How UPS communications helped avert a labor strike

• Strategic communications play a critical role in union negotiations, which show no sign of slowing down in 2024.
• And there are lessons to learn from those who did it correctly.

Catch up quick: The UPS union contract — which was ratified in August 2023 — is the largest in North America, and is highly influential across the broader organized labor movement, reports Axios' Emily Peck.

State of play: According to Genny Bowman, UPS vice president of reputation management, the communications team had two key goals throughout the negotiations:

1. Support the overall business objective, coming to an agreement before the contract expired, thus avoiding a strike.
2. Protect corporate reputations throughout what they knew would be a "loud and late" negotiation process.

Flashback: In the lead up to the negotiations, the team developed a clear corporate narrative that reduced tension and then created specific channels for deploying it.

• "We focused on finding ways to reduce that perceived tension by demonstrating that UPS is actually more aligned with the Teamsters than not," says Glenn Zaccara, UPS vice president of media, investor and crisis communications.
• Once the message was established, the team conducted ongoing in-person media briefings, employee and manager-level updates or trainings, and created a central news hub for employees, media, elected officials, customers and the general population.

Zoom in: Axios spoke to several members of the UPS communications team to better understand their strategy.

Here's what we learned:

✅ Do start laying the groundwork early, and create a narrative that seeks to cut tension, not create more.

❌ Don't be adversarial in your messaging or try to paint unionized employees as rivals.

✅ Do publicly acknowledge areas for improvement and communicate shared goals.

• "Because we offer the best pay and benefits in our industry — and the fact that our industry changed since the last time that we negotiated the contract — we knew that there were areas that we needed to solve for, and we were willing to say that publicly. I think that's part of the reason we were so successful in our communication strategy," says Bowman.

✅ Do identify your audiences and meet them where they are.

• "We found that when we looked at the variety of audiences that we were communicating with, we had a lot of stakeholders with differing levels of understanding — so our work early on involved education and providing context," says Zaccara.

✅ Do invest in digital infrastructure and create a central website for information during the negotiations.

• At its peak, UPS' negotiations website saw upward of 1.7 million views, according to the team.

❌ Don't forget to update the site regularly and optimize it based on audience habits and needs.

• "Our team functions like a newsroom, especially during contract negotiations, and we were making updates to the site based on traffic trends," says Jennifer Griffith, UPS vice president of communications technology and analytics.
• "We were also looking at SEO, and top search queries became a very important practice for us. … We would develop our content and keywords based on what people were searching for. This ensured that our site always appeared in the top three search results about labor negotiations."

✅ Do capture compelling content like personal testimonies and community spotlights.

❌ Don't forget to engage third-party spokespeople.

• Surrogates or experts advocate in a way that corporate spokespeople can't, which can in turn create a stronger case.

❌ Don't hide from the media with vague corporate statements.

• Engage with them directly through phone calls and in-person meetings — only then can you provide the proper context or nuance.

✅ Do monitor news stories closely and ask for corrections or updates to include your point of view.

❌ Don't ignore social media.

• It can often provide insight into what's percolating and arm your team with the right messaging for the moment.

✅ Do educate your internal leaders and non-union employees.

• About 70% of UPS' 25,000 frontline operations management employees were not sitting in the same seat during the last round of negotiations, says Bowman.
• "We started communicating with them in 2022 about big-picture matters in the world of logistics so they had this information to use in conversations with their union employees. Then in 2023, we shifted from that type of messaging into actual specifics around the negotiation — the do's and don'ts and ways in which they could talk about it."
• "We also had a team of 800-plus senior leaders in our organization who received updates so that they could educate, inform and provide context for their frontline management teams."

✅ Do stay agile. Know your messaging, have your proof points and be able to position it quickly in front of all audiences.

The bottom line: These communication tactics helped UPS avert a strike and bad press, something you can't say about automakers, media or Hollywood.