The UPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee is holding a meeting this Saturday at 7 p.m. Eastern time to discuss and organize opposition to the sellout tentative agreement. Register for the event by clicking here.

The Teamsters bureaucracy under General President Sean O’Brien claims that the new tentative agreement for 340,000 UPS workers is “historic.” In reality, it is an “historic” betrayal. After months of a bogus made-for-TV “strike ready campaign,” they have now sprung on us a tentative agreement that does not meet any of our demands. It creates a second tier of lower-paid part-time workers, freezes pension contributions for workers in the Western US, includes wage increases for drivers below the rate of inflation, and maintains Uber-style personal vehicle drivers, among many other concessions.

Behind the Teamsters, bureaucrats, the corporate press, Democratic politicians, officials from other unions and bogus “reform” groups like Teamsters for a Democratic Union have all snapped into line to praise it and browbeat us into accepting it.

The contract is not only a betrayal. It is a clear violation of the will of the rank-and-file. We voted by 97 percent to authorize a strike. That was not a “suggestion” or a means of giving “leverage” to the negotiating committee. That was a mandate for a strike to win back everything which we have lost for the past 50 years. It is also a betrayal of hundreds of thousands of workers around the United States, including writers and actors already on the picket lines and 150,000 autoworkers who wanted to use a UPS strike to press for their own demands.

We know our brothers and sisters are outraged over the TA. The question is: what are we going to do about it? We have to use all of the time at our disposal to organize to send this contract into the garbage where it belongs and to collectively enforce our will. We have to expand the UPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee to transfer power and decision-making from the Teamsters apparatus to the workers ourselves.

Saturday’s meeting will be the beginning of this fight. We urge all of our coworkers at UPS, as well as our supporters among autoworkers, writers and actors, dockworkers, freight drivers and others to attend. All attendees will have ample opportunity to speak from the floor.