Great things come in small packages.

The issues and the players involved in the current Teamsters' strike against the United Parcel Service are far broader than most people realize. Like the Detroit newspapers, the machinists' strike at Boeing, and the Caterpillar strike earlier this decade, organized labor is attempting to use the UPS contract as a line in the sand over a basic principle affecting millions of workers in all industries. In this case, it's the snowballing trend of large corporations replacing full-time jobs with part-time and temporary positions, so as to save on pay, benefits, and seniority. And this time, wisely, labor picked a company whose product (parcel delivery) affects people in every town in the nation on a daily basis--insuring that media could not ignore the strike as a "local" issue affecting only workers in one or a few communities.

The effort to protect the very concept of full-time employment as a social good speaks directly to million of us--most of us--who enter the labor force without any real prospect of employer-based health coverage, job security, or even advancement for a job well done. Increasingly, that--or unemployment--is a permanent condition.

The inability of people to sustain themselves and their families even when they're working as hard as they can goes to core issues of how, exactly, jobs should be defined in the global economy, and to two conflicting sets of values: one that sees people as integral parts of communities, one that sees people as interchangeable, dispensable parts in an enormous profit- generating machine. Organized labor and big business are not only watching the strike carefully, but actively maneuvering in it; UPS and the Teamsters are only the front line.

Tellingly, you'd never know any of this from mainstream media coverage of the strike.

Last Saturday's edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer featured the "Harry and Phil Show" as its lead article, kissing ass to Phil Condit and Harry Stonecipher, the two top men at Boeing these days. The UPS strike, on the other hand, was relegated to the Business Section, as if the only people in town interested in labor issues are business owners.

Likewise, the P-I (which has been running a disgusting series of countdown articles on the Boeing-McDonnell Douglas merger--"next week...", "in three days...", "starting Monday...", ad nauseam) has billed the UPS struggle as a showdown between UPS and The Evil Teamsters Union.

Reflecting the paper's bias toward business interests, it hasn't discussed the reasons for the strike in any detail--the fact that the workers at UPS are disgusted with a two-tier system that offers benefits and full-time employment to only a few (tenured employees), and keeps the rest of the newer employees in temporary or part-time positions at lower wages. No mention of UPS's 1,300 citations for health and safety violations since 1990, its $4.4 million in penalties, or its $1 billion in profits last year. Or, most importantly, that UPS is far from alone in its policies. (Microsoft, in fact, is one of the most notorious at exploiting part-time and temp help for even professional-level jobs.)

Far more people in Seattle go to lousy jobs each day than ship packages. But media coverage, invariably, has focused more on customer inconvenience. When the protagonists are discussed, a curiously timed "scandal" over funding for last year's Teamster election (pushed hard by that champion of the democratic workplace, The Wall Street Journal has gotten far more attention than UPS practices. And, of course, the larger issues are rarely mentioned at all.

As trade restrictions evaporate and corporations plot their production (and exploitation) strategies on a global level, it's become essential that working people think in similar terms. We have to recognize our common struggles across industries or borders if the cry for basic human needs is to be heard in the din of the new global economy.

That requires--surprise--communication, and free speech. It's pretty clear whose side corporate media is on. And why we need alternatives. In the meantime, the striking UPS drivers deserve everyone's support--now, not a year or two after the fact. The issues are universal, and the reversal of policies that sacrifice human lives on the altar of corporate greed might as well begin right here, right now.