BY NORTON SANDLER
SAN FRANCISCO - August is a very busy month for U.S. airlines with vacation travel at a peak. This year the "high season" workload for ramp workers at United Airlines here has been far rougher than usual. In addition to the big volume of luggage, the airlines bosses have been trying to fill every available inch on their planes with substantially increased amounts of mail and parcels shipped through the U.S. Postal Service as a result of the UPS strike. While U.S. president William Clinton preached neutrality on the strike, the post office, working with the major airlines, was one of the main vehicles the wealthy in this country used to try to relieve some of the pressure on businesses generated by the strike.

Airline workers felt this speedup in numerous ways. There is always pressure to get planes unloaded and loaded rapidly for "on time departures." But during the strike, inbound flights took longer to unload because of the mail packed into them. Then ramp workers would have to deal with getting the luggage loaded as well as trying to jam the containers and piles of mail sacks waiting for them at the gates onto the planes.

Making this far more complicated than usual, ramp workers had to scramble to find carts and containers to load luggage on because so much of the already short supply of this basic equipment had been diverted to moving mail.

I was assigned one day during the strike to United's postal operation at the San Francisco airport Post Office. An announcement over the Post Office loud speaker announced that all days off for U.S. Postal Service employees at that terminal were being canceled until further notice.

Olga Rodríguez, a ramp worker and Machinist union member at Northwest Airlines at Newark International Airport, reports that workers there "got beaten to a pulp with lots of overtime" loading planes in recent days.

"At several points over the last week the air mail facility at Newark got so bottled up with semi-trailers that they had to shut the facility and regroup," Rodríguez explained.  
 
 
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