Media Frames UPS Strike as Harming You, the “Consumer” and Protagonist of Reality
Turning labor reporting into pseudo-Service Journalism does nothing but build public contempt for unions.
Strikes, by their very nature, are meant to disrupt supply chains, consumption, corporate profits—business as usual. It’s an axiom of all labor politics that the greatest power labor has is the withholding of labor. Doing so, and the threat of doing so, is thus the primary leverage workers have when negotiating for better pay, conditions, security, or a host of demands for improving the lot of the working class. But labor stoppages are almost always the last resort, a product of desperation, and a breakdown of good-faith negotiations on the part of management. After all, workers do not get their regular paychecks during a strike (which is why unions have strike funds). It is not something workers do casually, or because they simply love “devastating the economy.” It’s the rare act of direct class conflict perpetuated by the workers—the most profound leverage these workers have is the disruption of commerce or the credible threat of disruption of commerce. And it’s only through the willingness to strike that workers have won things like: the 8-hour day, safer nurse-to-patient ratios in hospitals, and improvements to ghastly work conditions. In a scenario where they were unable to exercise this power, they would literally never get anything they want and have virtually no power.
This last resort from workers, this exercising of leverage by the party that is, by definition, less resourced and powerful than capital, is decontextualized and framed as a sudden and petulant act whose only apparent purpose is to harm “the economy.” Media consumers, half-paying attention, are given the impression the real injustice is not the years of worker abuses, underpay, deadly working conditions, and greed by corporate negotiators, but the act of withholding labor from the workers who have finally had enough. One way this ideological heavy lifting is done is subtle, but worth pointing out: It’s to jam the 2-ton elephant that is labor journalism into the 2-liter bucket that is service journalism.
Here we have headlines that mention, either for the first time, or for the first time in many months, the potential upcoming UPS teamsters strike. Members of the Teamsters union have voted to authorize a strike, and the contract expires July 31 at midnight. If around 350,000 Teamsters decide to withhold their labor, it will be the largest strike against a single company in US history. Workers have sounded the alarm about abysmal conditions: a two-tier system created by the 22.4 job classification, excessive overtime, lack of full-time jobs, flimsy job security, poor pay, and harassment on the part of the employer. Yet, instead of centering the underpaid, overworked UPS worker, the person centered is the holiest of the holies, The Consumer, the protagonist of reality.
CNN: What the potential UPS strike could mean for your packages (this article ran syndicated in dozens of news outlets)
Forbes: Without A Package Deal, UPS Workers Could Strike In August; How To Be Ready
Rockford Register Star: One of the largest strikes in US history appears imminent. Here's how it'll impact you
ABC: What the potential UPS strike could mean for your packages
Audacy: News What does the potential UPS strike mean for your packages?
Sacramento Bee: UPS workers could strike. What would that mean for your package deliveries?
USA Today: UPS employees authorize strike. What that means for you.
Service Journalism is an increasingly popular genre of reporting. It’s defined by the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri as “giving readers good, practical advice—what to buy, where to go, how to do a certain thing—to make their lives easier. While service journalism shares the same standards of truth and fact-finding as regular reporting, it requires a different approach. The biggest shift: The reporter’s lens moves from the subject to the reader.”
The idea of “consumer” focused reporting isn’t inherently a bad thing. In fact, there is an approach to covering consumer issues that acknowledges that the vast majority of “consumers” in this country—i.e. people who need to consume things to survive, which is most people—are part of the working class themselves, and stand to benefit from journalism that holds corporations accountable. We see this in coverage of how high insulin prices result in devastating health consequences for poor and working-class “consumers,” or how companies intentionally hiked prices, while blaming inflation, creating hardship for “consumers” of things like groceries.
But this brand of centering the “consumer” is not focused on exposing the wrongdoing of companies against consumers and workers alike. Instead, we see a depoliticized notion of a consumer—an approach that tries to depict the consumer as separate from the working class, or emphasizes the experience of upper-class consumers. There are bigger injustices in the world than “your packages” not being delivered on time and making “your packages” the focus of a massive labor strike removes the human stakes and turns a conflict over better working conditions and higher pay for struggling truck drivers and package handlers into bourgeois hand-wringing.
When corporate wrongdoing is removed from the equation, this genre of reporting puts the onus for the “disruption” on the workers, rather than on management, that is known for imposing draconian work quotas that try to dictate the amount of seconds it takes for a UPS driver to open the door, take out a package, drop it off, etc. (The position of the Teamsters is that workers are under no obligation to follow these quotas, which aren’t in their contract, but it is still a source of stress and unpleasantness for thousands of workers.)
The CNN article doesn’t seek any new comment from union reps, simply recycling old quotes and burying them down in paragraph 24. The lead establishes the stakes: union unrest is going to hurt your bottom line.
A UPS strike by 185,000 workers 25 years ago brought the logistics giant’s operations to a standstill. The 15-day strike slashed package deliveries, overwhelmed the US Postal Service and FedEx, and hurt businesses across the United States.
Audacy’s Joe Hiti doesn’t even bother quoting any union or pro-union sources, instead relying entirely on quotes from “Patrick Penfield, who directs the Supply Chain Executive Management Program at Syracuse University,” e.g. someone who trains corporate executives and managers for a living.
When union demands are mentioned, it is done so in passing, as an afterthought. The primary injustice isn’t the worker mistreatment and underpaying, it’s the effect a strike will have on you, the most important moral agent in the universe.
While the profile itself was balanced enough, The Washington Post social media team framed the upcoming UPS strike as a diabolical plot to attack you, the reader, personally, tweeting out: “The Teamsters president has big plans to stop your UPS deliveries in August”
John Stossel built the blueprint for this “consumer”-first, ostensibly adversarial—but ultimately conservative—framing. “The consumer” is seen as the primary moral agent; one’s rights begin and end with their ability to engage in commerce and maximize their purchasing decisions. There is no concept of working-class mutual interests, there is no sense that improving the working conditions and pay of UPS workers would help “you” as a wage worker, not just a consumer of package deliveries. After much searching, no headline reading, “What the potential UPS strike could mean for the working class” could be found. Because class and class interests don’t exist—only you, as an individual, an atomized being of passive consumption do.
A close cousin on this pseudo-service journalism is framing the strike solely in terms of how it will impact, if not you personally, the “economy” (e.g. all your friends and family). “Unionized UPS workers could strike this summer, scrambling supply chains and home delivery,” the AP reported. “A massive UPS strike could devastate the economy,” CNN headline blares.
This was a common framing for the then-pending railroad strike last November, that was later thwarted by an act of Congress and the White House. Media consumers were fed a non-stop torrent of doom and gloom headlines about a rail strike that would “disrupt,” “wreck,” “devastate” “the economy” and ruin Christmas for Little Jimmy:
credit: Steve Morris of The Recount.
A rare exception in UPS strike coverage worth noting was this CBS News report from Carter Evans on June 16 that centered on a UPS worker and why they were preparing for a potential strike.
Here, the subject of the strike isn’t a vague consumer, but actual humans with actual needs exercising their power for a specific and rational reason. (It’s also worth noting this report didn’t air on CBS, but its streaming-only service which probably explains how it got made.)
Worker strikes are stories about worker strikes. They have political context and years of backstory involving corporate malpractice and mistreatment that needs centering. They are not stories largely about inconveniencing “consumers” or doom and gloom fear mongering about harming “the economy” caused solely by workers striking. These “consumer,” “economy”-centered framings, stripped of context, serve only one functional purpose: to pit the public against workers by turning the reader into the victim of workers’ only form of leverage. Rather than showing how UPS teamsters exercising this leverage can benefit workers across the board, we are only given the downsides of strikes and how they affect us—not as constituent members of a class with class interests—but as “consumers” whose moral utility is reduced entirely to our ability to buy and sell goods and services.