Scott Jenkins, an organizer with the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), will join the Center for Work and Democracy as the new Activist in Residence for Spring 2024. Jenkins has several years of organizing experience, most recently working as a strategist and organizer with the TDU for the 2023 UPS contract campaign. Before that, Jenkins was a national organizer for Sean O’Brien’s successful campaign for the presidency of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
Jenkins has organized various contract campaigns and member education programs with Teamsters local and rank-and-file committees in New York, Iowa, Illinois, Rhode Island, and California.
Center for Work and Democracy Director Michael McQuarrie commented on Jenkins’s appointment:
“Logistics, once a peripheral sector of the economy, is now much more central, as the rise of companies like Amazon makes clear. The pervasiveness of practices developed in the logistics sector suggests its power to reformat spatial relations, work, consumerism, and, potentially, politics. We are delighted to have Scott Jenkins join the Center so that we can think through the implications of these profound transformations.”
During his appointment as Activist in Residence, Jenkins will be collaborating with the CWD on his own research within the logistics sector through an overarching project titled “Logistics, Worker Power, and Social Organization.” In addition, Jenkins will present at the Center for Work and Democracy’s annual conference on worker power and economic democracy, which takes place on February 23-24, 2024.
CWD: What kind of organizing have you done so far in your career? How has that brought you to where you are today?
Scott Jenkins: My focus has been on internal organizing and education with members in core Teamster industries. Industries with relatively high rates of union density (for example, rail, parcel delivery, grocery and warehousing) are an excellent base to organize aggressive contract campaigns that get thousands of members to take action and that result in significantly improved contracts. When contract campaigns are successful in delivering results, they encourage more unionized workers to be active contract enforcers and pave the way to organizing non-union workers by demonstrating the power of collective action. Some fresh examples of this dynamic include Amazon workers looking to the new UPS contract as a proof-of-concept of collective bargaining, and auto workers at Toyota, Hyundai and other non-union plants seeking raises and improvements based on the new Big Three Auto contracts settled after the UAW’s “Stand Up Strike.”
The other main focus of my organizing has been internal union elections. Building more militant coalitions and electing more militant leaders at the International level and the local union level is mandatory if you want to revitalize the labor movement. Again, the recent transformations in International Union leadership in the Teamsters and in the UAW and their subsequent contract victories at UPS and the Big Three auto provide compelling evidence.
CWD: What is your proudest moment in your organizing career?
SJ: It took a broad coalition that was years in the making and a year-long contract campaign at UPS to win the new 2023-2028 contract. Being part of that campaign and working with Teamster members and Teamster leadership across the country to build a credible strike threat was a privilege.
CWD: How do you feel your work in the logistics sector could be applied to the labor movement at large?
SJ: Employment in the logistics and warehousing sector has skyrocketed in the past thirty years and ratcheted up even more over the pandemic. Workplace technology and the organization of the work process in the industry are changing rapidly. Technological and organizational changes create new vulnerabilities in the operation. Within the domestic logistics sector, and the evolution of the consumer market through e-commerce, supply chains are more vulnerable to disruption than ever before. Everyone knows these trends but it's challenging to work out direct implications for strategic organizing. The basic question is always: what are the chokepoints that workers need to hold for the leverage to win economic and social reforms? It’s not rocket science, but connecting the most recent information about the organization of the labor-process on the shop floor at major logistics employers like Amazon with larger-scale assessments of planning by firms and investors active in major US logistics clusters can help us assess what kinds of fights we can pick and what kind of organizing has potential to claw back a great deal of power from these employers.
CWD: What kinds of projects are you looking to work on while acting as Activist in Residence?
SJ: We are calling the project “Logistics, Worker Power, and Social Organization.” There will be a series of research projects, conferences, and smaller colloquia that investigate logistics as an overall “organizing logic and process” that shapes the political-economic and social fabric.
The big-picture questions are things like:
- How does the logistics sector shape the overall labor market, and offer a site for working people and working-class communities to seize power on the job and in society?
- How have profitability and investment patterns in the U.S logistics industry in comparison to manufacturing shifted over the past 40 years?
- How does the development of logistics shape the labor process and technological development?
- How does the rise of logistics affect the composition of the U.S. working class? How does work in the logistics sector affect class formation?
- What are key vulnerabilities and chokepoints in dominant logistics networks that workers and working-class communities can use to win economic and political power?
I’m most excited about getting scholars and union researchers together who are interested in a long-term collaboration on these fundamental questions.
CWD: What are you most looking forward to accomplishing in this role?
SJ: Personally, I’m looking forward to having the time to get into the weeds on more detailed research questions that can inform the big-picture. For example, one of the research projects I will conduct will be comparative studies of the major U.S. parcel-delivery services. How do the network maps and physical plants compare, especially when they were built out over different decades? How have older networks adapted to contemporary conditions? Are there significant differences in technologies used for sorting and loading operations? How are major firms thinking about their investment strategies in real estate and technology? How does that all impact the organization of the work process?
Not all of this is going to produce actionable material for an organizing plan. You can’t research your way into, say, a national collective bargaining agreement at Amazon. But we live in an unusual moment where labor unions are more popular than ever even as union density continues to drop. If you can capture that interest with a strong strategic vision about key chokepoints in the economy that are credible targets for worker organizing, I think that can make a difference.
Jenkins will begin his appointment as Activist in Residence in January of 2024, working on collaborative projects with the Center for Work and Democracy through the spring semester.