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Joe Allen, "The Package King: A Rank and File History of UPS" (Haymarket Books, 2020)
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An interview with Joe Allen
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Joe Allen
That's right, ma'. Am.
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Joe Allen
Welcome to Hilton.
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I see your connecting rooms are already confirmed.
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Joe Allen
Welcome to the New Books Network welcome.
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Host Schneer Zalman Neufeld
To New Books Network. I'm your host, Schneer Zalman neufeld. If the 20th century was the American century, it was also ups century. Joe Allen's the Package, a Rank and file History of Ups, published by Haymarket Books in 2020, tears down the brown wall surrounding one of America's most admired companies, the United Parcel Service. Ups, the company that we see every day but know so little about. How did a company that began as a bicycle messenger service in Seattle, Washington, become a global behemoth? How did it displace General Motors, the very symbol of American capitalism, to become the largest private sector unionized employer in the United States? And at what cost to its workers and surrounding communities? Will it remain the package king in the 21st century, or will it be dethroned by Amazon? These and so many other questions are explored in this wonderful book. Joe Allen worked for nearly a decade at UPS between its Watertown, Massachusetts and Chicago, Illinois hubs. Alan's work life has largely involved different sections of freight and logistics, including such major employers as APA Transport from Canton, Massachusetts, Yellow Freight from Maspeth, New York, and ups. He has been a member of several Teamster local unions and a member of Teamsters for Democratic Union. I'm so glad his new book has brought him to our program. Welcome, Alan.
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Joe Allen
Thanks. Thank you. Glad to be here.
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Host Schneer Zalman Neufeld
Oh, great to get started. Could you tell us a little bit about your background and what led you to write this work?
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Joe Allen
Well, I mean, you know, I'm 60 now, so my background's getting longer. I grew up in Massachusetts, and as a teenager I got interested in sort of radical politics and was first influenced by Michael Harrington, who later became the founder of what Is not what has very much later evolved into the largest socialist group in the United States in a long time. I became a political activist at UMass Boston and was a member of the International Socialist Organization for, you know, a very long time, almost four decades. You know, I became interested in ups, you know, not in. With some epiphany, you know, one day, like a lot of people, I ended up working there in my mid-20s when I wasn't really thinking of it as a career or as a place for activism. It was just, you know, I needed a job and UPS was. Was hiring. And I worked there for a year in Watertown, Mass. Which is a suburb of Boston, for the Bostonians listening, they know Watertown. And, you know, I was my first introduction to really working in an industrial setting. Like a lot of young folks, I worked in restaurants where, you know, I had my first union organizing experience was actually a small restaurant in Boston, well, based in. In Somerville, but a Boston area chain. And, you know, and so I worked at ups and it kind of. I solely became sort of active as much as you could as a part timer in a workplace which just seemed kind of overwhelming and kind of crazy. And so I did a year there, and I never thought of it as a career, and I'm not even sure that I really thought of it as a place to be a kind of, you know, radical union activist, so to speak. I just, you know, it kind of. But it put it on the map for me. And around that time, I read a pamphlet that I had seen and probably scanned but didn't read, which was called how to Be the Big Brown Machine, which was written by a number of 1970s activists who worked at UPS and who had been either members of the International Socialists who later helped found Teamsters for a Democratic Union, and some of whom founded Labor Notes, and others who were members of the ISO. And it kind of gave me a big picture view of what UPS was Like, so it put, it put a seed in my head, but the seed in my head didn't really grow for another 15 or so years. So, you know, because changes came both quick and were very drawn out, particularly at UPS and at the Teamsters. So many years later, after the consent decree which kind of forced rank and file elections into the Teamsters, that's a whole another story. And Ron Kerry, who was this dissident militant, became president of the union. And much later after that, in 1997, UPS went on strike in the biggest sort of industrial strike in a generation. And one, it kind of brought back the importance of not only the Teamsters, but an industrial workplace as the center of kind of union activism and the potential for some radical union activism. So I, you know, lo and behold, they hired me and I couldn't really figure out why because I was pretty active in supporting the strike and organizing solidarity work as the ISO was as much as we could as a small group nationally. And I was hired and I stuck it through probation and worked for nearly a decade in Chicago and Teamsters Local 705, where, you know, besides the fact that work dominates your life, so you always have to remember that working at a place like UPS at it, you know, when you're working full time, you know, particularly, it just completely sucks up your whole life. And the small amount of time that it allowed to be a kind of, you know, socialist activists in the union and on, and as much as I could as a, as a part time, then full time steward, you know, it began, it, I just began to realize that, you know, there was a kind of void of knowledge about ups, not just simply what people perceived it to be outside of UPS and the Teamsters union, which kind of on one hand it kind of exploded around the 1997 strike and all of sort of UPS's dirty laundry that they had hidden for a long time became front page news. But then it kind of closed up again. UPS has a very effective PR operation, lots of friends in Washington, lots of friends in the media and, and I realized even through the sort of union's internal education that it was what people actually knew about the union, the relationship between the union, the company and the history of rank and file and radical activism in the union was largely anecdotal at best. So after I stopped working at ups, and again it took a few more years after that, I just began to realize that with the massive growth of the logistics industry in a variety of ways, FedEx and Amazon, the continued importance of UPS, just the way logistics plays a role in the modern world that's been, you know, hit the, hit the high speed with the, at the Internet that it was time for, you know, a much, as much as I could as a guy who works full time to write a book that kind of tried to answer those questions, particularly for rank and file activists at ups. But not solely, but that people could learn from that history in the other companies that are both non union because the logistics industry is by and large non union and what it means for their struggles today and in the future. And I hope it's been useful in that one.
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Host Schneer Zalman Neufeld
Absolutely. Well, thank you for that. So to step back a little bit, you kind of started to mention a little bit. But to give us a sense of just how big and how important is this one company, the ups.
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Joe Allen
Well, I mean ups, you know, is a, is a, is a global behemoth. And I, I say that without, you know, any hyperbole to it. You know, the, you know, it employs 440,000 people worldwide. I mean it's a huge company. But most of the logistics giants, you know, like FedEx and Amazon, DHL and you know, even the big national post offices, which for some reason don't come into focus on this and they should, you know, are really large employers. I mean, not just in the company and the countries that they're based in, but globally. That's why they're so huge, because they provide global services. You know, you know, UPS and FedEx. I haven't seen the recent figures for Amazon, but each of them moves like 2% of the global economy a day. They're companies that are absolutely indispensable in terms of how the international and national economies of many countries work. Their air operations are far more extensive than most of the military air forces of most countries with the possible exception of the United States. You know, they, you know, they have hundreds of planes that travel to, you know, hundreds of countries overnight. You know, UPS's air fleet is primarily based at what they call Worldport in Louisville, Kentucky, which is why local 89 of the Teamsters there is probably the most important UPS local in the country. Though not all UPSers in Louisville are members of 89, but it's, they represent the bulk of people at Worldport there and you know, in, in their, you know, in similar operations for, you know, so in other places. So like for example, FedEx, you know, has their, what they call the super hub in Memphis, Tennessee and that's where their global air operations are, are based out of. So you know, you, you, you Start with the big, you know, the big kind of, you know, things that capture your imagination about global air delivery and you break it down to how much they deliver of a national economy. All of this comes to tens of millions of packages a day, billions during the course of a year that people, you know, and what we learned during the pandemic, of course, is that, you know, with, with tens of millions of us, you know, shut inside all of the logistics giants became kind of a lifeline for people who just, you know, couldn't leave their homes or just had limited ability to, to travel. So I think, you know, you know, we learned overnight that, you know, that the corporate, the corporate leaders of most of these companies are fairly unknown except for, for Jeff Bezos. But we learned, you know, so, but we were always told how indispensable they were. But then we really realized during the pandemic, it's the people sorting packages, unloading trucks, loading trucks, delivering your package to your door. Those are the people who are going to, you know, keep you alive and going during a global pandemic. So I think, you know, people for whom, you know, the whole way that the modern logistics system worked, you know, as something, as a background thing that they, you know, assumed right, it's just there they kind of learned a lot more about the, its essential importance from a pretty life and death situation for millions of people. So I think that's how I would look at it.
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Host Schneer Zalman Neufeld
I hear you. I hear you. So you begin your book with the episode from Joe Tesny. Who was he and what shocking episode did he instigate?
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Joe Allen
Well, I think that UPS has not been immune to the issues of workplace violence where for reasons that, because very people who carry out workplace shootings don't usually leave messages or, and most of them either, you know, commit suicide or they, or they are killed by the police. In this case, I think Tesny killed himself. It's a few years ago now, but I think that, you know, you know, what we've learned really in the last 40 plus years is that while the US it isn't exceptional in this. Well, it's exceptional in this way, but it's not completely unique is that the American workplace has become an extremely toxic environment. Now on one hand that sounds like a cliche, but the pace of work, the meaning treatment of workers, the fact that if you lose a job that's well, paying, that there's likely to be nothing for you to get as an equivalent of that once you're outside of that particular job has created just A kind of unbearable atmosphere in many workplaces. And ups, you know, as many union activists in the teamsters and at UPS will tell you from, you know, the 70s onward. And I think it goes back further, but it becomes, you know, better known from the 70s onwards just because UPS is a much larger company in the 1970s, from that point onward is that people will tell you that the atmosphere at a place like UPS has always been that, and it's only gotten worse. And, and so there's been several incidents of workplace violence where, you know, you know, seemingly, you know, unknown person, you know, walks into work and shoots and kills two or three co workers or supervisors. And it's kind of, you know, makes the national news for a day or two and then it's kind of gone. And I think that, you know, UPS fits into a pattern that we've seen, you know, that used to be kind of this cliche of like, you know, going postal. But there's a reason why it wasn't post office that you saw so much of this in the 1980s and then working its way through many different types of industrial workplaces. Not exclusively industrial, but many are industrial workplaces. There was one horrible incidence a few years ago out here in Aurora, the second largest city in Illinois. And I think it all goes back to a general problem of whether you're a union or a non union workplace. Because that's one of the things that's really terrible about this, some of these stories, is that, you know, people say, well, you know, if they have a union, you wouldn't have this problem. Well, the truth is, is that many of these places actually are unionized places, which tells you something about how weak the, the unions are in trying to make workplaces decent, healthy places that people want to work in, not run away from or actually commit murder in sometimes.
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Host Schneer Zalman Neufeld
Right, right. And when did this rage and violent outbursts in the workplace begin? A kind of a period when this really took off?
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Joe Allen
Well, I mean, I think for people who have written about this, you know, much longer than I have, is that, you know, there's a notable turn in, in the net during the course of the 1980s. And I think that, you know, most people attribute that and I think they're right as a general kind of, you know, situation that it begins with really the Reagan era assault on trade unions and their collapse and their retreat and, you know, and the push by America's bosses for higher productivity, which, you know, just leads to a more intolerable workplace. And so, you know, you get it's it's, you know, you sort of broken the. Or at least it, you know, became more publicly aware of this, you know, due to shootings at the post offices. You know, because the post office is actually quite intense and, you know, horrible place to work. You know, there's a certain image of delivering the mail is some peaceful activity. When I talk to, you know, postal workers, they'll tell you working at the post office is a living hell and that, you know, it's spread out from there. So, you know, whether it's, you know, warehousing or UPS or, you know, working in a shipyard, working in a print shop, a variety of workplaces have seen, you know, what are called rage killings, you know, in some cases, you know, by workers who for the most part have a clean, have a clean work record and have no history of violence either in or outside the workplaces. So why is it that, you know, fairly normal people, as we would put in quotes, are doing these things and it's not outside of work to do it, it's inside of work. Which tells you something pretty awful about the American workplace, but also the weakness of many unions. I mean, you would think that a union workplace would be a better place. And unfortunately, too much of the time it isn't.
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Host Schneer Zalman Neufeld
Right? Right. And who was James E. Casey and what ethos did he impart to his company?
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Joe Allen
Well, you know, James Casey, known as Jim because, you know, for some reason at UPS were all on a first name basis. I haven't worked at UPS for a number of years now, Salman, but I just, it's the way that people, you know, it's one of those things about corporate America. Everybody's on a first name basis.
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Host Schneer Zalman Neufeld
Right.
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Joe Allen
Casey is considered, you know, is and is considered the founder of ups. You know, I tried to write a little bit about him as much as you, you can. He was a very kind of tight lipped guy. He had a very sort of austere personality and founded the company in Seattle, you know, over 100 plus years ago now as a bicycle messenger service. And it, you know, it was one of those things that grew and you know, motorized, you went from bicycles to motorcycles to trucks, as many delivery companies did during the course of the teens and the twenties. Casey kind of, if he put a personality imprint onto his company, it was sort of to combine this kind of funny, austere, tight lipped way of running things with a very kind of grueling work method, you know, for the many years, I mean, many decades, you know, because UPS is not a young company anymore, UPS kind of developed itself as a niche kind of boutique delivery service. It did high end deliveries for department stores up and down the west coast and made the leap to New York in the 1930s. So, well before, you know, cars became, you know, held by the mass of the middle class and the working class of this country. You know, they would, they would provide a service where they would, you'd go and you would shop and buy a lot of things and then UPS would deliver these to your home. It's a world that you and I, you know, aren't, I mean, it's kind of come back in a funny way with the Internet. You can order online, then they bring packages to you, right? If you're like me, you grew up the bulk of your life. You went to a shopping mall, bought it and you brought it home in your own car. So it's part of that. The old days was sort of like this whole, the whole glamour of shopping. There's no, there's no glamour to shopping anymore. But you know, in a sense, UPS went from, you know, being a kind of boutique delivery service for high end department stores to being one of the companies that most benefited from the explosion of the Internet. And even to this very day, I mean, this may change in the near Future. You know, UPS's largest customer is still Amazon. So it's delivering for a different type of department store. Let's put it there.
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Host Schneer Zalman Neufeld
Right. And you write that UPS is a culture where workers are meant to live, to work. What does that mean?
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Joe Allen
Well, you know, in a place like ups, which I think is one of the things that people don't really have a sense of outside of the company. I mean, there are not millions of people who used to work for ups. So it's not like the cloistered world that it was, say 30, 40, 50 years ago is that there's this, you know, total emphasis that you completely devote yourself to the company, whether it's good for you or mental health or physical health. Ups, you know, puts a lot of emphasis on, you know, you know, this whole idea that we can train people to be, you know, better than machines. And. Well, first of all, human beings are not machines. They're not supposed to be treated like machines. It's not supposed to be worked like machines. And despite the fact that the company, which is, you know, if you can find a year the UPS ever lost money, I, I, please tell me what year it is because I don't know what year it was. It's been a fabulously profitable company that, you know, as a, as people have written about long before I started writing about UPS, that combines sort of modern technology with 19th century working conditions. So, you know, if you walk into any moderate size, large size UPS hub where, you know, millions of packages are being pushed through on a given day or given week, depending where you are, you know, you'll just see the most frantic and unhealthy ways of working that you could possibly imagine. And then you get out on the trucks when you have to deliver packages where you have to make hundreds of stops a day, you know, or you face, you know, constant harassment about these things, then, you know, people end up, you know, with serious physical injuries, serious mental health issues, you know, which have been documented time and time again. And I think that the thing is, is that you would hope that this would be better in a unionized workplace. And I'm sure that, you know, and I, you know, I know there is because I was an activist in the tapestries for a number of years, is there is, but there should be, it should be better because, you know, one of the things, for example, that, you know, got highlighted about Amazon's working conditions last year was just the frantic and unhealthy pace of the work of the drivers. Well, that's true at UPS and that's true at FedEx. And that's true at, you know, at the post office. You know, I see guys at the post office delivering mail until 8 o' clock at night in my neighborhood. It's completely ridiculous. And so, you know, for a union like the Teamsters or any union to be an alternative for non union workers in the logistics industry, they got to see that being in a union is, is a, is, is something to gamble on because they'll get something better. And too much of the time that's not true.
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Host Schneer Zalman Neufeld
Right. And you use a lot of militaristic language when describing the ups, including the phrase the other army. Why the associations with the army, with military.
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Joe Allen
Well, some of it's just a lot of full military rhetoric, I think Solomon. I mean, I think that there's, you know, obviously among the rank and file of the Teamsters and in, you know, among the workers at ups, a lot of people, you know, have been in the military, you know, or, or they're, you know, they're in the National Guard. And you know, you can see that when anytime there's a mobilization, some people have to leave. That's not so true of upper management. I mean they're career UPS employees. There's been a bit of a change in that lately. But you know, there's, I think there's, it's an emphasis on this kind of militaristic culture is this, it's all for productivity, for productivity sink whatever the cost is. So you know, Oz Nelson, you know, said, you know, we, you know, we sort of combine the management techniques of, you know, the Marine Corps and the Quakers and kind of like, well, first of all, you can't do that. But you know, I think it's more PR than anything else. But the reality of work is the constant productivity push. And so if you look at injury rates among UPSers, which are again higher in the non union places, but they're still way too high, is that all this comes from a culture of just productivity for productivity sake, particularly for two thirds of the workforce which remains part time is largely in the hubs unloading and loading and sorting trucks. You know, it can lead to really terrible injuries and so forth. So it's something that I think, you know, kind of at one time, you know, kind of gave this kind of serious image to the company. But I think with a little bit of an awakening around how dangerous workplaces are in the logistics industry, it just seems weird and cult like now.
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Host Schneer Zalman Neufeld
All right, I hear you. Casey was raised in Seattle in the early 1900s, which had a reputation for political activism at the time. Was Casey aware of this politics and did he take any steps to curb worker mobilization at ups?
- [28:48]
Joe Allen
Well, it's hard to know. I mean, it's not like, you know, you don't want to infer too much about what people may or may not be aware of. But Seattle did have a general strike in 1919, so I don't think he could have avoided that where the whole city was shut down by the workers and, you know, for at least several days. So I, I don't think he could have ignored that, you know, So I think that, you know, the impact of, of that is, you know, we have to infer a bit. He didn't write an autobiography unless it's hidden out there somewhere in an archive or in the attic somewhere. And he didn't really do a lot of interviews either. So, you know, we can say that Casey kind of grew up in a. In the western U. S when, you know, the radical revolutionaries of the Industrial Workers of the World, better known as the Wobblies, were a dominant or an important factor in many of the labor struggles of that era. And certainly in the Seattle area in the northwest where Carrie grew up, Casey grew up, and where, you know, he built the company. So I think it's impossible not to be aware of that sort of stuff. But it's also important to remember the UPS was a pretty tiny company for a long time and so run more like a closed family business. So the long term impact of that sort of stuff is something we have to, you know, we kind of maybe see later. We do know that in the 1920s they put a big emphasis on an internal company culture of having summer camps and producing newsletters and trying to instill a certain company pride in them. And of course, a lot of that was a new business that a lot of everything from sociologists to psychologists to workplace specialists who kind of wanted to kind of counter the radical influence of whether it was the Bolshevik revolution or other currents of socialism. You know, we know that UPS did some of that stuff, but it's really not until the 1960s that ups, because it comes a company that employs hundreds of Thousands, you know, 100,000 people, you know, gets beyond a certain niche operation, let's put it that way.
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Host Schneer Zalman Neufeld
Right. And Casey and his assistant Russell Havinghorst went to inspect Marshall Fields and Sears Reebok in 1926. What did they learn from this inspection and did they try to bring any of this back to the operations of the ups?
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Joe Allen
Well, that's the one thing you got to remember about the whole history of any modern capitalist business or, well, you know, older capitalist businesses or modern ones as they all steal from one another. And no, you know, I mean, they clearly went on a big tour because as UPS became a much bigger company with a much larger volume of packages, you just couldn't simply deal with that in some old, old ways. So they went around to many of the, the companies at the time on, basically on a kind of goodwill and an inspection tour to see what they were going to, you know, take from, from them and apply it to ups. And apparently Marshall Fields had a big impact on them. They also apparently were very impacted by the structure of the Imperial German Army. That's, that's what was, you know, and of course, you know, the one thing that they both, they both mirrored and competed with, most importantly during all those decades, all those years, was the U.S. post Office. And you know, and that's, you know, probably the thing that they, you know, that shaped them and they competed with because it was the type of small parcels that the, the, that the post office delivered up until it was the mid-1950s that they then said that they weren't going to do anymore that kind of created this massive opening for ups. So, you know, I think it's not uncommon. I mean, you know, that what they did, I think it's, you know, pretty, pretty common. I mean, you know, go to Silicon Valley, they all steal from one another. Right?
- [33:08]
Host Schneer Zalman Neufeld
That's very true. Who, who was Dave Beck and what role did he play in the Teamsters union?
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Joe Allen
Well, Dave Beck was a huge figure in the Teamsters. He was from the west coast, from Seattle. So he's from, you know, him and Casey share a hometown and a kind of labor movement and business community that they both kind of overlapped in. Beck was an ambitious guy. He later succeeded Dan Tobin, who was the longest serving president of the, of the Teamsters. He was there for nearly 40 years. Almost 40 years. Beck was very conservative and very right wing in many ways. You know, he was pretty contemptuous of his own membership, but he also kind of understood that if the Teamsters were going to survive that they would have to become a different type of union, that they couldn't simply be a union just made up exclusively of a handful of drivers. And so, you know, according to the histories that I've read and the interviews that I've done, Beck was one of the first people who, you know, got a contract with ups, with the Teamsters on the west coast because he went from being a kind of leader in Seattle to being a leader of the West Coast Teamsters and later became president of the Teamsters for a decade before, you know, corruption charges drove him from office. But he's sort of a transition figure of both of the relationship between the Teamsters, you know, as a kind of regional body to a national body, which then Hoffa carries, James Hoffa senior carries to a different level. So I think it's interesting to look at Beck because both he and Casey share a similar, you know, history in that way. But the thing that was probably the most long term impact of, of, of of Beck's deal with UPS is that whenever the company would grow, the union would grow. You know, UPS didn't have, you know, the Teamsters never had to organize anybody at ups. It just grew with the company. So on one hand you can say, well, this, there's a big positive upside to that, which is that you're always, if your company is growing, you're always going to have new members. You can represent people, people you can, you know, you can have a union in a workplace while somebody does fight you. On the other hand, it creates a kind of, you know, a kind of, I don't want to say lazy relationship with the, between the union and the company because the dark side of that is precisely those same problems is that you never have to organize anybody. So you become in some sense for a long time a co partner in the company's operations. The consequences of that, many decades later is something we can talk about, you know, in the future.
- [36:01]
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- [36:30]
Listener/Caller
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- [37:31]
Host Schneer Zalman Neufeld
Right, right. And what was distinct about the Teamsters local 804 in New York?
- [37:39]
Joe Allen
Well, I think 804 New York has, well, a lot of unions, a lot of local unions in the Teamsters, you know, they have a similar story and they also then have these wide divergences. It's kind of hard to know sometimes. It reflects a lot of the changes in different type of industries. So the thing to keep in mind again is that UPS up until the 1960s is a fairly small operation for 804. They sort of, you know, could rep, they got the franchise on representing your workers at UPS in New York City. They also had other workers in them. The difference of course is over the course of a few decades it becomes almost exclusively a UPS local union that is kind of unique. I mean there's still, I'm sure that if you go to 804 today, there's still a handful of, you know, what sometimes are referred to as legacy shops or contracts of companies that aren't ups. But you know, it became over time an overwhelmingly UPS local union in most places. You know, it's, it's a little bit more complicated than that. So like when I was in, you know, Teamster705 here in Chicago, UPS was certainly the largest component of the local membership. But it also represented dozens, if not hundreds of, you know, other types of companies in New York. It meant that, you know, over the years there was always a kind of strong rank and file history of inside the union. So there was always a kind of high turnover among union presidents. It also became, you know, the place that Ron Kerry, who would later become the first and only reform president of the Teamsters Union, began his career as a UPS driver and then later as a local leader. And so Kerry made a reputation even though he wasn't very politically radical. He made his name as a kind of a union militant who also had a very open to new ideas into different voices in his local union. While too much of, you know, the Teamsters, whether it's in New York or the big cities in particular, you know, was dominated by the mob and their allies. So Kerry was sort of a unique figure in the history of the union, particularly in the 60s and 70s.
- [40:15]
Host Schneer Zalman Neufeld
All right, for listeners who are not really familiar with this, with this subject, when you say rank and file, what exactly do you mean by that?
- [40:23]
Joe Allen
Well, I mean the, the everyday members of the union. I mean, I think that, you know, when you look at the history of like 804, I'm not saying this is absent in other places, but you can't help but notice with 804 in New York that from the 1940s through, you know, really the present day, except probably for the decades when Kerry himself was president, local, is that there's always been a strong sense of militancy, at least among a sizable section of the membership, particularly at ups, who were quite willing to disagree with their local leaders, to act independently of them, to put up and fight for more militant leadership that existed in other places in the Teamsters also. But New York, it became, I think 804. New York became unique for that because after all, it produced Ron Kerry who then, you know, in 1997 leads the biggest national, the only national strike ever to take place against ups.
- [41:18]
Host Schneer Zalman Neufeld
Right. And you mentioned that UPS didn't have a national contract with the Teamsters until the late 1970s, so it made deals with local Teamster officials. How did this arrangement impact Teamster members?
- [41:33]
Joe Allen
Well, it just meant that working conditions across the country and wages could be wildly different. And so in some places wages could be much higher and conditions could be much better, largely through raging file militancy. You know, in the 1970s there were several local and regional strikes by UPSers against, against the company. But you know, UPS as it became a national company, you know, it's kind of for readers who aren't aware of it, you know, deregulation of the trucking industry or the freight industry during the course of, you know, which becomes, you know, under the Carter administration first and foremost. But there was a kind of slow motion process by which UPS won rights to make deliveries and all these different states until it was the 48 contiguous states and then Alaska and Hawaii, it's kind of a different world that's gone. People wouldn't be aware of it. And so one of the things that UPS wanted because they had a very cozy relationship with the mobbed up leaders that ran the Teamsters in Washington, is they wanted a national contract in order to kind of, you know, even out pay and working conditions across the country. For the most part, they got it. There was a couple of independent contracts. One remains here in Chicago, 804 had one in New York for a long time, but that's gone. There's also a myriad of what are called supplements and riders, which can sometimes be very confusing to understand if you're not part of the local union, if you're an outsider looking at it in. But UPS wanted to do that because they wanted to not just simply even out what they're, what they were paying in terms of a whole bunch of things, but they wanted to lower, particularly part time pay. So creating a national contract also went hand in hand in the first major concessions by the teamsters in the 1980s, which was the horrendous cut in part time pay. And then later, well, along with this continual elimination of full time jobs, so, you know, most of the time national contracts about strengthening the union and raising the working conditions of people at UPS, it did the opposite.
- [43:44]
Host Schneer Zalman Neufeld
Wow. In 1962, members of Local 804 in New York went on an unsanctioned or wildcat strike. Why did they do that?
- [43:56]
Joe Allen
Well, I mean, it's usually over questions of productivity and unfair discipline. You know, that was One thing that 800 and remember in the labor movement as a whole, there was a much more of a stronger sense of unions being strong, that workers kind of had a greater feel for their capacity to fight the boss and to, you know, act independently of their local leaders if they thought they were, you know, just too cozy with the, the boss and not taking these issues seriously. So, you know, 804 wasn't unique so much in that way. But you know, but compared to many Teamster locals, it was just far more militant. So if you go back even to the late 30s, right through the 60s, particularly after Kerry is elected, you know, there's a long history of when people are unfairly discharged, you know, workers just walk off the job until the worker is rehired. So there's a long history of that. You know, Stan Weir, who is somebody I think is a underappreciated figure in the socialist movement in this country, really kind of documented from the 50s through the late 60s that there was this growing rank and file rebellion across the board, across industries and workplaces. And a lot of it was rooted not first and foremost in the questions of wages or benefits, but in the working conditions, that is speed up unfair discipline and later the racist treatment of workers where workers would just act independently and walk off the job until this stuff was corrected. So I think 804 is part of that history.
- [45:36]
Host Schneer Zalman Neufeld
Right, but was there any particular things that UPS was doing to workers in 1962 or trying to introduce new management policies that inspired the unsanctioned strike of a local 804 in 1962?
- [45:55]
Joe Allen
Well, I think 62 is when they're starting to try to introduce part time, more part time work. These things all begin as these little initiatives or islands where they're trying to see how far they can get away with. Because up until really the mid or late 60s, part time jobs at UPS were almost exclusively for during Christmas when they hired extra help, the Christmas season. And then they began to try to sort of re, to kind of introduce it at different times of the year. And then they would cut deals with local leaders over that, over those issues. And so from these small little initiatives, these small little seeds, you know, a few decades later you have a workforce which is becomes two thirds part time.
- [46:44]
Host Schneer Zalman Neufeld
And why did full time workers see the part time, the introduction of part time workers as a negative thing for the company, for the union, for work life?
- [46:56]
Joe Allen
Well, they saw it as a threat to their own wages and working conditions and ultimately also for the strength of the union. It's very hard to kind of have a strong union if most of your workers are part time and don't feel that it's a place they want to stay at. Whether you want to say, make a career of it, maybe too, too overblown. But I think people from the very beginning saw this as something that was a grave danger on many different fronts. And so, you know, 804 in New York and a few other locals most notably tried to kind of deal with this stuff. But when you had the national leadership of the Teamsters undermining you, there was only so much you could do.
- [47:38]
Host Schneer Zalman Neufeld
Right. And was Local 804 successful in trying to hold back the flood of part time workers at ups?
- [47:50]
Joe Allen
Only partly. I mean like in a lot of cases, 804 was like a lot of locals where they were just on the defensive. So they were able to preserve a number of jobs while the apps full time, while the absolute number of jobs growing ended up becoming more part time. And it's also important to keep in mind that, you know, UPS was a growing company during these decades. I mean it was exploding in size. So you know, it also meant that there was a certain level of advancement. You know, a lot of part timers became full time drivers, full time drivers became feeder drivers, which who are, you know, the big drive, the big semis, feeders, the UPS lingo for that. And also a lot of people went into management. So, you know, you have a kind of a company that has a future, so to speak. It probably in the same way that, you know, there are workers who feel the same way at Amazon. I think that the difference was is that those who were a little bit more farsighted about the change in the actual composition of the workforce saw these things as danger signal, date warning signs, but they didn't really even grasp the fact that this would become as devastating as it did during the course of the 1970s and certainly the 1980s.
- [49:05]
Host Schneer Zalman Neufeld
Right. And how did UPS change its hiring practices in response to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's case against AT&T in 1973, which alleged widespread discrimination against women and minorities at that company?
- [49:22]
Joe Allen
Well, I think that, you know, during the course of the 70s, you know, one of the big impacts of the civil rights movement, it was not just simply winning the political rights to full citizenship in this country, the right to vote, the right to, you know, go where you want to go, eat where you want to eat, live where you want to live. You know, it was also had a big impact inside the workplace. And so, and not just the ups, but across the board. And so, you know, the racist hiring practices of many industries came under pressure, both from big class action lawsuits, but also the actions of workers themselves. So at a place like UPS, where, you know, probably outside of a handful of drivers, but most places around the country, most drivers were overwhelmingly white male, while the bulk of the inside workers, those who unloaded trucks, loaded trucks, sorted packages, were overwhelmingly black and increasingly Latino and a smaller number increasingly women. And so when it became clear that, you know, they couldn't hold back that tide anymore, they did make some small efforts to, to hire and to promote African Americans and women into driving. But these were, you know, this was a kind of, you know, this was a small response to a big, a big, a big movement. And, you know, it's still the case, I think that, you know, ups, you know, is still, you know, even though there are far more women drivers. And, you know, if you, in a big city like New York or Chicago, a large portion of the drivers are black and Latino. And you don't, you know, you don't have, you don't have that type of level of discrimination anymore. And I think partly it had to do with the pressure of the civil rights movement. It had to do with pressure inside the union from workers themselves. And so, you know, UPS likes to promote the idea that they're a farsighted employer when in fact they were forced to do these things in the same, for the same reasons that other employers had.
- [51:34]
Host Schneer Zalman Neufeld
It is really interesting to kind of tease out the difference between the image that these massive companies try to promote and then the realities of what they were actually responding to and why they took sort of positive steps in the right direction. Very, very interesting to keep track of who was Vince Meredith and what was the battle he fought to get bow ties off the necks of UPS employees?
- [52:06]
Joe Allen
Well, Vince Meredith was based in Louisville, Kentucky long before worldport was there. So it's a different type of UPS presence in Louisville, you know, and Louisville is, was a small city, you know, semi southern city. Vince was a military veteran, got a job at UPS and he helped organize with a whole group of workers a very militant kind of rank and file network in Louisville that later became important in terms of being an important part of the upsurge movement that took place in the late 1970s across UPS. It was a unique play, a unique thing in Louisville because one they, they created this kind of defense fund that would support workers who were unfairly fired from, from ups, which was really unique across the country. He was a union militant in a, in a, in a city, in a state that most people outside the mining industry wouldn't really see it that way. And UPSers had this, you know, again, this is sort of a cult like history of UPS where they, you know, for a long time they didn't allow UPSers to wear shorts in the summertime. Now of course they, it's, you would think that it's almost, you know, the company's invention that they did this. You know, imagine working in a hub wearing jeans when it's you know, 100 degrees outside, you know, that sort of thing. And at Vince's time, you know, in the late 50s and early 60s, they had this peculiar way of wanting the drivers to wear button up collars with plastic bow ties in the middle of the summertime. Louisville, which you can imagine is even hotter than Chicago in the summertime. And they call this basically a citywide and statewide strike, very much against the wishes of their union officials. And the company just ended up ditching it. Which goes to show, which is again a part of a long history. Sometimes these histories get broken up for long periods of quiescence. But you know, a long history of militant rank and file unionism at ups. A lot of time which is over working conditions. And any driver will tell you, particularly these days with the era of climate change, that the summers are not just difficult and Always sort of times to be serious about your health, being out there on the street and in these, you know, trucks that aren't air conditioned that you can, you know, as has been profiled the last couple of years by several news outlets about UPS is getting dying and getting very ill on the job from heat stroke. But these issues go back a long way at ups, whether it's working in the hubs or being drivers on the street. And so the bowtie strike that Vince led may seem almost amusing or quaint in retrospect, but it's actually about the health of drivers. And it's an important little story that more people should know about.
- [55:03]
Host Schneer Zalman Neufeld
Yeah, when I saw that, it really jumped out at me because it reminded me. Eric Olen Wright, a great Marxist sociologist, talked about the tyranny in the workplace and how once employees, you know, walk through the doors of their workplace, suddenly they really are submitting to a tremendous amount of scrutiny and control over their body in a way that people would never agree to outside of their workplace. And this business with the bow ties just jumped out of me as an example of that. But where the company was literally mandating what kind of neck wear or that the workers wear neckties as a stipulation of their work of being employed there, which is really kind of remarkable.
- [56:01]
Joe Allen
Well, remember, for decades you were allowed to have a beard at ups, and which again, in retrospect may be seen as some oddity, but it's all about this kind of, you know, cult like management that UPS was known for. You know, you have this kind of faux military style combined with these kind of, you know, a toxic productivity at any cost, workplace harassment that produces a lot of physical and mental health issues. You combine that with weird dress styles that nobody understands. You know, because after all, you know, a beard is a symbol of what again? I mean, if you're Jesus or Abraham Lincoln or Frederick Douglass, you can't work at ups. I mean, I don't know. You know, now all that's gone, partly because, you know, it's so anachronistic. But I think part of it comes from the fact that, you know, ups, there's something of a crisis in hiring at ups. So, you know, you couldn't have tattoos before or have a beard. Those things are mostly gone. You know, there's a whole generation of military, I mean, long before tattoos became a more widespread cultural motif across the world, really, you know, people, most people had tattoos were military veterans. You know, my uncle had several of them as a Marine Corps veteran. I mean, so you can't you have to wear long sleeved things to shirts to cover them up and other silliness. But it's all part of the kind of cult like management that UPS promoted for many decades.
- [57:42]
Host Schneer Zalman Neufeld
Right. And your book covers so much really fascinating and important history. Obviously we can't go through all of it. But when you think back to all of the history that you do discuss in your book, do you see any general lessons that readers could take away about UPS and about American corporations more generally?
- [58:04]
Joe Allen
Well, I think there's a lot of things about UPS that foreshadowed the bigger changes in the global and national economy. And, and first of all, in terms of what, you know, becomes the, the central importance of a logistics industry in terms of warehousing and distribution for all sorts of giants. So, you know, logistics is not just about, you know, producing something, putting it in a warehouse and it gets delivered by a delivery company. You know, they're about managing entire supply chains. So whether it's, you know, UPS or Walmart or, you know, pick a retail giant, Home Depot or Amazon, today the logistics revolution is really foreshadowed by the rise of UPS. I think the other is, is that the UPS strike in 1997 was over really important issues of the time, but again, it foreshadowed the much greater issues that would be that obviously today resonate at an even, you know, bigger logistics giant, which is Amazon. I think the other important political lesson coming out of the history of UPS is that the most important changes for workers have been at the company and in the history of the Teamsters has always been brought forward by rank and file activists and in many cases rank and file socialist activists. So the political lesson of that is the importance of not just simply rank and file activity, but the importance of having socialist ideas among, among rank and file activists. So I guess on those three big areas, you know, I would say those are the things that people can probably get some ideas from, from the book.
- [59:50]
Host Schneer Zalman Neufeld
That's great. Definitely a lot to consider. Okay, last question. Could you tell us about a new project that you're working on now?
- [59:59]
Joe Allen
Well, I'm kind of debating some new projects in my head right now. One of them is because of the end of the second Hoffa era and the Teamsters. I've been thinking about writing a modern history of the Teamsters union because I think that, you know, not only is it time to reflect upon, you know, what the Hoffa era meant, the second half of era meant for us, but what will be the relevance of the Teamsters in the future. And most people know very little about the modern history of the Teamsters. And certainly, you know, you're not going to learn much from watching terrible movies like the Irishman. You know, I mean, you know, I, I really wish somebody could, you know, talk to Martin Scorsese and say can you make a good movie about the Teamsters instead of this garbage from Frank Sheeran's autobiography. But I think not that my book on this is Teamsters would be make would be movie friendly. It would just, you know, somebody should. The other is, is I think that I become interested again in the role of the big union busting companies in, in tormenting the American working class, particularly after the defeat at Bessemer, Alabama, that, you know, some of the stuff that's been written is a few decades old, like Confessions of a Union Buster. And I think it might be time to revisit that subject with a modern eye and what it means for us, particularly as the whole question of labor law and its inadequacy is now a national topic.
- [61:35]
Host Schneer Zalman Neufeld
Oh, those both sound like really fascinating projects. Thank you. Thank you so much for taking the time to share your thoughts with us today.
- [61:41]
Joe Allen
Thank you, Zama, for having me.
- [61:44]
Host Schneer Zalman Neufeld
That concludes our program. Thanks for listening and have a great day.
- [61:59]
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Joe Allen
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Listener/Caller
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