James, I agree the part time work is the union's red herring to draw attention away from the pension issue. However, the union ALREADY has control of the pension fund; it's UPS that wants to withdraw their funds from it. The reason: the pension is underfunded. This means there is more money going out than going in. In NY, some Teamster pensioners get checks of over $4,000/mo. Therefore there is a dollar amount "liability penalty" for withdrawing from the plan, and the larger the contributing co's share, the larger the penalty. Thus, UPS currently has to pay $700 million to withdraw, which they would like to do. The reason: Since UPS continues to expand it's union work force, their penalty for withdrawing keeps going up. In five years UPS estimates the w/d liability penalty will be 2 billion dollars. A final point: the union purposely keeps the pension plan "underfunded" to induce the companies to stay in; ie so they won't have to pony up the $$$ for withdrawal penalties. It's a mess, getting messier, which is why UPS wants out. That's the real reason for the strike. The workers don't have much to do with it, IMO. Sure there probably are workers who would like to go full-time, but since part-timers do get benefits, what's the beef. If someone wants out of a job for any reason, then they should just quit and look elsewhere. For most people that's the obvious thing to do.
My source for this post is from the Wed, Aug 13th WSJ, page A4.
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