On Tuesday, President Joe Biden joined workers striking in Detroit.
As my colleague Inae Oh wrote:
IN THE END, the strike of the summer never materialized. The 340,000 UPS workers represented by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters could have eclipsed even the star-studded Hollywood picket lines and the presidentially sanctioned United Auto Workers (UAW) strike if they had walked off the job, bringing an increasingly delivery-dependent American economy to a grinding halt. This prospect seemed all but inevitable when negotiations between the Teamsters and UPS broke down in early July––to the elation of labor radicals and the despair of just about everyone else, including the Biden White House and its allies. (Vox fretted that “a UPS strike would be worse than you think,” while Bloomberg speculated about the possibility that Biden might invoke rarely utilized presidential powers to crush the hypothetical strike.) But in a dramatic reversal, Teamsters leadership assented to a tentative agreement just a few weeks later, with days to go before the union’s August 1st strike deadline. Members overwhelmingly ratified the contract in late August, and UPS workers remained on the job.
As we often say, another day is good.
