Today story on the pro-worker poll seemed rather perplexed, as it noted "Public support for the Teamsters comes even though 31% disapprove of unions."[22] An ABC News.com story on the ABC News/Nightline poll results took a similar tone, highlighting the unusual fact that although people were inconvenienced by the strike, most people didn't want the president to step in and end it.[23]
The poll results undermined the potential for the disgruntled consumer to be the primary frame of the UPS strike story. In fact, the unexpected poll results created the possibility for untraditional strike narratives. For example, a USA Today story on York, Pennsylvania entitled "Town finds strike is inconvenience but not calamity" took a more measured, less alarmist view of the impact on consumers.
Still, there were the fairly typical consumer-problem stories: by August 5, the second day of the strike, reports focused on an electronics business hampered by missing shipments (on CBS Evening News), fresh flowers going unshipped (ABC World News Tonight), and Lobstergram and cheesecake deliveries at a standstill (NBC Nightly News). Before the strike ended, the television news reports also covered the impact on fish deliveries, a wedding (an undelivered wedding dress), blood supplies, pricey Nieman Marcus department store goods, espresso, and frozen yogurt.
The news media also attempted to discredit the 185,000 striking workers by painting them as violent unionists. For example, the Big Three television networks ran 70 package reports between August 3-20, 1997 in their strike coverage. No fewer than 10 of the reports, all between August 5-10, noted violence on picket lines and showed police shoving picketers back to make way for UPS trucks rolling through the UPS gate. A typical report was the August 5 lead-in by ABC World News Tonight anchor Diane Sawyer:
SAWYER (on camera): Tempers flared at UPS plants today, in a second day of the Teamsters strike against the shipping company.
SAWYER (now voice over video of Chelmsford, Massachusetts police pushing picketers): Two strikers were arrested at this Massachusetts site after a scuffle with police left one person injured (shift to video of an older male UPS worker lying on the pavement, with his head cradled by an emergency medical worker).
The assumption, of course, is that the striking workers were at fault, since they were the ones arrested. But there never were (and typically never are) follow-up reports to such stories that tell the consequences of the arrests, nor were there reports investigating police conduct or responsibility for the worker's injury.
In fact, the peaceful nationwide work stoppage of 185,000 workers defied the new media's own typical stereotype of violent picketers. Nevertheless, during the first week of coverage, the network television news media returned again and again to the images of police physically pushing back and arresting workers attempting to nonviolently block UPS gates in a few Boston suburb locations. Even after such isolated incidences of "violence" had ended, CBS still stoked fears of more striker-induced violence by recycling the same video that CBS use earlier in the week. On August 10, 1997, CBS reporter Diane Olick filed a news package that included this content:
OLICK (voice over trucks leaving UPS gates through a crowd of people): There is also growing concern that as the possibility of negotiations cools, tempers will heat up on the picket lines_
OLICK (voice over file footage of six police officers pulling a striker away from the front of a UPS truck): _as they did already in Boston.
RON CAREY (from Face the Nation): I have made it very clear that there will be no violence.
UNIDENTIFIED PICKETER: Some people are getting fed up - that may go violent [sic].
Thus, even when no violence exists (the video CBS used had nothing to do with strikers becoming inflamed by slow negotiations, but instead showed police breaking a blockade with force), the news media seems irresistibly compelled to use it as a narrative element for labor stories.
Despite the news media's hyping of a violence angle and their befuddlement over public support of the workers, in several reports the news actually did what news is supposed to do: inform the public and be a medium for the open discussion of relevant public issues. Almost surprisingly, many reports on the UPS strike presented varying opinions about the status of part-time workers in the American economy, the years of downsizing at U.S. corporations, and the question of fair wages. Yet, before one concludes that the mainstream press opened up a new era of labor coverage, it is worth considering four unique factors behind the Teamsters' victory and the widespread public support of the workers.
1) First, there was a new democratic environment at the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Under the direction of Teamster President Ron Carey and the organizational help of the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), a reform movement within the union, the Teamsters had improved democracy in decision-making and maintained a very high degree of solidarity among its UPS workers.[24] Almost a year in advance, the Teamsters leadership developed the kind of internal communication campaign that contrasted highly with the corrupt, secretive Teamsters leadership style of earlier decades. In advance of the contract talks, the Teamsters
_hired rank and file activists from UPS centers as coordinator; mapped out an extensive one-on-one communications network; surveyed members on the issues; published flyers; prodded locals to hold before-work rallies; and put some rank and filers on the national bargaining committee. International officers and staff traveled to local meetings around the country; some attended the TDU convention last fall.[25]
So, unlike the UAW members at GM in Arlington who failed to support their fellow workers at Mackie (see Chapter 4), well-paid, full-time UPS workers willingly risked their positions by striking for the benefit of their fellow UPS workers who were part-time and low-paid. The Teamsters persuasively convinced their drivers earning about $20 an hour to go on the picket line to support full-time jobs for part-timers who were starting at only $8 an hour. UPS pilots also honored the strike, in return for support later in the year from other UPS workers when the pilots entered contract negotiations. The new democracy of the Teamsters union also meant that only a few thousand union members failed to join the strike, so the public front of the Teamsters was almost completely united.[26]
2) Second, the Teamsters were able to effectively turn the news media's consumer orientation to their benefit. The main issue of the strike was fairness to workers and the ability to make a living wage, the kind of wage that allows workers to enjoy the fruits of their wage labor in the consumer economy.[27] As Jim West observed in Labor Notes, this was a salient issue. "Fighting for full-time jobs that can support a family resonated with workers throughout the country, many of whom have similar problems."[28] [Unfortunately, in a nation where there is still resistance to thinking of women as the chief breadwinners of families, the concept of a "family wage" may not resonate as loudly when the worker is a female flight attendant.] The work stoppage successfully struck a chord with Americans disturbed by the trend of downsizing: well-paid, full-time, family-wage jobs being replaced with low-paying positions with no benefits and little security-while corporate profits soar. I
n fact, the ABC News/Nightline Poll found that 65 percent of respondents agreed that part-time workers should get the same health insurance as full-time workers, and 82 percent felt that part-timers should get the same pay as full-timers for equal work.[29]
The idea that workers should get paid enough to be good consumers is an old one in the United States, and was popularized in 1914 by Henry Ford's offer to pay his auto plant workers at least $5 a day, enough of a wage to be able to buy the cars they built and the new, corresponding consumer lifestyle.[30] The idea of decent living standards was renewed for labor's efforts when the new head of the AFL-CIO, John Sweeney, declared in 1996 that "America needs a raise." [31] A year late, the Teamsters had a similar slogan for the UPS strike: "Part-time America won't work." The Teamsters had prepared for nearly a year to communicate the idea of a living wage to the news media, and trained their rank-and-file workers to speak effectively on the topic.[32] As a result, mixed in with stories exaggerating worker violence and the strike's threat to the U.S. economy were at least two network television packages that investigated the use of part-time workers in the economy.
After a story lamenting the slowdown in car parts deliveries to mechanics (on August 4, the first day of the strike), Dan Rather introduced a second report, one which offered context for one of the strike's central issues:
RATHER: We want to give you a closer look now at one of the key issues in the strike because its one that goes beyond the Teamsters and UPS. It's the use of part-time, as opposed to full-time, workers. As CBS News economics correspondent Ray Brady reports, it's a trend in this country that is growing fast.
BRADY (voice over picket lines and file footage of UPS workers quickly sorting boxes along the conveyer belt lines of an immense facility): UPS employs more part-time workers than any other company-fully two-thirds of its workforce. And that's the problem. Some part-timers get just three hours of work a day, for a starting salary that hasn't been raised since 1982.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE WORKER (on picket line): We're guaranteed three hours. We're begging for more. We cannot live on three hours.
BRADY (voice over picket lines): Even part-timers who get more hours say they're paid half as much as full-timers.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE WORKER: They got us working like 40 hours a week and still keeping us at a part-time rate.
Brady's package for CBS continued with the story of a 63-year-old woman who had worked at Woolworth's for 27 years when she was fired and replaced with part-timers who earned less money and no benefits. Brady's on-camera conclusion focused on the sobering reality of business's increasing use of part-time labor: "Unions may feel that this is the time to make an issue of low-paid part-timers. As the ranks of these workers grows, more Americans may be wondering, could I be replaced by one of them?"
On the second day of the strike, August 5, NBC broadcast a package that also investigated the problem of part-time work.
TOM BROKAW (anchor): Of course, one of the issues at the heart of this strike is the practice of hiring part-time workers for long-term jobs. It's a practice in which UPS is certainly not alone in this country_
MIKE JENSEN (reporter, voice over picket line): Six out of 10 workers at UPS are part-timers, and a lot of them want full-time jobs.
CECELIA FRETS, UPS WORKER (on picket line): I would like to make full-time, but they're not going to give it to us.
JENSEN (voice over picket line, shots of man on line): Anthony Diaz gets only four hours of work a day. He'd like eight.
DIAZ: I live with my three sisters and my grandmother, and help them and support them.
JENSEN: (voice over images of waitress, Wal-mart store, and hotel doorman working): It's a sign of the times. Almost every company in America hires temporary or part-time workers in the name of efficiency-UPS because its work comes in spurts.
JIM KELLY, UPS CHAIRMAN (voice begins over shots of UPS workers sorting, then goes to a head shot of him): We have three or four hours where we have to sort packages, and there's no work before that, and no work after that, in many cases.
JENSEN: The number of temporary workers is up 400 percent in the last 15 years. And one out of every five workers is part-time. Some labor experts defend part-time work.
PROF. JEFF SONNENFELD, EMORY UNIVERSITY: An awful lot of people got new footing into the world of work in a very important way in a critical time in their lives. And that's through part-time work.
If Jensen was a more enterprising reporter, he might have taken Kelly to task for the suggestion that there is nothing more than a few hours of work a day for workers classified as part-time at UPS. Kelly's use of in many cases obscured the fact that more than 10,000 UPS "part-time" workers put in over 35 hours a week.[33] If Jensen was also a more accurate reporter, he would have better described the background of his expert labor source Sonnenfeld, who curiously seems to be an apologist for part-time jobs. In fact, Sonnenfeld was not a "labor expert," but a management professor-one who had worked professionally as a consultant for UPS executives.[34]
Despite the report's shortcomings and inaccuracies, Jensen's package still made clear that part-time work was also destroying the full-time job market:
PONCE, UPS WORKER (on picket line, with his young son on his shoulders): I got two kids and a wife. What I take home after taxes is about 120.
PONCE (new shot, with Jensen nodding slightly as he stands beside Ponce): You can't survive. It's impossible, impossible.
JENSEN (voice over shots of picket line, including Ponce and son): A part-time job can be a stepping stone. But if you want to work full-time and can't, part-time is more like a dead-end.
In these reports, the message planning of the Teamsters was clearly effective. Within the constraints of consumerism, the Teamsters were able to show that UPS was denying its thousands of part-time workers a living wage for them and their families, and that this was part of a national trend affecting millions more.
3) A third element that aided the success of the UPS workers in their struggle with UPS was the workers' existing goodwill with millions of Americans. An ABC News.com timeline reflecting on the major stories of 1997 captured the American sentiment toward UPS workers: "In early August the nation learned-through sudden deprivation-just how completely dependent we have become on the armada of brown UPS vans and their ever-friendly drivers."[35] Unlike laborers in so many sectors of the American economy, UPS workers have daily contact with people-a lot of people, since each UPS driver delivers up to 500 packages a day.[36] Because UPS delivery drivers work regular routes, they build personal relationships with their customers. The New York Times in an August 17, 1997 story related one such anecdote:
In Brooklyn, Michael Rodriguez, owner of Open Road Cycles, said he sympathized with the Teamster strikers partly because he was so fond of his brown-suited U.P.S. driver. "The workers do work hard," he said. "I have some feelings for my regular guy. They do deserve something." [37]
It is a fact of the consumer-based economy that most people don't have knowledge of a worker's daily life, and the process of production or a service. And, as noted in Chapter 3, it is a central frame of labor stories in the consumer media that the process of production is not the public's business. The UPS case is unique, because its a rare situation where the public isn't reliant upon the news media to communicate the experience of the worker. Moreover, UPS's own advertising portrays its delivery people as noble, courageous workers-the dedicated people who made UPS "the tightest ship in the shipping business."
4) The economy was good. The American economy was doing well for businesses, with high profits and low unemployment in 1997. UPS, too, was extremely successful, with 80 percent of the nation's parcel business, $1.15 billion in profits in the previous year, and a profit rate of 19.4 percent, which dwarfed competitors like Federal Express and the U.S. Postal Service. Yet, the workers at UPS-like workers in many industries in the U.S.-did not completely share in the fruits of the economy. Given the good economy, it was hard for UPS to make the argument that they were in a precarious fiscal situation, or that they were highly pressured to stay competitive.
The strike, the largest walkout since the 1983 AT&T strike, lasted 15 days. The resulting settlement created 10,000 new full-time jobs, reduced the wage differential with raises for full-time workers and larger raises for part-timers, prohibited UPS from taking control of the workers' pension fund, and limited subcontracting of labor. Thus, with their advance planning, the Teamsters were able to turn to their favor every one of the five major frames used by the consumer-oriented news media:
ù The consumer is king. The Teamsters plainly showed that UPS denied their part-timers a living wage and the ability to be normal, everyday consumers.
ù The process of production is none of the public's business. The Teamsters trained their workers to be articulate on the issues, and traded on their uniformed workers' long-term goodwill with the public, and the public's knowledge of their hard work.
ù The economy is driven by great business leaders and entrepreneurs. Although the typical news framing of labor stories suggests that great business leaders and entrepreneurs drive the economy, the nucleus of UPS's operations is their brown-clad workers, and the company's own advertising heralds their contributions.
ù The workplace is a meritocracy. It was quite evident that the UPS workplace wasn't a meritocracy. Full-time and part-time workers performed the same tasks, but earned grossly disparate wages.
ù Collective economic action is bad. It was hard to argue that this collective action was bad. Although the strike inconvenienced some people (which the news pointed out many times), the public largely supported this strike. Moreover, holding 80 percent of the parcel business and earning more than a billion dollars in profits the previous year, it was hard for UPS to claim it was under attack.
Although the Teamsters were able to engage the typical news frames to their advantage, the limits of consumer-oriented frames were also apparent in the UPS case. The other important issue for the Teamsters was control of the union's pension fund. UPS wanted to withdraw from the union's multi-employer pension plan and administer its own pension fund for workers. It wasn't until an August 17 report by CBS-about two weeks into the strike-that any of the television news reports even attempted to explain why workers might not want their pension in the hands of their employer. As the package by correspondent Troy Roberts explained, retired Pan Am airline workers continue to suffer from underpayment of their pensions after Pan Am went bankrupt in 1991 and ceased operations.
Many observers hailed the Teamster victory as a victory for all of labor, and a milestone that would mark labor's resurgence. On the network television news, an NBC report on August 18, an ABC report on August 19, and a CBS report on August 20 all covered the new life in the U.S. labor movement, after years of decline. Yet, for the corporate news media, any levity that might be associated with broad public support for the Teamsters and a possible upswing in fortunes for working people was strongly tempered with worry about Corporate America's bottom line. Clearly, the prophets of Wall Street get the final word on whether or not anyone beyond the Teamsters should be pleased by the UPS settlement. On Sunday, August 17, a day before the resolution of the work stoppage, CBS News weekend anchor Russ Mitchell speculated on the causes of a stock market drop at the end of the previous week:
MITCHELL (voice over video of Teamsters picketing): Another problem may be the UPS strike. Even though polls show most Americans are siding with workers in the dispute, some investors think labor's demands in the strike could spill over into contract talks at other companies, and cut into corporate profits.
At ABC World News Tonight on Tuesday, August 19, the day the strike ended, ABC carried its report on labor's new momentum. Immediately afterward, anchor Peter Jennings cheerily reported "The stock market seemed genuinely pleased with the UPS settlement," and noted the upturn in the Dow Jones index and the NASDAQ market. The same day, economics correspondent Ray Brady filed his final report on the UPS strike for the CBS Evening News. In his on-camera summary, Brady concluded:
BRADY: There have been concerns this settlement might set off a whole new round of wage increases in other industries and heat up inflation. But that's not likely for now. There are now big labor contracts like rubber, autos, or steel coming up until next year.
Even after labor's biggest victory in two decades, the mainstream news media easily slid back into the same old consumer-oriented news frames. The good news, it would seem, is not that working people might get a well-deserved raise in an era of rising profits, but that Corporate America's profits (and, of course, the prices of consumer goods) wouldn't again be threatened for at least a year.
The Future of Labor in the Corporate News
Consumerism can sometimes be the basis for coverage in labor's interest when the consumption-production link is apparent. Some of the most powerful news stories of recent years have developed when consumption gets linked back to production. [Of course, the mainstream news media, which don't regularly cover a labor beat, and rarely use investigative reporters, rarely shed light on production and labor. The impetus for such stories usually begins with social activism by labor or other organizations.] For example, the production-consumption link was visible in much of the UPS story. In some ways, it was undeniable, since many people were personally acquainted with the 185,000 striking UPS workers across the U.S. In other words, the consumers knew the people who did the work, and identified them as regular people with valid concerns - not as the faceless, potentially demonized members of organized labor. The reform-minded Teamsters also did an excellent job of communicating th
eir message of a living wage to the media and the people.
The story of Wal-mart and its use of sweatshop labor-which used the narrative "hook" of Kathie Lee Gifford's Wal-mart clothing line-was another major news item that linked the often invisible process of production to consumption. And, as historian Lawrence Glickman explains, the recent and historic campaigns for a "living wage" have been ways in which labor has advantageously linked consumerism - i.e., the ability earn a wage so that one can live in a comfortable fashion - to production.[38] In fact, by March 2002, more than 80 local living wage ordinances had been passed in the U.S.[39]
The news media, though, generally don't portray the link between consumption and production, often because the production process and treatment of labor doesn't reflect very favorably on their advertisers or own corporate parents. In fact, it scares the hell out of businesses when they can't control the image of production (witness Phil Knight's and Nike's discomforts over charges of sweatshop labor). Businesses don't want to call attention to production, which is exactly what labor and consumer advocates do. (The WTO protests are a recent example of such unwanted publicity.) Businesses often fight to control or hide the image of production through public relations and advertising. GM's efforts to make Saturn a "different" people-friendly auto company and Wal-mart's advertised "Buy American" policy are both approaches (rather transparent approaches to the keen observer) that try to mask the true modes of production. Recent books from the left (e.g., Thomas Frank's The Conqu
est of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism) and the right (e.g., David Brooks' Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There) detail how business, through advertising and PR, now sells consumption as hip and countercultural, and business entrepreneurialism as equally radical. This is only possible, though, by obscuring labor and class relations, and true radical social action.
Thus, there is a constant battle between corporate interests defining consumerism in one fashion - buy, buy, buy, and let business do as it wishes - versus labor, which asks for a living wage to participate in a consumer economy, and also fair, safe modes of production. The major news media are commercial, corporate media, and generally frame news stories in ways that favor corporate interests. But, in cases of widespread public activism by labor and other social groups, news cannot afford to be seen as acting as lackeys of corporate capitalism. So, in these instances, the news media are unable to frame labor news from their typical consumer economy perspective, and must report the story that presents clear criticism of the production side of the economy to sustain their own credibility. In other words, the mainstream news media won't cover labor news, and won't cover it with favorable frames, unless the stories are thrust upon them. Then, of course, corporate damage control
teams go to work, to reestablish corporate-friendly framing of news events. The UPS "brown" branding campaign of 2002 is one part of this effort, publicizing the corporate processes and obscuring the company's former symbol-the people who do the work.
Notes
[1] Stuart Elliott, "Going Big on Brown," In Advertising Newsletter, New York Times on the Web, 19 February 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/email. The TV ads were scheduled to also run during broadcasts of the NCAA men's basketball tournament, the Academy Awards, and on CNN, CNBC, Fox News Channel, and Discovery. The print ads appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Forbes, Fortune, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, and Time.
[2] See Michael Parenti, Inventing Reality: The Politics of Mass Media (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986) and William J. Puette, Through Jaundiced Eyes: How the Media View Organized Labor (Ithaca: ILR Press, 1992). See Parenti, Inventing Reality, Puette, Through Jaundiced Eyes, and Jonathan Tasini, "Lost in the Margins: Labor and the Media," Extra! 3, no. 7 (1990): 2-11. Also see Herbert J. Gans, Deciding What 's News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time (New York: Pantheon, 1979), 46.
[3] James W. Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 21.
[4] Lance Bennett and Murray Edelman, "Toward a New Political Narrative," Journal of Communication 35, no. 4 (1985): 159.
[5] Todd Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 7.
[6] Peter Golding and Graham Murdock, "Culture, Communications, and Political Economy," in Mass Media and Society, ed. James Curran and Michael Gurevitch (London: Edward Arnold, 1991), 27.
[7] Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), 238.
[8] Jimmie L. Reeves and Richard Campbell, Cracked Coverage: Television News, the Anti-Cocaine Crusade, and the Reagan Legacy (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 59.
[9] In a longer work, the author analyzed mainstream news media coverage of the five major labor events from the 1990s, all of which offer different sets of circumstances for comparison: the 1991-94 shutdown of the General Motors Willow Run Assembly Plant in Ypsilanti, Michigan; the American Airlines flight attendant strike of 1993; the 1994-95 Major League Baseball strike, the 1997 United Parcel Service Strike, and the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization's Ministerial Conference in Seattle.
[10] See Parenti, Inventing Reality, and Puette, Through Jaundiced Eyes,
[11] Juliet B. Schor, "Towards a New Politics of Consumption," in The Consumer Society Reader, ed. Juliet B. Schor and Douglas B. Holt (New York: The New Press, 2000), 452.
[12] See Robert Goldman and Stephen Papson, Sign Wars (New York: Guilford Press, 1996).
[13] See Diana B. Henriques, "Business Reporting: Behind the Curve," Columbia Journalism Review, November/December 2000: 18-21. On the rise of business news, see Thomas Frank, Commodify Your Dissent (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), especially pages 23-28 on the "Culture Trust." Also see Gary Andrew Poole, "'Wealth Porn' and Beyond," Columbia Journalism Review, November/December 2000: 22-23.
[14] See Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945-60 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994).
[15] See Freeman and Rogers, What Workers Want.
[16] See AFL-CIO Committee on the Evolution of Work, The Changing Situation of Workers and Their Unions (Washington: AFL-CIO, 1985).
[17] Network news stories were acquired through the Vanderbilt Television News Archive. Newspaper reports were obtained via the Nexis full text database, and supplemented with microfilm copies.
[18] Peyton M. Craighill, e-mail to the author, 15 August 2001. Craighill, Project Director of The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, supplied New Interest Index data for all labor stories in their surveys from the 1990s.
[19] Jeremy Brecher, Strike! (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1997), 358-359.
[20] David Field, "Poll: 55% Support Strikers at UPS," USA Today, 15 Aug 1997: A1. Also see Steven Greenhouse, "Strikers at U.P.S. Backed by Public," New York Times 17 August 1997: A1, A16.
[21] Greenhouse, "Strikers at U.P.S. Backed," A1. The story's assertion that "the public sided with management in most other recent work stoppages that grabbed the nation's attention, including the 1994 baseball strike, the 1982 football players' strike and the 1981 air controllers' strike" is also a gross simplification of public sentiment regarding these strikes.
[22] Field, "Poll: 55% Support Strikers," 1A.
[23] Gary Langer, "Poll: Keep Clinton Out of U.S.," ABC News.com 12 August 1997, http://more.abcnews.go.com/sections/us/upspoll812/index.html.
[24] See Jim West, "Big Win at UPS!" Labor Notes, September 1997: 1, 14-15.
[25] Ibid., p. 14.
[26] For an overview of the Teamster strategy, see Matt Witt and Rand Wilson, "Part-Time America Won't Work: The Teamsters Fight for Good Jobs at UPS," in Not Your Father's Union Movement: Inside the AFL-CIO, ed. Jo-Ann Mort (London: Verso, 1998).
[27] Lawrence B. Glickman, A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). Glickman explains that early proponents of the living wage in the post-Civil War era defined the wage as one that provides "the ability to support families, to maintain self-respect, and to have both the means and the leisure to participate in the civic life of the nation" (p. 3). Glickman argues that the family wage is a subset of the living wage.
[28] West, "Big Win at UPS!" 14.
[29] Langer, "Poll: Keep Clinton Out," 1.
[30] See, for example, David Gartman, Auto Slavery: The Labor Process in the American Automobile Industry, 1987-1950 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986), pp. 203-214.
[31] See David Kusnet, "The 'America Needs a Raise' Campaign," in Not Your Father's Union Movement: Inside the AFL-CIO, ed. Jo-Ann Mort (London: Verso, 1998), 167-178.
[32] Jarol B. Manheim, The Death of a Thousand Cuts: Corporate Campaigns and the Attack on the Corporation (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001), 337.
[33] Jane Slaughter, "Teamsters May Strike UPS for Full-Time Jobs," Labor Notes, August 1997, 1, 14.
[34] For an example of Sonnenfeld as pro-UPS commentator, see Allen Myerson, "Fracturing U.P.S. Image of Labor Peace," New York Times, 10 August 1997, p. A16. According to the Augusta Chronicle Online, "Senior executives would pay up to $2,500 apiece to attend [Sonnenfeld's] conferences at Emory." See Associate Press, "Star Business Professor Falls Amid Vandalism Allegations," Augusta Chronicle Online, 23 December 1997, http://www.augustachronicle.com/stories/122397/biz_dean.shtml.
[35] "UPS Strike Starts," ABC News.com, 4 August 1997, http://more.abcnews.go.com/sections/world/1997/97_ups.html
[36] See "The UPS Story," UPS, 25 March 2002, http://www.ups.com/about/story.html.
[37] Greenhouse, "Strikers at U.P.S. Backed," A16.
[38] Glickman, A Living Wage.
[39] Jen Kern and Stephanie Luce, "Living Wage Movement Greets the Recession with New Victories," Labor Notes, March 2002, 1, 14.