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Tempers flare on picket lines
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UPS workers brace for long strike

August 13, 1997
Web posted at: 7:41 p.m. EDT (2341 GMT)

From Correspondent Brian Jenkins

BOSTON (CNN) -- UPS strikers who are used to hard work complain that sitting around is a pain in the neck. Picketers in Boston throw baseballs, play cards and read the paper to pass the time.

But boredom is the least of the strike's hardships for many union members. While United Parcel Service and Teamsters leaders dig in, striking workers are also preparing, tightening their belts or taking other jobs to make ends meet.

'$5 in my pocket and that's it'

For two years, Shirlee Walsh walked a UPS delivery route in downtown Boston. Now she spends her mornings walking a picket line a few miles away. In the afternoon, she picks up her 8-year-old son, Christopher, from a church day camp.

Walsh is better off than some; the camp is waiving its fee while she's on strike, and the house her parents gave her is paid for. But she just got a bill for part of Christopher's Catholic school tuition -- about $200 -- and doesn't have the money to pay it.

"I think I have $5 in my pocket and that's it," Walsh says. "I have a jar of pennies and there's probably $7 in there."

Walsh took a part-time job at UPS shortly after her husband, Daniel, died four years ago. Before the strike, she was making $8.50 an hour, working about 15 hours a week on average and hoping to move into a full-time job.

"I bring home about $110 a week" from the UPS job, Walsh says. "If it wasn't for benefits, I would have been gone a long time ago." Now, she has no benefits, and no money for food until her weekly strike pay of $55 arrives.

Walsh says Christopher will have to get used to eating cereal and peanut butter sandwiches for a while; she can get bread and milk on credit at the corner store.

Despite the hardships, Walsh says she will not cross the picket line.

'Anxious to be back on the job'

Scott McDonnell is back where he started, packing fish at his brothers' wholesale company. It's a job he held while also working part-time at UPS, until he got a full-time driver position two years ago. His father spent 32 years at the company and retired as a district manager.

Amid the din of the warehouse, McDonnell says that he's "very anxious to be back on the job" at UPS. "It's a little easier to handle boxes than to handle fish."

McDonnell has no wife or children to support, and he worries about other strikers who do.

"I don't know how some of those people are going to survive," he says. "They have car payments, they have mortgage payments, and I was just lucky to fall into this."

Teamsters leaders say they want as many of their members picketing as possible. But with no end to the walkout in sight, the union acknowledges that many striking workers will have to take part-time jobs to pay their bills.