The International Brotherhood of Teamsters is collaborating with UPS to keep workers on the job without sufficient protection. A COVID-19 page on the Teamsters website stresses workers’ personal responsibility, rather than the company’s responsibility, for limiting infections, including an “[e]mphasis on personal hygiene practices, hand-washing, respiratory etiquette, and social distancing.” But the policy of “social distancing” is impossible to apply in a crowded warehouse full of personnel in constant interaction with one another and merchandise.

For its part, the Teamsters for a Democratic Union, an opposition faction of the Teamsters bureaucracy, has sought to corral workers behind a petition to UPS management, pleading with them to give workers two weeks paid time off in case of exposure and to implement sanitation measures. The function of such a campaign is to channel workers behind fruitless appeals to management and the Teamsters apparatus and keep them from taking matters into their own hands, as autoworkers did last week when they walked off the job in defiance of the auto companies and UAW’s attempts to keep them working during the pandemic.

Full Report: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/03/23/upsb-m23.html
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